Biography

Lộng Chương (b. Nguyễn Văn Hiền, Hải Dương province 2/5/1918 - 8/20/2003) was a Vietnamese playwright, writer, screenwriter and director in both film and theater. If one counts only Vietnamese artists growing up from times of French Indochina onwards, Lộng Chương's generation of playwrights (including Học Phi, Bưu Tiến, Nguyễn Văn Niêm,...) can be considered the first. During his ten years of participating in the resistance war against French colonialists, Lộng Chương composed 17 short plays. Among them are: Lý Thới (1948), Du kích thôn Đồi (1952), Đoàn quân tóc trắng (1953),... In the decade following Independence Day in 1945, during the struggle against forced migration, he produced a number of other plays: Nhỡ chuyến tàu bay, Ma hiện, Giữa đường, Mưu giặc… Later on in his career, he would write and revise nearly 100 plays, working with many genres of Vietnamese theater: oral, musical, puppetry... Apart from becoming stage productions, his plays are also printed into books and broadcast on Voice of Vietnam (VOV). Known for his comedy, some of Lộng Chương's most famous works include the comedic plays "Desperate" (Quẫn, 1960) and "Slightly Opened Door", both of which had reruns in theaters nationwide for a long time. Lộng Chương's comedic sensibilities vary in frequency across different works. He was also a prolific artist, known to be writing one play each week in the 60s and 70s of the Vietnam War, but most of these works have been lost to difficult times. During this time he also worked as a theater critic and reporter. An artist always seeking to preserve the national history of perfoming arts, in the 60s, together Lộng Chương and his friends Lưu Quang Thuận, Trần Huyền Trân, Hà Văn Cầu and Nguyễn Đình Hàm... founded the Ancient Chèo Troupe. Together they collected, edited and preserved many ancient Chèo plays.