Saigon

Saigon is a play in French and Vietnamese set entirely inside one restaurant. Caroline Guiela Nguyen wrote and directed it, and the Théâtre National de Strasbourg is its lead producer. This visiting production is a limited engagement in Brooklyn in December 2026 and marks the first time the play is seen in the United States. It is presented in association with L'Alliance New York's Crossing The Line Festival, a citywide festival of international artists.

The restaurant exists in two places and two eras at once, Saigon in 1956 and Paris in 1996. Over almost 40 years, eleven characters pass through its dining room, and their lives are shaped by love, family, friendship and exile.

The restaurant belongs to Marie-Antoinette, a Saigon woman whose parents named her after the French queen. Customers come to eat and drink, but also to sing, argue, dance, fall in love and mourn. The play jumps between its two years instead of running in order, and the living and the dead share the room.

In 1956 the French have lost the war and are leaving Saigon, and some Vietnamese must go too, either because they worked with the French or because they hope for a better life in France. In 1996 the Vietnamese government lets emigrants return, and the exiles in Paris learn that their country may be within reach.

The crowd includes a soldier haunted by the war and his trusting bride-to-be, a young man from Saigon suddenly seen as a traitor, a French civil servant's wife and a mixed-race Parisian. Younger characters often grew up without being told the past, and food is one of the few things still handed down.

Nguyen wrote the text together with the whole artistic team of the original production. It is invented rather than documentary, but it grew out of two years of testimonies gathered in Ho Chi Minh City and in Paris. Among the encounters that fed it were a man in Seine-et-Marne with a French soldier father and a Vietnamese mother, and the disused ballroom of the Hotel Majestic in Ho Chi Minh City.

Each performer speaks their own language, French or Vietnamese, and the cast mixes French actors, Vietnamese actors and French actors of Vietnamese descent. Duc Duy Nguyen and Thi Thanh Thu Tô are credited with the translation, and Jérémie Scheidler and Manon Worms with dramaturgy and surtitles. A book of texts and images about the play appeared in 2018.

The stage is the restaurant itself, laid out panoramically: a kitchen on one side, the dining room in the middle and a piano corner where customers step up to sing sad love songs.

Saigon had its world premiere in June 2017 at La Comédie de Valence, then played the Festival d'Avignon in July 2017 and the Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe in Paris into February 2018. Until 2020 it toured about fifteen countries, including Sweden, China, Germany, Australia and Vietnam. Nguyen revived it nine years after its creation. The revival's dates run from Berlin in April 2025 to Brooklyn in December 2026, the Barbican in March 2027 and the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris in June 2027.

At the 2018 Molières, Nguyen was nominated as best living French-language playwright for Saigon, and the production was nominated for visual creation. It also received the Prix Georges-Lerminier for the 2017-18 season and, in 2019, a Goethe-Institut Paris dramaturgy prize.