art | Tom Bolton

Photo: Alex Brenner

Scenes from a Repatriation by Joel Tan – Royal Court Upstairs, London

Joel Tan’s new play is an ambitious overview of a post-colonial world, examined through the fraught question of museum repatriations. A statue of the Boddhisattva Guanyin, on display in the British Museum overlooing the gift shop, becomes the focus of attention in the UK and in China, from where it was stolen during the destruction and looting of the Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860, by British and French troops. The violence of this act echoes in the opening moments of the play. The production, directed by emma + pj, has powerful sound design by Patch Middleton, who conjures the screams and earth-shaking roars as soldiers burn the palace in a fire which killed more than 300 servants.

Scenes from a Repatriation switches characters and sometimes eras with each scene. They are announced on a screen formatted like object labels in a museum. The play is in two parts. The first half, set in the present day, tells the story of pressure on British Museum curators to return Guanyin to China, while exploring the experience of people of Chinese origin living in the UK. The second half takes place in China after the return, and features more loosely connected scenes, probing politics, money, social relations in China itself. Tan pushes the limits of the format, staging an epic with a cast of only six, in the Royal Court’s small Upstairs space. It is not entirely successful, but when it works it works well.

The cast, constantly switching roles, do a very good job of telling a narrative that always remains entirely clear. The cast are predominantly performers of Chinese origin, and some scenes are performed in subtitled Cantonese and Mandarin, rare on the London stage. Kaja Chan switches with great fluidity between roles from English curator to Mandarin-speaking secret police interrogator. Sky Yang shows similar range, moving among roles that include a protesting Chinese student and the Scottish soldier who first looted the statue.

The play gives us much to admire, and is also frustrating at times. It would have benefited from an edit. There are a couple of scenes that do not work well, in particular an encounter at a party between a wealthy Chinese businessman, an ingratiating employee and his hired female companion, in which the characters appear either stupid or viciously misogynistic. The production’s tone is also confusing at times, shifting between broad parody – a comic posh curator, a doddery professor, a protest group called Islington Witches for Change – and the intense realism of an interrogation in a Hong Kong prison cell, which diffuse the play’s focus and impact.

However, many scenes do really hit home. A student, boycotting the British Museum, explains to his tutor how Guan Yin is a surrogate mother figure for young Chinese people far from him. A flashback takes us into the mind of a soldier looking down on himself as he loots the Summer Palace. The tokenism of a Chinese-themed British Museum Late is neatly skewered. And the interrogation scene, in which a cartoonist is questioned about the political intentions of his work, is powerful – the interrogator perched high up behind a screen and a civilised veneer that fails to hide that the outcome is never in doubt.

Scenes From a Repatriation brings wider issues to the stage that are both current and neglected. The conduct of the British and colonial armies in China in successive opium wars during the second half of the 19th century, intentionally forgotten in the West, is well-remembered in China and influences international politics now as much as it ever did. The return of looted objects is an issue becoming impossible to ignore. But the play is also about human dislocation: Chinese people looked down upon in the UK, Chinese students propping up the higher education system, oppression of Uiyghurs, crackdowns in Hong Kong. Empires then and empires now use people as their currency.

The production is urgent and exciting – video from Tyler Forward and lighting by Alex Fernandes are integral to the fast-paced story-telling. Joel Tan’s play is entertaining and urgent, with so many stories to tell that they cannot be contained. Perhaps if more work by writers and performers from Chinese backgrounds was staged, there would be less need to cover everything in one go. However, Tan has created real political theatre, dramatising debates that are difficult, unresolved and unavoidable, and reflecting our society in an unexpected light. The Royal Court is fulfilling its mission by staging plays like these.

*Victoria Smurfit and Rhashan Stone. Credit: Helen Murray*

Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen adapted by Gary Owen – Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith

Published at Plays International.

The back of The Captain’s heavy, balding head is literally papered onto the walls of Merle Hensel’s set for the Lyric’s new version of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, in a repeating patten. He may be dead, but his menacing presence looms large in the lives of everyone he has left behind. Meanwhile, the rear wall is a curtain of mist, dimly reflecting the characters who wander, lost, through a mental fog. The marble and leather opulence of the expensive interior does nothing to disguise the unresolved anguish which is pulling everyone apart from the inside. The Captain was a larger-than-life figure, a bully, a philanderer and arapist. Gary Owen’s pin-sharp updating of Ibsen’s classic preserves the generational impact of dark, unacknowledged secrets, while making them completely of the moment.

The Lyric’s boss, Rachel O’Riordan, has a fruitful artistic relationship with Owen including their hit Iphigenia in Splott. Their new collaboration feels like an event. The show’s emotional impact smoulders from the very first scene, as Rashan Stone’s lawyer, Andersen, visits the Captain’s widow, Helena (Victoria Smurfitt), to discuss arrangements for a new children’s home to be funded by his legacy. The professional atmosphere rapidly dissolves in the face of their unresolved relationship as old lovers. Callum Scott Howells, a force of nature as Helena’s deeply troubled son Oz, arrives on the scene to confront the older generation with the consequences of their silence. His burgeoning relationship with the Captain’s unacknowledged daughter Reggie (Patricia Allison) is both sweet and real, and deeply troubling as they discover they are half-siblings. Meanwhile, her non-biological father, Jacob (Deka Walmsley), is from a different social world, from where he can see exactly how poisonous a situation she is in.

Owen’s rewrite is masterful, pulling the play from its 19th century setting and refocusing on the human relationships that make it powerful and current. The lurking threat of syphilis, which no longer makes sense, is removed making space to dive into the realities of a coercive relationship, the corrosive power relationships created by wealth, and the terrible dilemma of discovering you are closely related to your lover. Ghosts is brilliantly cast. Victoria Smurfit, making a rare and welcome stage appearance, is perfect as a woman struggling with her inability to speak out against her abuser. She switches between full insight and reversion to the language of the oppressor. Her relationship with her son, Oz, is at the centre of the play. Callum Scott Howells is Gen Z to the core in bleached hair and Adidas tracksuit bottoms, his emotions always on the surface. He hides nothing, but being open to his feelings of rejection does not make them easier to bear. The generational gap with his mother, who hid everything to protect him, comes to a head in a scene reminiscent of Gertrude and Hamlet, where he questions her about whether she was raped. It draws gasps from the audience, as do several scenes during the evening.

Rashan Stone’s Anderson is a much more sympathetic character than his original, the hypocritical Pastor Manders. He gives a deeply human performance as a man trying hard to do the right thing, and finding there are no good choices. Patricia Allison’s Reggie is spiky, and fully aware of how much she has to lose while Deka Walmsley, as her father, is also more sympathetic than Ibsens’ original, using what little power he has to protect his daughter. Jacob, a painter-decorator with a broad East Anglian accent, emphasises the social gulf between the wealthy, living in coastal luxury, and those who work for them, who have very few options.

Ghosts is a significant achievement, a fresh look at a classic which shows us just how powerful Ibsen’s writing can be. Gary Owen turns our attention to themes easily obscured by the differences between eras. His version includes a powerful, entirely real evocation of Anderson’s lifelong, unrequited love for Helena. It draws on the power of public image, with the children’s home destroyed by the threat of toxic press coverage, rather than burning down, as in the original. He explores, in excruciating detail, how parents come to emotionally damage their children. And he gives a sophisticated, convicing analysis of the insidious ways a coercive relationship isolates and destroys a woman. Ghosts is a gripping, beautifully acted show, driven by a creative vision that brings this 150-year-old play pulsatingly to life.

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