TWO WOMEN, LONG YEARS ACROSS HALF A CONTINENT
1935: below projected headlines about Communists executed in Shanghai and the war between Japan and Red China comes an audition call for A Doll’s House. At the League of Left Wing Dramatists’ shabby theatre Lan Ping, suave and stylish, is warming up for Nora with Ibsen’s revolutionary words “I must make up my mind who is right, the world or I!”. Enter a dishevelled, scruffier black-clad teenager who hardly knows where she is, was sent there by the Party. Lan Ping patronizes her, but is impressed by her ability to read the emotion below the lines like a director. They become friends, flatmates. Both are intense and fascinated by this new world : theatre as,“a temple, where that other world of truth, beauty, justice is so close we can almost touch it”.
But a scene later, a couple of years have passed : they enthuse about Chekhov and Stanislavsky and dream like his three sisters of theatre’s capital, distant Moscow . They light incense, bow, vow friendship. But rivalry, and difference in character, divide them; the assured elder had a success as Nora but took on a Coca Cola ad for money; the younger woman is having stage successes and remains idealistic about it all. Trouble is aggravated by discovery that the younger – daughter of an executed Communist martyr – has been adopted by Zhou En Lai, later Mao’s premier. But it is her older friend from that old audition who becomes Mao’s mistress: as war and the creation of the new China gathers pace she’s excoriated as a slut, a vixen, distracting the Leader; when she marries him, and becomes Jiang Qing, madame Mao, she is forced to promise to do nothing political for thirty years. Meanwhile young Sun Weishi, has also broken through the expectations of women and become a nationally important director and theatremaker.
Amy Ng’s fascinating, fast-moving two-hander uses imagination and research to evoke their relationship’s early days; but Jiang Qing did play Nora, and a period of uneasy rivalry is documented. I had, to my shame, known only that as Mao’s wife – later tried – once out of her thirty years as mere wife was the architect of the Cultural Revolution, sociopolitical determination to wipe out both ancient tradition and invasive capitalism, banishing intellectuals. I did not know about the long link with Sun Weishi, idealistic director-artist. In a telling moment Jiang instructs Sun “I am commissioning new works. Everything must be red, bright and shining. The heroes must be tall, mighty and wholesome. I shall ban everything else from our stages”. Sun, of course, wants her play about women oil workers to cover suffering, doubt, cruelty and humanity.
Sun was finally arrested and tortured to death in 1968: Zhou unable or unwilling by then to protect her; she herself would not denounce him as a spy and traitor. Ng gives us a last conversation in prison between Jiang and the tormented, battered, near-dying Sun. It’s wrenching. All the more because the fleet 80-minute journey of the play telescopes the three decades, and makes you remain aware of the light-spirited comradeship of their early meeting.
All happens amid swivelling, simple walls and in front of evocative designs and projections by Nicola T Chang and Akhila Krishnan : blue-black cloudscapes, great changing headlines. It transports you to another culture, opens a half-understood history. But at the heart of its power of course are the two players: Gabby Wong tall, elegant, showy, determined as Jiang Qing, hardening before our eyes into the older angrier Madam Mao; and Millicent Wong, gentle-faced, sincere, trying to hold the comradeship long after it had soured. They’re tremendous; as is the direction by Katie Posner. Another strike for the Kiln.
Kilntheatre.com to 10 May
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