Choy-Ping Clarke-Ng pieces together her mixed race and queer identity in a new play with fresh perspectives. Photo: Isaac Harris
★ ★ ★
Welcome to the green pastures of a great place. For a long time, this realm was under the stranglehold of an oppressive religion, with selected emissaries to preach its gospel. But recent outcries against injustice have turned public opinion, forcing the domain to re-evaluate the kind of messages it wishes to send.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is Irish theatre in 2019.
You don’t have to look far to see how long established models of production have been changed by - and made answerable to - #WakingTheFeminists. Artistic directors nowadays have to defend signs of unbalanced programming with breakdowns and spreadsheets. Yet, even with equality on the agenda, the landscape is still overwhelmingly and depressingly white.
Here to join in the good work is Where are You From? by Choy-Ping Clarke-Ng, a recent graduate of Trinity College where she made the live installation My Little China Girl. Her slick new docudrama, co-directed by Grace Morgan, is presented as part of the Young Curators Festival at the Abbey Theatre. The kids are alright.
With a restrained face-front delivery, Clarke-Ng sits in a bathtub, dressed in green velvet, relaying the details of a horrendous Tinder date. Her privileged suitor, heard in ominous voiceover, mistakes her for Japanese. (Clarke-Ng lived her life in Ireland, and her father is from Hong Kong). His phone lights up mid-conversation, a big-breasted anime woman filling the background of the screen. Being fetishized on the first date isn’t what she had in mind.
The play goes on to show Clarke-Ng piecing together her mixed-race and queer identity, mostly over zippy conversations with her father, the gently honest Chi-Wai. A bulk of the plot sees her travelling to his home village in the New Territories, and searching for her own sense of home as an English teacher in Hong Kong, amid growing tensions with Mainland China
Wired with Ferdy Emmet’s fantastic lighting, the stage thrillingly transforms from a neatly mysterious apartment into a wild and sometimes inhospitable nightlife. There is a dazzling slideshow of Asian music artists, mirrors for Clarke-Ng to see reflections of herself, a scene that also operates as a sly critique of Irish theatre.
The production fizzes with talent, though it isn’t enough to gather its elements together. Some arch stage effects show the ripping up of identity (oranges are unpeeled) and cementing of others (a bowlful of noodles is consumed), shown with unrushed seat-shuffling nerve. Other visuals, including one involving the Portrait of Lady Lavery as Cathleen Ní Houlihan, are lost because they’re simply too small to see from the stalls.
There are so many fresh perspectives here on finding home within a mixed-race identity, surviving life with depression, an embracing of bisexuality, and the speculated future of Hong Kong. Sadly, the overall effect is a bit scattershot.
What if it was a story that focused in on one or a few of these things? We’ll just have to wait for another play to zoom in.
Run ends Aug 10th.
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