In many ways, the setting of Amy Ng’s new play Shanghai Dolls, is everything. Take the backdrop of a China reeling from war and conflict, with famous figures like Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai looming large: how else would it be possible to understand the roles that Jiang Qing, the architect of the Cultural Revolution, and Sun Weishi, China’s first theatre director, without the great, momentous historical context around them?
Yet at the same time, the production stands apart from all of that, and is simply the brutally tragic portrait of two women pushed by tides they cannot control, and end up forced to do whatever it takes to survive. Their interweaving stories are so intimately personal yet by Ng’s pen and Katie Posner’s direction, somehow manage to transcend time and space: it is the sad, devastating universality of both Jiang Qing and Sun Weishi’s stories that stay long in the memory.
“It will be us against the world” – Lan Ping (Jiang Qing)
At the beginning of the play, both young women have dreams: for Jiang Qing (played by Gabby Wong) in particular, it is to create revolutionary art and be free. Through her passion for theatre she lights a fire in young Sun Weishi (Milicent Wong) and thus the play starts with both women full of bright, excited energy for the possibilities that may lay before them. As the story unfolds, we are given a front row seat to the distressing way their dreams and spirits twist and die.
We know from history how both their stories end and enough information is given to inform those not familiar with this historical period, whilst starkly highlighting to the audience just how much is out of the control of both women. Designer Jean Chan purposefully does not over-furnish the set, utilising three moving panels that frame the scenes into snapshots in these women’s lives, key moments selected for the audience to bear silent witnesses to, as helpless to the evolution of their friendship as the women themselves are to the men and the political forces around them.
Both actresses thrive in the eighty minutes that they both own the stage, pleading, sparring, and bouncing off each other for the entire run time. Their power shifts are fascinating to watch, as over decades we see how their relationship transforms from one of bright hope into that of deep, deep tragedy. Ng and Posner painfully build this tension from scene to scene until, in the play’s final moments, it all spills over to gut-wrenching effect.
“She wants them to… choose… a different world.” – Li Lin (Sun Weishi)
The relatively short run time of the show means that scenes zip past and remain fresh in the memory. As a result, it is impossible to not watch the production and ask one’s self: “What could have been?“, a question often asked when confronting the stories of so many women in the world who have had their lives cut short or elsewise, have turned into monsters.
What would Jiang Qing have been if she hadn’t caught the eye of Chairman Mao? What other great works would Sun Weishi have made, if the Cultural Revolution had not been? What friendship could they have truly had?
Each scene lays bare these sliding door (quite literally) moments, as either or both actors constantly lay bare the heavy, heavy weight of their all-too limited choices. Here, despair, torment and desperation grows and transforms in both performances, contrasting so greatly with the play’s opening scene that it impacts all the deeper. Props must be given to both actors, who push themselves from beginning to end as they bring to life several different decades of both women’s lives.
So yes, Shanghai Dolls is a story that is deeply entwined with its setting and the actions of Chairman Mao, Zhou Enlai and the war and tension that ravages around them. But at its transcendent heart is the relationship between the two women, and the terrible, painful things they did and endured. Were their actions inevitable? Or even justifiable? That is up to the viewer to decide.
Yet every audience member should undoubtedly leave the play with this question fresh in their mind: what must women sacrifice in order to be able to exist? Their minds? Their bodies? Each other?
Shanghai Dolls runs at the Kiln Theatre until the 10th of May. Tickets can be found here.