Genre-bending Singaporean playwright Joel Tan throws a lot into the mix to make a play about whether we should return artefacts to China not dull, and quite a lot of the time he succeeds: his Royal Court debut is a playful, disjointed collection of scenes-cum-installations which enjoyably ignore convention, and definitely one of the more ambitious shows there’s been in the Royal Court Upstairs recently.
A mummified figure sits on a plinth at one end of the space, its form turned into twists and distortions by the layers of cloth and rope wrapped around it. This is Guanyin, a (fictional) sacred Chinese statue that was nicked by some Brit at some point and plonked in the British Museum. The Chinese government wants it back.
Starting with a protest from some Islington witches, each subsequent scene plays out with new characters, hopping between people and places (doddery art historians, political prisoners, activist students, dodgy billionaires), building up the history of the statue and arguments that now blaze around it; the cultural and political stuff, the institutional context, the history of it, its artistic value, its spiritual significance, but also the personal encounters people have with the object.
The constant drop away of meaning and context between each scene is enjoyably disorienting: it takes a minute to work out if or how one sequence is connected to the last. Under directors emma + pj, some scenes are dance, tableaux, non-literal. Some are earnest, others playful, some worthy and others quite moving. Each scene takes a new shape, the six actors deftly take on new roles, and it feels epic in scope.
It’s a hard thing to pin down, other than to say that it really is way too long, and succeeds in its restless breadth where it doesn’t in giving us depth. I wish I loved it. It’s full of little bits and moments that are great. The gesture of it is great. But a lot of it doesn’t work. It’s too lengthy, too slack, too much of a rehash.
In those early scenes we get entertaining replays of arguments about artefacts and institutions and protests: the embarrassment of big fusty old places like the British Museum trying to cope with a group of disgruntled witches, trying to seem relevant with late night dance events. But comedy moments drift into caricature, and serious moments are sapped by outstaying their welcome.
The first half sometimes finds some interesting questions: why don’t we apply the same arguments for repatriation to Chinese artefacts as to the Benin Bronzes or the Parthenon Marbles? And some knotty answers: that this is less about museum artefacts than it is about the way some nations are goodies and some are baddies to us in the UK or the West, and that those labels don’t come from nowhere.
The second half moves to China, and we see things from that perspective: that repatriation is a power play, an assertion of dominance. If the first half seemed cynical about the tenor of the arguments playing out in a hand-wringing liberal democracy, the second half is far more condemning of a repressive government that secretly loathes the West and only cares about their hand wringing to the extent that it can be leveraged and undermined.
Where it tries to be meaty, though, too often it’s flabby. In glimpses you can see the amazing thing this play almost is: an exchange between an imprisoned Chinese artist and a captor; the time slippages and ghostly presences. The messy form and the ambitious scope are things to admire. It just needs a lot more chipping and sculpting to find its final form.
