Burning as an act of ritual is such an ancient tradition, it’s easy to forget why we do it. Certainly for the Chinese-Singaporean siblings at the centre of Merlynn Tong’s play Golden Blood, burning is as perplexing as it is meaningful, as much a burden as a way of paying homage.
They’ve just cremated their mother, whose suicide orphans them at a crucial juncture in their development. There is the question of guardianship, given the girl (Tong) is 14 and her brother (Charles Wu) is 21. And then there’s the question of money.
The play opens with that cremation, the two siblings standing in silhouette against a brightly coloured wall like forced participants in a James Turrell exhibition. It’s an abstracted image, but it neatly conveys the power and impact of the funeral pyre, its violence and its finality. Of course, the dead are only as dead as we allow them to be, and soon the fallout of their mother’s legacy begins to haunt the children, even to corrupt their relationship.
Tong is deeply interested in this idea of legacy, of what we’re reasonably expected to do with the things – material and psychological – our parents leave us when they die. For these kids, raised on strict notions of respect but also neglected and perhaps even abused, this becomes an almost Sisyphean task. The girl wants to understand her occluded past better, even though the person who could best explain is dead; the boy, who remembers more and is therefore more obviously damaged, wants largely to forget.
Tessa Leong directs this sharply observed and often very funny two-hander with enormous energy and verve, eliciting fine performances from her cast. Tong conveys the wide-eyed awe and gullibility of a girl in her mid-teens, but also subtly adds layers of maturity and weariness as the play progresses. Wu is terrific in a wilder, more unpredictable part, mercurial and edgy but also touchingly vulnerable and lost.
After a long opening scene of negotiation folded into the shock of loss, Golden Blood settles into a jolting, rapid-fire rhythm – he indulges in increasingly hare-brained money making schemes, first as the “king of ketamine” and then as the “god of gold”, and she gets pulled unwillingly along. While this has an undeniable dynamism, Leong’s overemphasis on raucousness and ribaldry crowds out the more contemplative aspects of the script.
Michael Hankin’s set, with its coloured walls and scattered red plastic chairs, doesn’t help much. The apartment interior is completely abstracted save for a rudimentary set of shelves and a foldable mattress, bleeding the play of detail. Singapore’s seedy underbelly, mentioned in the program notes, has to be inferred by the audience because it isn’t on the stage; missing is the tactile specificity needed to bring this world to life. Fausto Brusamolino’s lighting is vivid and energetic, and Rainbow Chan’s sound design goes some way in suggesting a wider context.
Golden Blood has a lot on its mind. Key to the play is a tension between family and self-preservation, between the broken inheritance of the past and the uncharted waters of the future. Some of its plot elements – notably the under-realised gangsterism and a late act of betrayal that undercuts the central relationship – are hesitant and slightly pulpy. But there are some brilliant observations on lineage and intergenerational trauma, and the sibling dynamics are powerfully articulated.
If ritual is inherently theatrical, then theatre is inherently ritualistic; the stage is a place for carving out sacred space, honouring ceremony and communing with the dead. Golden Blood is critical of, and also sympathetic to, the practice of burning paper products for lost loved ones. Here, grief seems like a transactional process, and spirituality akin to materialism. But Tong is a compassionate and canny observer; her siblings may be cut adrift from their traditions, but they honour them nonetheless. Because burning things doesn’t necessarily make them go away.
Golden Blood is at Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne, until 30 November
