In a week’s time, the Sheffield Crucible will stage a revival of Miss Saigon - the popular stage musical by Claude Michel Schonberg and Alain Boubil that transports Puccini’s Madama Butterfly into the Vietnam war. At the same time, Kimber Lee’s ‘untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play’ is showing audiences the other side of the coin here in Manchester at the Royal Exchange, highlighting and directly addressing some of the controversies that have plagued the original since its 1989 premiere.
It’s rare for a play to be performed while simultaneously being critiqued by another, especially one that has already seen its share of recent headlines; when the Sheffield Crucible run was announced last November, New Earth Theatre - a company of British east and south-east Asian (BESEA) artists - pulled out of staging their play ‘Worth’ in protest against a musical, which they say “perpetuates deeply held notions of Asian inferiority”.
Miss Saigon tells the story of a doomed romance involving an Asian woman abandoned by her American GI lover during the Vietnam war. It has won 40 awards, including two Oliviers and three Tonys, and has been performed in more than 28 countries. But over the years, it has faced intense criticism for both its use of whitewashing and its subject matter, which has been accused of perpetuating racist tropes including reductive, often sexualised portryals of Asian women.
