With China high on the news agenda, Amy Ng’s play is timely, and though it’s not a great piece of drama it tells a great story briskly and efficiently. Spanning six decades, it tracks the interwoven history of two women who were pivotal in the political and cultural upheavals of Mao Zedong’s revolution, but whose stories are little-known here.
An 80-minute two-hander, directed by Katie Posner in a co-production between the Kiln and Paines Plough, it necessarily features more exposition than character development, and it begins in a Shanghai theatre in 1935. Lan Ping (Gabby Wong) has hoiked herself out of poverty to become an actress famed for her performance in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Li Lin (Millicent Wong) is a young communist seeking sanctuary from a government crackdown.
