Imagine if Caryl Churchill had written Noises Off. Like Michael Frayn’s play, which shows the same creaky farce three times from different angles, Kimber Lee’s furious and funny untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play loops through the same story over and again. And like something by Churchill, it cracks open the conventions of naturalistic theatre to engage in a brittle argument with itself. It is punky, polemical and stingingly fresh.
As the Sheffield Crucible steels itself to open Boublil and Schönberg’s Miss Saigon next week, Lee’s play calls out a century of western colonialist dramatisations of the east. By east, we could be talking about Vietnam, China, Malaysia, Japan or Cambodia – who cares, it’s all the same place, right?
In heavily satirical style, the playwright circles through pastiche interpretations of Madama Butterfly, South Pacific and M*A*S*H, with nods to The King and I and The World of Suzie Wong, reducing them to the same imperialist tropes. An exotic Asian peasant (“dirt poor but very clean”) is seduced by a square-jawed white soldier who abandons her for a porcelain-pretty western wife, only to return later to “rescue” their illegitimate child. The peasant’s subsequent suicide neatly resolves any lingering guilt.
Boiled down to its elements, the story becomes a metaphor for colonialism – one culture raping another while claiming to have right on its side. In its repetition, it also reveals a pattern of patrician attitudes to class and gender that are inextricable from the imperial mindset. The peasant is commodified, exploited and silenced three times over because of her race, poverty and gender.
All of this blasts noisily into the modern world as Lee considers the psychological impact of these narratives in a multicultural dinner party where viewpoints range from denial to assimilation to angry resistance. The playwright sets her sights on a colonial worldview that affects not only art but real life.
The mood switches from comic to confrontational in Roy Alexander Weise’s production, part of the Manchester international festival, as a superb Mei Mac – funny and ferocious – successfully resists being stereotyped as the submissive Kim, only to confront societal pressures beyond her control. She leads an excellent ensemble in a witty, needling and bolshie production.
• At Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 22 July. At Young Vic, London, 18 September–4 November.
