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?
