Dangerous Liasians
Downstairs Theatre, Belvoir Street
September 18-20 and 25-27
Bookings 9699 3444
Review by Suneeta Peres da Costa
A cabaret as anti-racist polemic? The work of the ensemble in Dangerous Liasians, performed as part of the fifth annual Company B Sydney Asian Theatre Festival, is at once charming and savagely critical.
As an indictment of the state of race relations in this country, the piece traces the lives of five "Asian-Australiens" as they struggle to make sense of their place in a culture that seems consistent only in its ambivalence and indifference to their presence.
Creatively conceived and with dynamic and, in moments, deeply moving performances by all members of the cast, the ideas explored are courageous, timely and provocative. The play is set in the future, a future that seems to all characters depressingly possible: it is election night, 1998 and Pauline Hanson's One Nation party has won a landslide victory.
In a fashion typical of the cabaret, this group-devised piece turns clichés and aspects of the carnival into a valuable and palpable commentary on public consciousness.
The confessional nature of the monologues gives the innovative musical adaptations a bittersweet edge. Tensions in the experience of the Asian migrant are borne out with sophistication and uncanny stylistic contradiction. While not explicitly expressed, the value of the collective identity "Asian" is questioned. The characters are caught in all kinds of double binds, torn between varying allegiances to home and experiences full of pathos which, try as they do, fail to connect.
Cindy, for example, is Chinese-Australian but seems alarmingly intolerant and painfully ignorant of things Chinese. She dreams of emigrating to, of all places, Paris.
Keith and Linden, who left the Philippines and Malaysia respectively, recount their terrifying encounters with martial law and, being a minority within a minority (Linden is Chinese from Malaysia), with simple candour.
Given the length of the production, issues of reconciliation might have been usefully incorporated as an ironical counterpoint to the refrain, poignantly echoed throughout the piece: "Go back where you came from."
Two of the strongest musical performances were by Georgina Naidu (Indian mother/English father/born in Adelaide) and Keith Kempis. But even the slightly off-key and corny moments leave a sense of the fragile indeterminacy of Asian lives under Hanson.