By Helen Jarvis
Belvoir Street Theatre's second Asian Theatre Festival brings a range of sharply different presentations from writers and performing artists living and working in Australia. Music is to be a strong theme of this season, whether dominant form or as persistent underpinning to words. As well as the two works reviewed here, other productions of mask, epic poetry and dance take the season through until October 1. For details and bookings, ring (02) 699 3444.
The world premiere of Nicholas Jose's play Dead City will continue at Belvoir until September 25. The play then reopens at the Q Theatre in Penrith from October 5 to 30.
Shanghai 1994. A hotel room. Four people (or is it five?) — the Australian consul-general, a UN disaster emergency official, a US historian and the enigmatic representation of the Chinese people: room attendant/opera singer/student/political activist/spy/government official. And a piano.
What happens over the course of less than 24 hours between these people is the subject of this complex and gripping play. Their individual desperations and opportunistic exploitation of each other clash with moments of love and beauty, memories of the past and haunting music.
Nicholas Jose takes further his previous work, particularly his short stories on the Tienanmen Square demonstrations of 1989, "Avenue of Eternal Peace" (televised as Children of the Dragon), setting this drama firmly in the new economic China open to foreign investment and involvement. But it is also post Tienanmen China, suffused with suspicion and uncertainty.
These themes combine with that of the foreigners each in China for their own motives and each forming an impression from only one small corner of reality. The familiar modern version of the "old China hand" is complemented and challenged by the arrival of an ageing professor to lecture on "varying American impressions of democracy" — a man who daily lives the torments of European history and brings them with him.
The acting is strong, particularly Helmut Bakaitis, artistic director of the Q Theatre, as the professor. Rodney Fisher's direction keeps the plot's tension throughout a rather long performance that takes place in a most authentic archetypical Asian hotel room — red velvet furnishings and black woodwork, seediness and modernity mixed with poor air-conditioning and noisy traffic outside if one opens the window for relief.
Max Lyandvert's musical direction is masterful with both Chinese and Western music throughout, and the soaring rendition by Bronwyn Lim of Korngold's Die Tode Stadt (Dead City) will stay with you long after you leave the theatre.
In the Downstairs Theatre, the musical dimension is given full rein by Ngoc Tuan Hoang in his rendition of Ta Duy Binh's The Return, which concentrates through music, movement, text and ritual on one moment in a journey — the moment of waiting.
Memories — how and what we remember of our homeland — have such meaning for so many Australians that this interpretation of the Vietnamese experience will doubtless strike personal chords with many in the audience.