Imagine yourself seated in a cosy, newly refurbished theatre, watching a production about Joseph Goebbels. It portrays a young Joseph, from childhood to teenage years, with his genuine passion devoted to art, drama, and literature, compassionate about his physical illness and disability, and framing him as somewhat of a victimised scapegoat, tragically consumed by the symbolic and demonised propaganda of Nazi ideology.
However, in Shanghai Dolls, there’s no hero Joseph Goebbels, but rather a heroine, Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife and the primary architect of China’s Cultural Revolution. Often mixed up with the global radical student movements in the 1960s, the Chinese Cultural Revolution was in fact a state-orchestrated ideological purge that led to immense persecution, cultural devastation, and severe social disruption. Just as portrayed in the play, when Sun Weishi – another heroine of the play – is forced by Jiang Qing to sign a “confession” reporting her adoptive father Zhou Enlai – Mao’s second-in-command – as a traitor, the Cultural Revolution unleashed the darkest demons residing in our humanity.
However, Shanghai Dolls lets such brutality go easily. Instead, over ninety minutes, we witness a teenage Jiang Qing (Gabby Wong) having great passion for theatre. Ng and director Katie Posner attribute a twenty-minute play-within-a-play of A Doll’s House for the pair to build up friendship. But while the play seems to bestow both with even voices, we seldom hear Sun Weishi’s (Millicent Wong) inner voices, even though she was the first female director in the PRC. Instead, she serves mainly as an indispensable backboard to support the portrayal of a quite bold and vibrant, fleshed-out Jiang Qing. Their sophisticated friendship – a failed attempt at ‘girl helps girl’ in 1930s China – is genuinely moving and authentic, where ressentiment can be as poignant and touching as affection and care.
To be fair, the production per se is quite decent and mature. Both actresses bring the characters great nuance and full brim, and I’m especially impressed by Millicent’s physicality when Sun is put into a dungeon. Jean Chan’s minimalist set design, featuring three movable panels with doors, effectively frames the narrative through a series of vignettes. Akhila Krishnan’s projections provide useful historical context, helping audiences navigate the chronology with authentic period newspapers, captions and archival footage. Nicola T Chang’s music design exhilarates with intense rhythms, effectively capturing the anxious, restless spirit of the times, and the final track from Faye Wong evokes a sense of surreal nostalgia, especially for us ‘insiders’.
On Chinese social media, someone criticises the play for misusing feminism for its own agenda. However, perhaps feminism is the least significant issue here. Even within the play itself, a logical coherence is lacking to explain Jiang Qing’s transformation from a richly human, vividly alive woman into the demonised symbol she eventually became. Let alone the extensive discussion over female agency and subjectivity, which could take centuries to unfold. It seems particularly strange: if the play establishes a sympathetic and compassionate undertone towards Jiang Qing, doesn’t it implicitly deny Jiang’s own agency? The play’s closing strongly hints that she’s merely a doll, but who (and what) should be responsible? From a woman of strong agency to a doll, is this transformation entirely attributed to her environment, to communism, and, of course, to Mao? If yes, then where is the examination of all those macro/micro power-dynamics?
Compared to the gender controversy, the real issue, I would suggest, is the play’s ethical controversy. Though not a direct parallel, Jiang is very much the Chinese Goebbels. It would be quite a discomfort to the London audience if staging Goebbels with an empathic undertone, but staging Jiang Qing is much safer and acceptable because of cultural and historical distance – no direct trauma. Let’s put the diasporic Chinese communities aside first, although there might still be many direct victims of the Cultural Revolution, and the play trivialises and diminishes their great sufferings. Isn’t the play risking itself, pandering to a western gaze by taking advantage of the London audience’s ignorance? Even if the historical and cultural distance is de facto, it is ethically problematic to use such a self-orientalist approach to exploit that distance, broadening it into exoticisation.
