Writer and Director: Yijing Zou
Upending your life to move halfway around the world would be a daunting prospect for most people. Moving to a place where you are struggling with the native language must be even harder.
The couple at the heart of Yijing Zou’s Bathroom, Bowen Sun’s Shiming Liang and his girlfriend Siwen Yan (Jinyu Dan), have relocated to London from China’s Shenzhen province. He is a struggling filmmaker; she is in an academic field that brings her into contact with many people whom Shiming could network with. But both feel cut off from the city that is their new home and, increasingly, from each other.
Zou’s play, performed mostly in Mandarin with English captions projected, is set in the couple’s small flat. The use of surtitles allows a soundscape of London noises to play in at a volume one wouldn’t normally tolerate, forever competing with the actors’ voices. It’s intrusive, but deliberately so. This is a play about how a couple find so much getting in the way of their communication.
The standard bickering of a couple who are both tired is immediately recognisable. Shiming, out of work and struggling to complete a script, has reverted to his hobby of folding origami cranes. When Siwen returns home, it is after a day in which her lack of confidence in her English has led her to make mistakes, resulting in an effective demotion to her work colleague’s assistant. They each have sympathetic friends – for him, a neighbour; for her, a male work colleague who sends her regular, encouraging texts – but what they most want is each other’s support.
There is a recurring theme of neither party truly listening to the other, and of getting frustrated when they are not heard themselves. This is especially apparent in the scenes set in the flat’s eponymous bathroom, the place where the couple are fundamentally most exposed to one another. In one particularly poignant scene, Shiming finally pours out his heart after bottling up his emotions, only to see that his girlfriend can’t (or chooses not to) hear over the sound of her hairdryer.
The couple’s conversations pivot briskly between happiness – often while remembering happier times, such as their first meeting – and deep sadness and despair at the current state of their relationship. Like sea waves hitting a beach, it is not always possible to tell immediately what direction the tide is heading until it is too late.
Some strong visual projections complement the character work. Whether that’s recreating some of the racist interactions Shiming has to deal with by projecting blurry, dreamlike heads, or seeing Siwen’s shower transform into a cascade of English words drowning her, it is a tremendous demonstration of how imaginative video work can integrate into a low-budget show to great effect.
At times, the English surtitles feel a little dry and perfunctory, which one hopes is a byproduct of the translation process rather than of the original dialogue. The themes are captured well, though – while a woman’s frustration at her male partner’s lack of ambition and drive is hardly new territory, its placement within the larger narrative helps to keep the situation feeling fresh.
The exploration of how some people’s behaviour can feel like racist aggression, and yet how assuming every negative response is rooted in racism can be an excuse for not considering other factors, is certainly expressed eloquently. Bathroom is an intriguing study of what it can feel like to have sacrificed so much for your partner and feel like you have not been given enough in return – and what happens when both parties feel the same way.
Reviewed on 4 August 2026
Camden Fringe 2026 runs until 30 August
