Writer: Amy Ng
Director: Katie Posner
Two women meet in China in 1935 both destined to receive a level of cultural fame in the future and both struck by Ibsen’s message about female confinement in the closing passages of A Doll’s House as Nora attempts to throw off her shackles to find a more truthful life. To an extent, Amy Ng’s new play Shanghai Dolls asks what happens next to all of the Noras who suddenly think they are free while the next 50 years of Chinese history just build them bigger dolls’ houses.
Playing at the Kiln Theatre, Ng’s play follows the intertwined fortunes of actress Jiang Qing who becomes Mao Zedong’s wife, and her younger charge left homeless in Shanghai, Li Lin who is later revealed as Sun Weishi, China’s first woman director. In Ng’s play, she gets to run her own theatre, be trained by Stanislavski himself and translate for Zedong’s trip to meet Stalin. These real moments – largely reported off-stage and through extensive between-scene captions – are mixed with imagined conversations as the young friends share a passion not only for Ibsen but for Chekhov as well, enthusiastically swapping lines and knowledge of the theatre layered within the play.
Some of Shanghai Dolls’ strongest scenes involve the changing nature of the friendship as the women’s lives send them in different personal and political directions, eventually placing them at odds. Ng is sympathetic to their reasoning behind their choices, the class divide that narrows their options and freedom to design a future, placing them, as women, in the power of inadequate men in order to survive – men who never recognise or utilise the value of Jiang and Sun even as they suppress them. Both friends have a moment where they offer protection to the other and both are compromised by the path they take instead, but the continual intersection and the growing investment in their lives is engaging.
However, given the vast time period that it covers and the detail of Chinese history during this time, Shanghai Dolls is immensely expositional, sometimes rendering the dialogue little more than an exchange of facts. This is exacerbated by the short scene structure that initially skips 12 months into the future each time and eventually takes much longer time leaps, meaning the characters must ‘explain’ their context every time the audience meets them again. Jean Chan’s scene design includes big history pit stops outlining military and political changes which eventually become a recitation of narrative history that overshadows the female story caught up within it.
Gabby Wong makes Jiang a confident and determined woman, pursuing an acting career at a time of distrust and sure that her life will be more liberated. During the years of the play, the recognition of the cage she has built for herself is at first sorrowful and eventually hardens her. Millicent Wong’s Sun develops less during Shanghai Dolls, always a good, decent woman, largely put upon and never revealing the risks or darker choices she made to thrive. But Sun is likeable and her experience reveals an increasing independence from her friend.
Told from the perspective of two women who culturally and politically influenced China in the twentieth century, Ng’s play ultimately trades exploring Ibsen’s doll houses for a history lesson from which the Noras of Shanghai Dolls can never escape.
Runs until 10 May 2025
