At the bottom of its heart, it’s a play about home-coming and always on the road.
A 12th-century stoneware Guanyin statue.
A debate over history, cultural representation, and rightful ownership.
A repatriation that marks anything but a “victory.”
Half fictional and half factual, Singaporean playwright Joel Tan‘s Scenes from a Repatriation imagines the many tangled narratives surrounding a British Museum artifact – a Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) stoneware Guanyin statue, allegedly sacked by a Scottish soldier during the Yuanmingyuan圆明园(The Old Summer Palace) invasion in the second Opium War (1856-1860). Professors, students, protestors, business moguls, artists – all are involved. Eventually, the artifact is repatriated to PRC’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism through soft coercion when China’s money is flooding all over the UK. This fictional episode closely but not identically parallels the repatriation of the bronze rat and rabbit heads via donation in 2013, heads by the Pinault family.
Tan ambitiously weaves together a broad range of themes: British colonial history, cultural identity, the diasporic pan-Chinese experience, Chinese smuggling (clearly referring to the Dover lorry deaths), the Hong Kong issue, and the Ürümqi fire of November 24, 2022 – an incident that directly escalated to the White Paper Protests and ultimately led to the end of China’s protracted and draconian lockdown policies. All those attempts carry a precise and sharp perspective, while they don’t feel forced, out of context, or pandering to a Western gaze through superficial critique of the CCP.
Tan’s real talent, though, lies in his exquisite handling of poetic language and boundless imagination, imagination that almost feels realer than the real. Even within the physical limitations at the Jerwood Upstairs, such imagination is rendered with full body by a magnificent team. TK Hay’s traverse stage (with assistant Yijing Chen) places the half-metre Guanyin at one end and a tilted projection screen for subtitles at the other – just like the East and the West, locked in a mutual, reciprocal gaze. Emma + pj’s direction reinforces such reciprocity through the statuization of the Scottish soldier at the end of first half – a firm and defiant gesture demonstrating that it is not always the East being petrified as an object ready for scrutiny.
The ensemble of six (Kaja Chan, Aidan Cheng, Jon Chew, Fiona Hampton, Robin Khor Yong Kuan, and Sky Yang) casts all the roles. But rather than fleshed-out individual characters, they are more like archetypes: types of people grappling with what “home” and “freedom” mean to them. Yes, deep down at its core, Scenes from a Repatriation is a poem about home and freedom, and their sophisticated, intertwined and even contradictory relationships. Beneath the shifting characters and political controversies, there lies a desperate yet human plea: Where is my home, and my family? The home that feels safe? The home that grants me the freedom to speak? The home that guarantees my ‘on the road’ state be not just an exile, but also adventure?
Whether it’s the young queer poet’s (Aidan Cheng) resonant monologue about eating jiaozi饺子(dumpling) with his gran, or the Chinese international student’s (Sky Yang) speech on how the Guanyin embodies diasporic longing, or last but not least, Khor’s poignant, vulnerable catch of a desperate Uyghur whose entire family perishes in the Ürümqi fire, each voice offers a raw, eternal plea for homecoming, for a sense of belonging, and for an elusive hope of feeling safe and free at the same time, under the same roof. Thus, the Guanyin statue is no longer just a simple symbol of cultural pride, but also the very tyrannical symbol of a certain culture that renders home no longer home, and freedom as confinement – so it has to be crushed.
The imagery of fire burns throughout the play, leaving sheer despair and almost no hope – almost. But spirits can remain free, right? They can transform into birds and horses, and fly away – the very last sentence from Tan’s script. On my way home, Lee Chien-Fu’s 李建復 Gui Qu Lai Xi 歸去來兮(Homeward Bound I Go) hummed in my heart. I kept asking myself: Where do we go, home or faraway, and why?
Scenes from a Repatriation runs until 24th May. Tickets are available here.