A witty and high-energy blitz of wrath and disenfranchisement that loses focus in a scattershot flurry of conflicting ideas.
The first thing budding actress ‘Lili’ Lum Wai Man (Gawa Leung, also the playwright) tells us as she stalks through the audience towards the stage in Open Source Intelligence and Counterinsurgency for the Jobbing Hater is that she has three problems. 3) She can’t hug anyone without wanting to punch them in the throat. 2) She’s always angry. 1) You.
‘You’ in this case is Eve Xiao (Lorraine Yu), another East Asian aspiring actress in the UK, whose social media posturing and ersatz trauma-confessionals have become the focus of a pathological rage in Lili: a heady concoction of envy, distrust and projected self-loathing that has mutated into stalkeresque obsession. As her hatred spirals, it catalyses a swirling mix of confrontations with her familial trauma, fears, tumultuous relationships, and fragmentary sense of identity as an expat in a disorientingly performative landscape of forced otherness and cultural schism.
The company Brava Guava describes OSI as an ‘unpredictable three hander’ charting a ‘journey towards healing with anime music, puppetry, Shakespeare and Muay Thai’. Unpredictable is an understatement. OSI careens around the place – stylistically, formally, tonally – throwing everything and the kitchen sink at the wall to see what sticks. It leaves your head spinning: trying to grasp the piece and the character at its heart is like trying to hold smoke. Narrative threads crash into the show and then fizzle away; motifs flare-up and are jettisoned when a new instinct takes hold. This disjointed quality isn’t helped by the transitions between scenes, which largely happen in silent blackout with audibly clunky set changes. Lighting and sound (by Zidi Wu and Morik Liang respectively, with slick music by Filippo Galli) are hampered by the same dramaturgical inchoateness: they’re great when they’re great, but they can’t seem to decide what they’re supposed to be doing in the piece as a whole.
Occasionally this schizoid energy is a delightful rush, and it becomes an endearing facet of the show by virtue of its gutsy abandon. But it also means that Leung and director Tess Adèle Glinert can’t seem to follow their ideas through and let them breathe. That excessive quality might reflect Lili’s own overflowing psyche, but it equally renders a lot of the emotional impact oddly weightless. This is a particular shame because so many of the ideas in this piece are brilliant and have incredible potential. When it settles to something and really invests the time, it absolutely sings. For example, the two plinths onstage, one light one dark, constitute a snappy visual pun from Glinert and set designer Zidi Wu, particularly when Lili manipulates her mental projection of Eve, literally ‘putting her on a pedestal’ just to fantasise about tearing her down again. Indeed, the moments when Eve becomes a tragic cypher for Lili’s own fractured sense of self are genuinely funny and beautiful. Projections (also by Liang) are a highlight, injecting Edgar Wright levels of postmodern zip into the proceedings. The satire is sporadic but regularly astute and laugh-out-loud witty – Leung can absolutely spin a cracking one-liner.
Performances by Leung, Yu and Lavan Jeyarupalingam have buckets of energy. Jeyarupalingam is a charming presence as Lili’s partner (latterly ex), and the scenes between them are as fraught, funny and real as they need to be – especially as Jeyarupalingam begins to jump between refractions of the male figures in Lili’s life. They’re best when they relax into their roles and avoid hamming, at which point they all make clever and intuitive choices.
There’s so much skill and invention on display in OSI, and every one of these young theatre-makers has got the goods.The honesty of its reflections on family, culture, and self-destructive jealousy were frequently hilarious and moving. There’s a lot to say about it, and so many lovely choices to reflect on. Take a scalpel to this show and carve out some more dramaturgical coherency, chasing the juiciest ideas through to their fullest expression, and they’ve got a timely, potent and richly-observed character study on their hands.