Chimerica: Headlong at The Harold Pinter Theatre

I saw this performance at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London on Tuesday 10^th September 2013 at 7.30pm.

It was my first time cycling in rush hour traffic in London, I set off at 8am to make sure that I could get in the queue at the Harold Pinter by 9am, so that I could get two £10 day tickets for my friend and I to see Chimerica that night. I cycled through Victoria Park and along Regents Canal before joining the CS3 cycle superhighway and heading to Charing Cross. The roads were busy, the cycle paths were busy. My general cycle pace is fast, I was trying to overtake slower commuters but then had to keep stopping to check my map to make sure I was going in the right direction so they inevitably caught up and overtook me so I was stuck behind them again. But no matter, I was on a mission and I was on time. I pulled up at the Harold Pinter, saw that there were only four people in the queue so far and locked up my bike around the corner. I walked over to stand in the queue and then opened my bag to pull out my book... which, in my mad dash to leave by 8am and not forget both the D-lock and curly lock for my bike, I had forgotten. That meant I had one hour to stand in the queue, with no book to read and not wanting to use my phone and drain the battery, for fear that I would not have the Google Maps function to see me home. Damn.

My first thought was to find the closest newsagent and pick up a copy of the i, but what if someone then came and took my spot in the queue and then I couldn't get a ticket? No, I had made the rookie mistake, I had to live with it. I stood in the queue and decided to just enjoy the atmosphere of London and do you know what? I did. The sounds, the people, the cold air on my sweaty-from-cycling back, I was lapping it up, because this was my second week in the big smoke and I was just thankful to be there. When a truck turned up in front of the theatre with the words 'Food Supplies' on it, I asked the guy in the queue next to me if he thought they were maybe supplying us all with bacon sandwiches and coffee while we stood in the queue. A little laughter and then a long discussion about how to be an actor in London ensued and before I knew it, the box office was open and my tickets were being booked.

I asked the box office employee if he had seen the show, he said he had, I asked him what he had thought of it, he looked at me from behind his glass partition and he said 'Spectacular', then handed me two tickets for the front row. We were in business.

The set consisted of a large cube which took up most of the stage and rotated. The existence of the cube enabled projections onto the outside of it, of images, backgrounds and the like, but there were also sets set up within it, so the rotation could move you from one flat to another, from China to New York. When it rotated, people would walk past, or stand and be moved, all to create the setting of the next scene. The result was the most cinematic experience I have ever seen in a theatre, it enabled all those quick scene-setting images that films can use, to locate and contextualise the next scene of the play. It was used to great effect.

 

The play followed the journey of Joe the American photojournalist who had taken a photograph of a man standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square in China in 1989. Joe returns to China many years later and learns that the 'tank man' is still alive, it then becomes his mission to find him.

This mission overtakes Joe's life, to the point where all of the other surrounding characters who had been helping him in some way, seem (to him) to become obstacles to his goal. His boss Frank (Trevor Cooper), his friend and colleague Mel (Sean Gilder) and his love interest Tessa (Claudie Blakley) but most upsettingly his friend Zhang Lin (Benedict Wong). One by one, he alienates himself from them, all in pursuit of his goal.

This play addresses many issues and does so with witty dialogue, clever direction and superb acting.

One of my favourite scenes is Act Three, Scene Two, where Joe meets in Washington Square Gardens with his boss and colleague while they discuss the fact that Frank wants Joe to drop the story. The order has come from above in relation to strategic planning for the company that owns the paper, wanting to open up into the Chinese market. Frank is carrying out the orders, afraid for his job when he has a son with leukaemia and mounting hospital bills. There are so many important issues raised in this scene, about censorship, free press, bias of the media and reporting matters of public interest, versus the individual's need for a job, a wage, their personal circumstances massively affecting how they may react and behave to the bigger issues.

There are also some very well depicted relationships within the story. The heart wrenching one is that of Zhang Lin and Liuli. To describe this in detail would ruin the story for anyone who has not yet scene it, suffice to say that their performance, their story, even the hallucinations, are all performed to perfection to provide the most subtly beautiful love story that I would consider to be the heart of the play. 

For me there were just a couple of loose ends tied up at the end that I did not think really worked. Again, not wanting to give any spoilers, but the condition that Tess is in in the last scene that her and Joe meet, seemed a little contrived, obvious, unnecessary really, I think their relationship was worth more than that. She had felt that she couldn't be with him while he cared more about the bigger issues and not enough about her. This is something that they never really dealt with and perhaps would have been too big to deal with in the end of the play, but I feel that the resolution here was not the right one and would have rather this was left more open-ended perhaps.

I feel similar about the 'twist', as it were, with the tank man's identity. I feel that the earlier revelation about Pengsi and his brother, that should have been the real twist, the real ending to that part of the story – who was the real hero? I prefer that as a final thought, to the thought that you might be searching for something that was under your nose all along.

However my mentioning of these two little things by no means tainted the production for me. I felt that the play, in its entirety, was simply incredible. Having been to playwriting workshops over the last couple of years, I find it very hard to watch a play and not dissect the writing and structure completely. In this play, the direction and acting was to such a high standard that I was immersed in the world from the second it started until long after the play ended. I have been dipping in and out of the script ever since, reminding myself of scenes, re-hashing what happened in my mind. This was an incredible production and I would certainly recommend it to anyone who wants to see good professional theatre and new writing at its best, I will certainly be on the lookout for more writing from Lucy Kirkwood in the future.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
 

Chimerica runs at the Harold Pinter, London, until the 19^th October 2013.