untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play – Young Vic Theatre

Picture: The Other Richard

untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play continues at the Young Vic Theatre, London until 4 November 2023.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩ 

Stereotypes are made, not born. Reinforced through repetition, an ingrained stereotype replaces the truth with what, instead, becomes an imagined truth – far more damaging for all concerned.

Directed by Roy Alexander Weise, Kimber Lee’s play, first produced as part of the Manchester International Festival and now transferred to the Young Vic, looks at one trope in particular: white American soldiers who have children with Asian women, then return a few years later to offer their children a “better” life in the US.

The examination of this particular trope focuses on three theatrical works: Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific and Boublil and Schönberg’s Miss Saigon, which adapted Puccini’s opera to a 1970s Vietnam setting. (The epigraph to the playtext of Lee’s work includes a quote from Miss Saigon producer Cameron Mackintosh, as he praises the “tragic love story in which a young woman sacrifices her life to ensure that her Amerasian son may find a better life in America.”)

In all cases, Rochelle Rose’s narrator reminds us of the framing of the story: the setting is somewhere in the Asia-Pacific region – Japan, the South Pacific, Vietnam, it all merges into one in Western eyes – where locals are presented as uncouth, dirty, unenlightened peasants, certainly compared to Tom Weston-Jones’ Clark, the US serviceman in each repetition.

Each time, Mei Mac’s Kim is enticed into a relationship with Clark (usually at the behest of a scheming parent or relative); each time, Clark returns years later with a new wife (Jennifer Kirby) in tow. And every time, the American couple depart with Kim’s child, leaving the forlorn mother to commit suicide over her grief.

The repetition requires the actors to reinforce those stereotypes – Mac the meek, giggling local girl, Weston-Jones the well-meaning and chiselled face of American colonialism – but Lee’s writing, and the production’s staging, allows us to laugh at their absurdity. Scene changes are accompanied by the cast performing modern pop songs performed in a pastiche of the music of the region: echoes of how many Western plays clumsily attempt to make these artefacts of a previous age feel more relevant, perhaps.

But while the music plays, the stage management team rearranges the moving stages between each version of the tale to form differing versions of Kim’s living quarters. The intent is clear: different hut, same oppression.

And then Lee brings the action up to 2023 New York, the action for the second half of the play split into two long scenes. Here, Kim is an Asian-American now married to Clark; but she has memories of the cycle we have witnessed in her character. Mac and Lourdes Faberes, here playing Kim’s mother, each have speeches that, in their own way, talk about how media and artistic interpretations of Asian women have played into expectations of how they should behave. Racism and patriarchy combine to expect them to be subservient, to defer to the men the same way Cio-Cio-San defers to Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly or Kim to Chris in Miss Saigon.

As Kim attempts to escape the theatrical hell, only to find that each road leads back to the role that someone else is writing for her, Lee’s metatextual writing style emphasises how hard it can be to break free of the stereotype. It is not just Kim who is trapped, though: Kirby, now a prospective sister-in-law to Kim, delivers a devastating critique of white feminism while attempting to empathise with Mac’s character.

There is optimism here, though, too. Kim never gives up believing she can break free of the cycle that decades, centuries, of stereotype have forced upon her. And as she tries, over and over again, we are reminded that we, as theatregoers and practitioners, have the power to break those cycles too. The problematic artworks which continue to perpetuate stereotypes only do so because we enable them. Maybe it’s time for us to lay them aside. Maybe it’s time for us to break away, too.

Scott Matthewman