All love and war are unscrupulous – or so Google translate tells me. Chinglish, David Henry Hwang’s hilarious modern comedy about mistranslations, misunderstandings and misadventures – in love and business, English and Chinese – arrives deftly and definitively at the Park Theatre for its European premiere.
Daniel Cavanaugh is your post-08 financial crash Willie Loman. One of the small-fish salesmen behind Enron, he’s recently taken over the more modest but similarly crumbling family business, Ohio Signage. He reckons if he can break into the Chinese market he and his family will be, as Linda sobs in Death of a Salesman, “free and clear”.
He enlists the help of foppish ‘consultant’ Peter to help him understand Chinese customs and more importantly “guanxi”, the central concept of relationship dynamics. However, as they say, the course of international signage sales never did run smooth, and Daniel is faced with corruption, deception and rejection as he falls for the woman he can never have and ultimately secures the deal he might not be able to fulfil.
Hwang is an exceptional writer, perhaps best known for his play M. Butterfly and his work on Broadway musicals Aida (with Elton John and Tim Rice) and Disney’s Tarzan. Among his many accolades are three OBIEs, two Pulitzer Prize nominations and one Tony, as well as being America’s most-produced living opera librettist.
Hwang’s work however, often exploring Asian-American experiences and tensions, has never quite peaked in the same way in the United Kingdom, where audience and industry alike are instead piqued by the all-white casting of a play wrongly thought to be set in ancient China.
Hwang’s writing is funny and accessible, despite spanning two completely different languages, and the full two hours skips along at a native pace.
Characters are broadly cut but what an audience loses in emotional attachment it gains in object philosophising: Hwang allows us into a muddy world where, with someone else making the mistakes, we can happily learn, laugh, and look for commonalities.
Director Andrew Keates makes his debut at the Park, filling the intimate main space with magnetic performances, attention to detail, and, above all, a lightness rare to work of social critique.
To cast the play Keates and company undertook an exhaustive four-month process and, to quote Xi, its findings “open like an oyster”: broad yet delicate, the cast create lives we can both relate to and call into question.
Candy Ma is superb as Xi Yan, a young wife trapped both by her marriage and by her ideals. Her monologues are utterly engrossing, almost too so to read the surtitling, and Lobo Chan brings supreme dignity to the otherwise staunch (or sozzled) Cia Guoliang.
Gyuri Sarossy is a convincing American Dreamer with Duncan Harte (Peter) a very competent, but less compelling, counterpart. Sui-see Hung, Windson Liong and Minhee Yeo provide smatterings of well-observed comedic relief.
Tim McQuillen-Wright’s set is outstanding. Creative, versatile and beautiful, it is perhaps the most impressive part of this already strong production. It is beautifully (and sequentially) lit by Christopher Nairne’s designs and James Nicholson punctuates proceedings with snippets of pop rock in both languages.
With a set as versatile as its cast, plenty of laughs and even more to chew over in the welcoming Park Theatre bar afterwards, Chinglish is the perfect low-key high-brow piece for these lengthening Spring evenings.