
Lucy Kirkwood's new play at the Almeida is hugely ambitious and well worth seeing. It's had excellent reviews. But for many reasons both the play and the production left me feeling irritated; it seems a harsh thing to write, but some different artistic choices could have made it much better.
It's inspired by an image -- the famous news photograph of a lone man standing in front of a tank in the centre of Beijing during the Tienanmen massacre in 1989. The author has invented a fictional photographer, Joe Schofield, who tries to track down the man in the picture in 2012, against a backdrop of massive change in China and in the Sino-American relationship. There are a lot of short scenes, especially in the first half, and the play has a cinematic feel to it. The set by Es Devlin is a revolving cube, on to which are projected a series of black and white images, crudely marked in red with a photo editor's crop marks. Boy, does it revolve, accompanied each time by deafening rock music. For most of the play, the actors are performing inside a smaller cubed space set into this revolving box, which gives them very little space to do anything. Occasionally they emerge downstage in front of the big cube, in a series of two-handed scenes which become rather repetitive.
The action takes place partly in Beijing and partly in New York, as Schofield and a journalist colleague from his unnamed newspaper pursue their quest for the elusive Chinese man. Most of the action takes place in 2012, with the U.S. presidential campaign in the background, but there are flashbacks to the streets of Beijing in 1989. Middle-aged translator Zhang Lin is pursued by memories of his dead wife, who died in the crackdown by the army. Zhang's vague memory of the 'Tank man' going to the United States, recounted to his old friend Schofield, is the trigger for the photographer's obsessive hunt, which ends up causing a lot of collateral damage.
Lucy Kirkwood's dialogue crackles, the American idiom sounds authentic (at least to a Brit like me), and the performances are excellent, particularly Benedict Wong as the anguished Zhang Lin. Claudie Blakley is pitch perfect as Tessa, Schofield's British girlfriend, a market researcher he first meets on a flight to Beijing. I also liked Trevor Cooper as Frank, the hard-boiled news editor, and Sean Gilder as the equally hard-boiled reporter.
In the 1980s and 1990s I spent a lot of time working with Reuters international news photographers. They were the best in the business, and I learned a lot from watching how they operated. News photograhers are often obsessive, eccentric, street-wise rule-breakers, not very good with words, but with razor-sharp visual reactions. Their equipment -- in the late 1980s it was generally a Nikon F3 like the one pictured above, heavy as a metal brick but indestructible -- was an extension of their bodies. I watched the almost masturbatory way in which, like soldiers with their rifles, they polished their lenses and filters and blew the dust off the gear in their achingly heavy shoulder bags. Stephen Campbell Moore, playing Schofield, gets the neurotic compulsive personality just right but as soon as he picks up a camera, his body language, like the equipment he's been given, is all wrong. He comes across like a Sunday afternoon amateur, taking pictures on a day out. It's a pity that in this production, which has in other ways been exhaustively researched, the technical photographic elements don't work. Instead of a Nikon, Schofield seems to have gone to Beijing in 1989 with an SLR that doesn't even have a motor drive or a long lens. In the crucial opening scene, he's on the phone to New York, describing what he's seeing outside his hotel window -- a man standing up to a tank. Any real photographer, rather than giving a description to his editor, would have dropped the phone instantly and started snapping. In the scenes set in 2012, Schofield seems to have missed out completely on the digital revolution which overtook news photography in the 1990s. While his strangely computerless editor is still looking at sheets of contact prints, the photographer is still using his bathroom to develop film and his bedroom to hang up his prints to dry out after being fixed. In one of the final scenes, Schofield meets Tessa for the last time, camera around his neck on the streets of New York. This time it's a digital camera, but one without interchangeable lenses which no professional would ever dream of using.
Why does all this matter? One might argue (and I often do) that theatre shouldn't aspire to photographic realism, and the lack of a motor drive doesn't really spoil the play. Perhaps. But this play relies on hyper-realistic details and images in its cinematic design, with each piece of the jigsaw looking just right. I couldn't really believe in the photography theme of the play, or in the central character as a professional photographer. Schofield's search for the Tank Man is not aimed at discovering a hidden truth or righting an injustice -- the traditional dramatic goal of a quest -- but merely at getting a good story. So when his editor orders him to drop the investigation, with the traditional phrase 'Consider yourself spiked', it's hard to feel much sympathy.
Lucy Kirkwood's play hops beween too many characters, losing its focus on the central relationship between Schofield and Zhang Lin in Beijing. Tessa has no dramatic function in the central story, and appears to have been added just to provide a love interest and a sounding board for the photographer. When she addresses a marketing seminar on why the idea of the rapid 'westernisation' of China is a misunderstanding, it's information, not drama. The style of Lyndsey Turner's production, as is to be expected from the Headlong company, is fast, frenetic and noisy, but I feel the over-use of the revolve and the over-emphatic set design make the writing seem fragmented. Almost every scene seems to be over before it has really got going. In many respects I was reminded of Lucy Prebble's Enron, directed by Headlong guru Rupert Goold, but the result is less satisfactory, partly because the set doesn't allow the actors enough space.
I would love to see this play with an American audience, who might view it differently. Enron, so deservedly popular here. bombed on Broadway. Despite Chimerica's undoubted merits, I left the theatre with the feeling that this play may have been over-developed, rather like a pre-digital roll of 35 mm film. If you spend six years on a play, an initially simple concept can become too complicated. Sometimes less can be more, and this evening in the theatre lasts about half an hour too long, at three hours. Howard Brenton's recent Beijing-themed play at Hampstead Theatre about the arrest of artist Ai Weiwei, which is more tightly focused, is a good example of how to keep it tight by subtracting what's not essential. So is The Effect, Lucy Prebble's latest play.
I can however make one confident prediction about Chimerica. With its uncompromising depiction of modern China's efforts to wipe out all memory of the 1989 protest movement, it is unlikely to be playing in the Beijing equivalent of Shaftesbury Avenue any time soon.