FringeReview UK 2025
Joel Tan Scenes from a Repatriation
Royal Court Theatre
Genre: Drama, Historical, Immersive, LGBTQ+ Theatre, Mainstream Theatre, Multimedia, New Writing, Political, Theatre
Venue: Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Screams of people trapped in a fire end with lines projected on a screen like texts from 9/11. But this is 1860. And the British are doing the burning – and looting. A statue’s repatriation opens more than two kinds of imperialism, and brushes very different lives. Joel Tan Scenes from a Repatriation premieres in the Royal Court Upstairs directed by Emma + pj till May 24th.
A pocket epic play, huge in its reach, it’s clearly developed so the last scene isn’t as written, but now feels more ambiguous, more transcendent: as if the statue’s meaning, touched on throughout, can finally have its say.
Review
Screams of people trapped in a fire end with lines projected on a screen like texts from 9/11. But this is 1860. And the British are doing the burning – and looting. A statue’s repatriation opens more than two kinds of imperialism, and brushes very different lives. Joel Tan Scenes from a Repatriation premieres in the Royal Court Upstairs directed by Emma + pj till May 24th.
Tan’s known for crafting a gallimaufry of scenes, and here he reads history by lightning with six actors: widely varying characters, mostly contemporary, and bar a few swivels, mainly in chronological order. Here he tackles just one outfall of a British act we hear little of: but it came near the start of a century of humiliation China is now answering. Being Tan though, there’s venality and arrogance everywhere. British and Chinese officials variously oppress, harry and condescend to ordinary people: self-appointed witches, an academic and her disaffected pupil, cleaners, migrants, businessmen and proteges, partygoers, a Chinese dromedary lion nuzzling the front rows, and drag poets.
The British Museum famously thinks it knows better than people – be they Greek or Chinese – what’s best for their civilisation. The Elgin Marbles’ fight grinds like marble on marble till there’s nothing left. The Anglo-French burning of China’s Summer Palace in 1860 as an act of vicious imperialist spite (and as we discover here, murder) gets less coverage. The Palace hasn’t been rebuilt, but its scattered artefacts have made their way onto Radio 4 documentaries, as several items disappear from the West and turn up back in China. This time though as a Chinese official tells a BM official with stone-chiselled precision: “I think you misunderstand. This meeting is not a request. This is a courtesy call.”
Though an ensemble play, that Chinese official Kaja Chan impresses too as an interrogator on screen as she grills Hong Kong cartoonist Robin Khor Yong Kuan. It’s the longest scene, opening Act Two, and skews any one-sided debate about cultural appropriation, rights and artefacts. China might revere its past, but though Chan’s official cos-plays admiring the cartoonist, she wants to nail him: “Are you a homosexual” she asks with casual venom, then announces she’s arrested his boyfriend, as he sits on a chair, feet in the water. The final scene too highlights the million (of 11 million) Uighurs incarcerated, tortured, murdered. Chan is a young woman abducted as Khor Yong Kuan makes suicidal demands, in almost pitch black, stabbed by torches.
Fiona Hampton, first a Witch offering numinous western love, then a compromised British academic also in conflict with Sky Yang (a scene scintillating in banana-peels and liberal imperialist assumptions), finally adopts an Arkansas drawl as a despised western woman in a scene involving Jon Chew and Khor Yong Kuan. Yang also enjoys a monologue as a non-binary Poet
Chew’s two great moments come as a sardonic businessman who says, before delivering a crushing lesson to his young admirer Khor Yong Kuan: “They were strong once, which is how they took from us. And now that they’re on their way out? We take things from them… All of human history? It’s basically people taking things from each other. That’s a story worth paying for” “I should be writing this down” replies his admirer, with Tan’s wink firmly at the audience. Another scene unleashes a Scottish soldier from 1860 (twice seen performing a violent act) whose monologue ends as he too becomes a rigid pawn, a victim of his own atrocities.
As the Buddhist statue from c. 1200, originally from India, is repatriated to China from the British Museum, its appearance shifts: sometimes it’s not meant to be there at all. Strikingly it’s once boxed and hauled up and then brought back down. The moment when Chew as a frightened cleaner who’s paid to be effectively trafficked abroad by Aidan Cheng, bows before it, ripples with pathos and foreboding.
T K Hay’s set features a statue plinthed in an alcove at one end of the Upstairs in traverse. There’s a small rectangular pond below it in the second act, where some actors are uncomfortably placed. And for two scenes actors appear on a large screen interacting with someone on stage. Alex Fernandes’ lighting in particular sculpts and throws scenes with light: flames, raves, spotlit museum plinths, searchlights roving in pitch dark. Patch Middleton’s sound evoking all these scenes also scoops out an eerie envelope, and the fright of time.
A pocket epic play of two-and-a-half hours, huge in its reach, it’s clearly developed so the last scene isn’t as written, but now feels more ambiguous, more transcendent: as if the statue’s meaning, touched on throughout, can finally have its say.
Costume Supervisor Ellen Rey de Castro, Dialect & Language Jenru Wang, Assistant Designer Yijing Chen, Stage Manager Aime Neeme, DSM Daze Corder, Executive Producer Steven Atkinson, Production Manager Zara Drohan, Dramaturg Gillian Greer, Lead Producer Hannah Lyall, Company Manager Mica Taylor.
