Representation and Visibility in Miss Saigon and the Orphan of Zhao

Here is a story for me: representation and visibility in Miss Saigon and The Orphan of Zhao Abstract This article places The Orphan of Zhao casting controversy into dialogue with another problematic theatrical representation of East Asians, Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil, and Richard Maltby Jr’s musical Miss Saigon. Drawing on his personal experiences of playing the role of Thuy in Miss Saigon in 2005, Chow suggests that the problematic hyper-visibility of East Asian performers in a number of stereotypical roles in Miss Saigon may actually lead to moments in which the labour the East Asian actor might be perceived in excess of the character. Therefore, while Miss Saigon’s narrative constructs an orientalist vision of the East, its embodiment in the theatre creates moments of possible resistance. Understanding the relation of actor to role in this way, the RSC’s casting of The Orphan of Zhao can be seen as exclusionary, as its particular distribution of roles polices East Asian embodiment, presence and speech. Chow suggests that rather than being problematic for the use of ‘yellow-face’, the RSC’s casting of non-East Asian actors in East Asian roles was troubling for a different reason: it silenced its East Asian actors and hid them in plain sight, therefore replicating the way East Asian subjects are hidden and silenced within contemporary British discourse. Introduction In October 2012, the RSC mounted its first ever play of Chinese origin, The Orphan of Zhao. Director Gregory Doran’s decision to cast only three actors of East 1 Asian descent in the new adaptation by writer James Fenton, in the roles of servants, guards, and the Demon Mastiff (or, as I called it at the time, ‘two dogs and a maid’)1 provoked me to write a personal reflection on the controversy, which I posted to my blog.2 At the height of what came to be known as ‘Zhao-Gate’, it was passed around various social networks, and was eventually posted by Filipina actress Lea Salonga on her Twitter account. As I write this in 2014, the subsequent year and a half has seen the formation of the advocacy group British East Asian Artists (of which I am a part), and the ground breaking Opening the Door: East Asian in British Theatre event for East Asian actors at the Young Vic on 11 February 2013, organized by members of BEAA and Equity. It has also seen a large number of plays about China, including #aiww: The Arrest of Ai Wei Wei at the Hampstead Theatre, the National Theatre’s The World of Extreme Happiness, and Lucy Kirkwood’s Chimerica. As for myself, a former actor turned theatre academic and performance maker, this year of ‘visibility’ of East Asian bodies, voices, and subjectivities on Britain’s stages has been an opportunity to reflect on how much things have progressed for the representation of East Asians onstage (and in television and film), and how far we still have to go. This article revisits and builds upon my blog post of 2012. I put my reading of the Zhao controversy into dialogue with my experiences playing the role of Thuy in Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil, and Richard Maltby Jr’s Miss Saigon at the Arts Club Theatre Company in Vancouver, Canada, in the summer of 2005. Contrasting the productions of these two texts – one, a ‘Western’ representation of the East, the other, a classic of Chinese literature – I argue, shifts our focus to the way the material conditions of the theatre makes certain persons visible and audible, or rather, 1 In actual fact, it was two-thirds of a dog, and a maid. 2 Broderick Chow, ‘Two Dogs and A Maid: Theatricality, Visibility and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Orphan of Zhao’, BroderickChow.com <http://dangerology.wordpress.com/2012/10/19/two-dogs-and-a-maid-theatricality-visibility-and-the- royal-shakespeare-companys-the-orphan-of-zhao/> [accessed 25 June 2014]. 2 able to be seen, and heard. This is a very different site of analysis from what often seem like more pressing questions about the politics of East Asian acting, such as representations, stereotyping, or which East Asian story ‘should’ be told. In effect, I establish a dialectic between the representation of the East Asian actor and his/her presence. The East Asian body made visible and audible by the theatre, defiantly asserts its unruly presence (which is always in excess of the role played) in the presence of the audience, providing opportunities for the subversion and undoing of stereotypes by both actor and spectator. While many during Zhao-Gate critiqued the RSC’s use of ‘yellow-face’, we are not on the territory of the clownish grotesquerie of, say, Mr Yunioshi or Fu Manchu.3 For me, the RSC’s casting of non-East Asian actors in East Asian roles was even more troubling for a different reason: it silenced its East Asian actors and hid them in plain sight. In this way, it replicates the way East Asian subjects are hidden and silenced within contemporary British society in general.4 This dialectic of presence/representation also challenges the way we understand stereotypical representations, such as Miss Saigon. The show has rightly been critiqued for its problematic representations of race, particularly in connection to gender. Without challenging these criticisms, I want to offer a counterpoint to them, an unapologetically personal reflection on the pleasures of being able to appear, to simply be, which is potentially subversive since theatrical being is always being-in- excess. This is a more nuanced way of understanding theatre’s function, because 3 Mr Yunioshi is a Japanese character in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, subsequently portrayed by Mickey Rooney in Blake Edwards’ film of the same name; Fu Manchu is author Sax Rohmer’s iconic Chinese villain, portrayed by, among other actors, Christopher Lee and Peter Sellars in film adaptations of Rohmer’s novels. 4 In addition to the underrepresentation of British East Asians on screen and onstage, hiding and silencing also touches on other contemporary East Asian experiences in the UK. Consider, for example, the hiding of East Asian migrant labour – for example, Filipino domestic workers, or Chinese labourers and sex workers. See, for instance, Hsiao-Hung Pai, Chinese Whispers: The True Story Behind Britain’s Hidden Army of Labour (London: Penguin Books, 2008). 3 representations, even ‘realistic’ ones, are always accompanied by and potentially undone by the performative force of presence. Presence is potentially subversive, I show, when there is pleasure in it. I draw heavily here on Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns’ study of Filipino/a performance, and her concept of puro arte, developed from the Tagalog phrase ‘puro arte lang iyan’, or ‘She’s just putting on a show’ (or, in my translation, the non-gender specific ‘That’s all show!’)5 In Tagalog, the phrase is used to draw attention to self-conscious histrionics; to attention seeking and showing off. For San Pablo Burns, however, puro arte expresses a ‘dual structure’, simultaneously recognising (as it puts it down), ‘the theatrics at play […] the labour of artful expression, of the creative efforts required to make something out of nothing.’6 Puro arte is deployed by Filipino/as ‘[…] to exceed their erasure as subjects.’7 I adapt the concept here to encompass a labour of theatricality that exceeds the erasure of East Asian subjects as the ‘model minority’ while maintaining the term’s Filipino/Spanish origins. I draw on puro arte for personal reasons as well. I am half Filipino. My mother is a Chinese-Filipina from Makati, Manila, and my father a Xiamen-born Chinese raised in Hong Kong. Both have lived most of their lives in Vancouver, Canada, where I was born and raised. Growing up, I often was encouraged to put on a show: at Christmas I’d often hear ‘Play piano for Auntie’ or ‘Sing for Auntie.’ However, like many Asian families, mine was apprehensive when I declared that putting on a show was what I wanted to do for a job. ‘You have a yellow face’, my father declared bluntly. ‘Don’t forget.’ He meant well, of course. One rarely ever saw 5 Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2013), p. 1. 6 Ibid, p. 2. 7 Ibid.. She draws here on the playwright Glecy Atienza’s statement, that ‘Kaya pala mukhang maarte ay dahil may mga di masabi’ (ibid). [She is overacting precisely because there are things she cannot say]. 4 Asian faces in Vancouver theatres or film and television. The announcement of Miss Saigon at the Arts Club – Vancouver’s largest and highest-profile professional theatre company – seemed to validate my choice of career. Certainly the community of Asian Canadian actors of which I was a part couldn’t believe its luck. ‘Finally’, we thought, ‘Here is a show for us. Here is a show about Asia. Here is visibility.’ It wasn’t that I was ignorant of the history of criticism of the musical. But the opportunity to deploy my puro arte exceeded the problematic representations of Miss Saigon. In the first section of this paper I intersperse a critical reading of Miss Saigon’s orientalist construction of the East as available/dominated Other with a thick-descriptive, phenomenological analysis of performing in the Vancouver production. In the second I switch analytic modes to consider Doran and Fenton’s The Orphan of Zhao and the way its casting and script organizes an aesthetic presentation that silences its East Asian performers.

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