MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL COMEDY FESTIVAL
Hsiao-Ling Tang in Single Asian Female.Credit:Stephen Henry
SINGLE ASIAN FEMALE ★★★★
Arts Centre, until April 21
Single Asian Female isn’t “groundbreaking” Australian theatre, as some media reports have suggested, though it might have been in Brisbane where it premiered in 2017. The ground in question is diversity in Australian performance, and in Melbourne there has been a profound shift over the 21st century, as our stages have moved to reflect and celebrate what we see every day on the tram.
That process has been incremental (to those whose stories have been marginalised by the dominant culture, it can seem geologically slow) but it has also been going on for a long time. And we should be wary of overstating the importance of a single play in the grand scheme of things. Such a view plays down the contribution of other playwrights who focus on Asian-Australian stories – Chi Vu and Michele Lee leap to mind – and ignores broader shifts in theatrical culture such as colour-blind casting: a frequent and unremarkable phenomenon on Melbourne’s main stages over the past decade, though not yet as securely embedded as it is in Britain or the US.
If Michelle Law is ground-breaking, it’s by way of popularising a pre-existing trend in a charming and accessible way, harnessing the Law family gift for self-promotion to maximum effect.
Single Asian Female is likeable domestic comedy with a sitcom feel and structure. With its recognisable typologies, slightly over-emphatic treatment of themes (including racism, violence against women, intergenerational conflict in migrant families), and its episodic narrative, the play sometimes seems closer to binge-worthy telly than theatre.
Pearl (Hsiao-Ling Tang) runs a Chinese restaurant on the Sunshine Coast. She’s a tiger lady who has suffered great trauma and emerged resilient, with a great zest for life … and karaoke … and helicoptering over the lives of her two daughters Zoe (Jing-Xuan Chan) and Mei (Courtney Stewart). That drives them all mad, though the love is always fierce.
As Zoe and Mei face challenges and growing pains in their own lives, Pearl nurses a secret that threatens to tear the family apart.
Director Claire Christian gets terrific performances from the leads. Tang is a force of nature onstage, but all the characters are vividly sketched and immediately relatable, with enough nuance to feel drawn from life.
Indeed, the show rides high on the sturm und drang of mother-daughter relationships portrayed as complex and poignant, furious and funny, enlivened by fractious intimacy and supercharged with comic excruciation.
The lone male character, played by Patrick Jhanur, provides understated comedic support, and the awkward sex and courtship scenes opposite Chan ripple with hilarity.
If the melodrama drifts around a bit uncertainly in the first half, it flows better and wins every heart in the room in the second.
Michelle Law has some work to do if she wants to master theatrical craft, but her play showcases a natural talent for storytelling. Gender and ethnicity play out effortlessly through character, there’s plenty of comic vitamin and perky, overheard dialogue, and she speaks to a middle-class tribe in the same sort of way David Williamson once did.
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