[author-post-rating] (4/5 Stars)
There is something clean-cut about Rachel Kauder Nalebuff’s complex play about culture shock and national stereotyping. Everything is polished and concise. The four-piece cast are dressed in uniform, purple-patterned suits. Scene changes are fluid, and there are never more than three cast-members on stage at any time, with dormant actors waiting in the wings to bring in a restaurant table upon their entrance, or gather up debris from a torn passport. Even so, as I watched this show, a question kept niggling me, one which I carried into the question-and-answer session with the playwright and cast afterwards: “Why Mao?”
It had, at first, seemed to me slightly odd that a semi-autobiographical tale of an American diplomat living in contemporary China had invoked the ghost of Chairman Mao. I began to speculate as to whether it would seem tasteless or lazy for hypothetical plays called Berlin Cake or Moscow Cake to feature Hitler or Stalin as a main character. I did not understand why such an association was being made.
I realise now exactly why: because it was so obvious. Try picturing Tiananmen Square without the gigantic portrait hanging from it; it is still ill-advised to ridicule an image of Mao. Stalin’s regime collapsed, Hitler’s was removed, but Mao Zedong’s spectre still haunts contemporary China, hence why he haunts the characters of Beijing Cake.
Intermittently throughout the play, Mao’s ghost appears to the main character, Lori, whether reciting old rubrics like “Let a hundred flowers bloom!” (the poetic-yet-sinister slogan which launched the murderous Hundred Flowers Campaign) or considerately reminding her to floss more regularly. He also acquaints himself with her son, whom he tries to coerce to leave the country by any means necessary. Rachel likens this to Mao’s efforts to “expel Western influence from China”. What funnier way to illustrate this than have Mao taking photographs of Lori’s son for his profile on a mail-order-bride website, in the hope that an American man might buy him?
Much humour derives from such absurdity. Lori’s son is an especially tragi-comic character. He is called “Li” by Lori in a vain attempt to raise him Chinese, but “Peters” as far as the passport agency is concerned. He thus grows up without a nationality, not even knowing how to pronounce “hamburgers”, basing his preconceptions of America on TV shows and, weirdly, practising his courting technique on his mother, with whom he pretty much lives in isolation.
To address a contentious issue, Chinese characters speak in a non-language – which is still perhaps more appropriate than the crass imitations reverted to elsewhere. Nonetheless, the speech offended some audience members, who expressed this afterwards. I personally appreciated the attempt to simulate living in a country but not feeling part of it. Lori is, after all, the main character and focal point.
Further, Lori herself is caricatured as an American national stereotype. The play opens with her being loud and innocently patronising towards her Chinese interpreter and thoughtlessly celebrates the “complimentary iPods” she receives from locals, as one might (might) expect an American tourist to (in the USA, where only 39% of the population have passports, insularity may well encourage some nationals to look down on other, “quainter” cultures). Everything is deliberately exaggerated in order to satirise stereotyping, not to perpetuate it for cheap, laughs.
The eponymous dessert served in the American-style, Beijing restaurant of the first scene can never suit both Chinese and the American tastes, just as there are too many cultural relatives to establish a universally-polite way of saying “fat”.
Beijing Cake is at theSpace on the Mile until 25 August. For more information and tickets visit the Edinburgh Fringe website.