MASTERFUL MYSTERY
Search for truth in Nine Dragons
In Nine Dragons, the search for a killer is complicated by conflict between a talented Chinese detective and his English supervisors.
The detective genre was the perfect vehicle for the themes he wanted to explore, says playwright Jovanni Sy.
“Along with a murder procedural, so much of the play is tied into the mystery of identity. In the case of my lead character, he’s a Chinese detective living in an English colonial construct. What a lot of people of colour face today is that mystery of being trapped between two cultures, that of your ancestors and the dominant culture. I wanted to tie the two together, where the protagonist is solving a crime and delving into the mystery of who he is.”
Set in 1924 in Kowloon, Hong Kong. A detective named Tommy Lam (John Ng, Kim’s Convenience) is searching for the identity of the killer dubbed the “Kowloon Ripper.” The leading suspect is Victor Fung (David Chen), the son of one of the wealthiest families in Asia. A cat-and-mouse game ensues between Lam and his nemesis.
Nine Dragons is a co-presentation between Calgary’s Vertigo Theatre and Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. In writing Nine Dragons, Sy had help from Vertigo artistic director Craig Hall, who directs the play.
“Mysteries are tricky to construct,” said Sy, who is also the artistic director of Gateway Theatre.
“The thing about a mystery that unfolds on a stage in real-time is that you’re often collecting information at the same time as the detective. You want to be careful when you’re writing a mystery about how information is discovered and withheld from the viewer and the detective. I was really lucky to work with Craig, who is so masterful at this form.”
In a review of the 2017 Calgary production of Nine Dragons, one reviewer noted that “Hall has developed a brisk, economic style of staging these gritty neo-noir crime stories that he ought to copyright.”
“Craig has a lot of strength moving things from locale to locale,” Sy said. “Detective stories require that, because you’re often in pursuit of leads and looking for clues in various places. The kind of mystery that I’ve written is much more that kind, following a detective on an investigation rather than an Agatha Christie locked-room mystery, where you’re in a cabin and nobody can get in or out and you’re trying to figure out it’s one of the 10 people in the room.”
The design team that helped the Arts Club bring Aaron Bushkowsky’s adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel Farewell, My Lovely to the stage in 2015 has also worked on creating Nine Dragons’ ambience and visual style. That team includes Scott Reid on set design and Jamie Nesbitt on video projections.
Sound designer and composer Andrew Blizzard contributes a score that Sy says “evokes the feeling of Hong Kong in the ’20s and creates the tension between the Western colonial influence.”
Nine Dragons is part of a Mystery Series from Calgary’s Vertigo. What Sy calls a “healthy subscriber base” for the series attests to the continued interest theatre-goers have in the genre, even if stage-set detective stories are relatively few and far between.
“They used to be really popular,” he said.
“For whatever reason, they seem to have fallen out of favour in the mainstream. But Vertigo is a perfect example that people love watching mysteries onstage.”
The reason that people love the genre, Sy believes, is that, like Tommy Lam in Nine Dragons, “the detective is someone who searches for truth.”