Broken feet and small revolutionary steps
China Doll affirms women’s awakening with sympathetic performance at centre
In a deeply misogynist society, circumstances force a young woman to marry an already married man she doesn’t love. “This is not a life,” she concludes, and flees to freedom as the ghost of a mother who couldn’t have that freedom stalks the stage.
The basic plot of China Doll is similarly the plot of A Thousand Splendid Suns, at the Stanley earlier this month. Written before Khaled Hosseini’s novel about Afghanistan, Marjorie Chan’s play set in early 20th century Shanghai is getting its Western Canadian première at Richmond’s Gateway Theatre in English with Chinese surtitles.
Theatrically smaller-scale, China Doll powerfully reaffirms the theme of women’s awakening and emancipation with a highly sympathetic performance at its centre. Chan directs her own script, proving responsible for some of the production’s highlights and its primary problem.
The play opens with its central
metaphor: the painful binding of a five-year-old girl’s feet.
Poa-Poa (Manami Hara) promises granddaughter Su-Ling (Jennifer Tong) that her tiny feet will be her fortune, the marital bait that will lift the two of them out of poverty: “How could any man resist?”
When Su-Ling hits puberty, Poa-Poa frantically tries to find a match for her. Meanwhile, the girl befriends Merchant Li (Jovanni Sy), who has been influenced by the republican ideals of the 1911 Chinese revolution.
Unbeknownst to illiterate, ultratraditional Poa-Poa, he teaches Su-Ling to read and write, and even shares some feminist literature.
Despite the fact that PoaPoa’s own mother was forced to become a second wife and flee from her concubinage, Poa-Poa eventually arranges for Su-Ling to be second wife of second son Chen.
Though neither we nor Su-Ling ever meet Chen, servant Ming (Donna Soares) makes clear he’s a monster. And after Merchant Li gives Su-Ling Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House to read, Su-Ling follows the lead of Ibsen’s Nora, leaving behind her Ma-Ma’s sorrowful ghost (Soares again) and a devastated Poa-Poa.
Tong ’s Su-Ling is a delight, filled with the contradictory impulses of a kid: feisty and snotty, intellectually curious and adorably coy, at one moment wanting to play with Ming, the next ordering her around. Soares is very good as the servant whose place in the pecking order is even lower than Su-Ling’s. And Sy does fine work as the merchant bent by the paradoxes of his culture, a republican with a fetish for Su-Ling’s tiny, broken feet.
Hara has the most difficult job because Chan has written Poa-Poa one-dimensionally. Narrow-minded, snobbish and heartlessly pragmatic in her laser focus on getting Su-Ling married, she generates little sympathy despite occupying as much stage time as Su-Ling.
Director Chan stages some glorious moments, especially a choral segment where Su-Ling, Li and Poa-Poa sew Su-Ling’s lotus shoes against the backdrop of Heipo Leung ’s monumental set bathed in CHIMERIK’s gorgeous projections.
But she also lets Poa-Poa’s slow, methodical pace dominate the show so that it never quite takes off.
Foot-binding, though anachronistic, is symptomatic of forces that continue to stymie women in many parts of the world, and Su-Ling’s resistance is stirring. As Merchant Li tells her, “The smallest revolution is still a step forward.”