Shanghai Dolls, Kiln Theatre review - fascinating slice of history inadequately told

The writer Amy Ng has made a sterling effort in digging up the true story behind her new play at the Kiln, Shanghai Dolls, but sadly has not yet found the best way to project this interesting material. 

The Dolls are two women who meet in Shanghai in 1935. China is riven by a civil war, the Japanese are encroaching on its territory and the Communist leader who will become one of the 20th century’s most iconic faces, Chairman Mao, is undertaking the Long March to save the Red Army from Nationalist forces. Newspaper headlines trumpet this, projected on the back wall. Meanwhile two women meet in a building used by the League of Left-Wing Dramatists, one to audition, the other to hide in its attic “safe house”. 

The older one is Lan Ping, later known as Jiang Qing, who would become notorious as Madame Mao, the Chairman’s fourth wife and the Stalinist motor of the Cultural Revolution. Qing is a pragmatic survivor, a Communist who thinks the phrase “obedient revolutionary” is an oxymoron. The other is Li Lin, real name Sun Weishi, the adopted daughter of Mao’s deputy, Zhou Enlai; he looks out for her after her father is shot by the Nationalists. She is "Communist royalty” and will become the first female theatre director in China. 

It sounds like the terrain the playwright Terry Johnson used to expand into dramas, uniting famous people in fictitious encounters and pitting them against each other. Except these two women really did meet in 1930s Shanghai and would go on to shape the China that emerged from the civil war, their lives interweaving while their political stances radically diverged.

Ng burrowed away into the two women’s backstories, a murky area where much has been destroyed (some of it by Qing) and other people’s memoirs would turn out to be a prime source of information. She found a gift of a story with its own built-in metaphor. 

Jiang Qing is well known for having started out as a stage star, one of her most lauded roles having been Nora in A Doll’s House, the woman who turned her back on the straitjacket of respectable middle-class life and asserted her right to freedom. Qing would have three husbands and multiple affairs. How, Ng wondered, had the actress who identified so passionately with this heroine been transformed into the vicious ideologue of the 1960s? Jiang Qing would destroy the freedom of millions, and eventually be imprisoned for life herself, assigned to a prison workshop — making dolls.

Li Lin, meanwhile, found a degree of fame playing Joan of Arc, her life a tragic case of being on the wrong side of history. After marrying the leading actor Jin Shan, she set up theatre groups among the workers, like a good revolutionary, but fell foul of Qing’s desire for “red, bright and shining” dramas. Ng’s account also suggests Qing was angry with Sun Weishi for refusing to collaborate with her. She had Sun Weishi horribly tortured to death in 1968. 

Packed into a scant 70 minutes, this complex, epic tale of giant forces at work needs much more powerful resources to make an impact. Ng has opted for showing just the two women, using the staging to do a lot of the spadework in the form of projected videos (Akhila Krishnan) and clever sound design (Nicola T Chang) to indicate the social upheaval in the outside world. She also needs a more elevated kind of language for the exchanges between the women, which too often sound like a backstage spat between warring thesps. Doll’s House metaphors pop up throughout, as a way of tieing all the strands together, but it’s a dense subject requiring much more granular scrutiny if we are to understand these characters, let alone engage with them.

It’s not helped that Gabby Wong seems uncomfortable in the role of Jiang Qing, hurriedly reciting her dialogue rather than embodying the character. Millicent Wong fares better as Sun Weishi, a convincing frightened teen in the first scene (Li Lin was 14 at that time) who matures into a professionally revered, faithful Party member. Their encounters, especially in the later stages, should be as dramatic and potent as Schiller’s Elizabeth I sparring with Mary Queen of Scots, a clash of major world views as well as temperaments. But the two women aren’t given that kind of dimension.

The staging is first-rate. Mobile sets of doors are neatly reconfigured into walls and barriers by the actors, while the projections on the backdrop, indicating the year and its dramatic headlines, give each scene an authentic context. In particular, the use of archive footage is thrilling: we hear the real Mao’s voice recorded as he announces the creation of the People’s Republic of China, and see the court proceedings that condemned Jiang Qing to death, then are shown the woman herself spitting venom at her accusers. Chang’s music, mixing Western and traditional Chinese instruments, is nicely evocative as well. But these strengths can’t mitigate the disappointing thinness of the central drama.

• Shanghai Dolls at the Kiln until 10 May 
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk