24 – 26 March

This is a play which from the start had me puzzled. An ethnic Chinese cleaner (Angela Yeoh) and an Executive Officer – an ‘Indian Princess’ (Anya Jaya-Murphy) – face off over a pristine white office table about how the room should be cleaned. Both are Australian – we’re in Australia. The tableau collapses and both characters and the setting engage in a constant state of flux. Hyemi Shin’s anodyne white box of a set stands in well for a modern corporate office, yet offered the merest hint of change as the scene moved from Australia to India and back again without a by-your-leave.

Over in India the young EO, Nisha Gupta (Anya Jaya-Murphy) an Australian of Indian background fails to understand the cultural subtleties of her Indian hostess, an assistant to the minister (accurately played by Ms Yeoh) as she tries to secure a multi million dollar deal for her company to supply rice to the Indian Public Distribution System. She is continually thwarted in her attempt to meet the relevant minister. It’s a meeting she has tried to engineer against the wishes of her employers. Meanwhile, back in Australia the Chinese cleaner and small time entrepreneur, Yvette (Ms Yeoh) is failing to understand her activist daughter (Ms Jaya-Murphy) who has been arrested for assaulting the CEO of a company she was protesting against.

Significantly perhaps for Nisha, sex, which she seems to enjoy at the drop of a hat, is insignificant in being merely the matter of brief moments of physical pleasure devoid of any purposeful attachments. The most important thing in her life is her status within the company and which is undermined by her Indian debacle. She struggles for recognition of her worth. Is it her ethnicity or her sex that holds her back, or something else? And yet here we are in Australia where a cleaner can face off with someone higher up the corporate chain.

The key I realized, was that director, Matthew Xia, wanted us to fix our focus on the shifting dynamics and tensions of the characters, a small basketful of which, both male and female, were played by the two actresses. The penny dropped at the end when we were misleadingly teased by a comfortable resolution in which the Chinese cleaner and the thrusting young Executive Officer toddle off for a drink together, only to be told that that was not what happened and in fact the two left separately. The cultural and human threads that had been allowed to waft through the action were not so easily tied.

This play by Michele Lee does not admit of any easy reading,  yet the wit and cultural interplay leave the audience with something less tangible and yet more memorable than a point well made.

★★★☆☆  Graham Wyles  25th March

Photo credit:   Steve Tanner