With a wide historical backdrop that extends from 1935 to the 90s, Katie Postner’s production takes political activism, art power, personal prayer and sexism in the middle of the revolution.
But although Jean Chan’s fluid set of mobile screens and the vivid back projections helps to balance decades of seismic events with the human history of Madame Mao and the director of theater Sun Weishi, we must not escape the fact that the fact.
Ibssen’s heroine, Nora, and the door, are used through a touch stone for female emancipation versus sexist customs, so it is ironic that it is Lan Ping who becomes completely trapped and silenced that marries with Mao, and ends.
Meanwhile, it is only the protection of his powerful adoptive father, the number two of Mao, Zhou Enlai, which allows Weishi to become the first director of Modern Drama of China, even if he cannot protect her from sexual violence or Vexefefle of Madame Mao.
In the two children of NG, the two women swore for the first time loyalty before politics and individual elections, apart from the subject.
But too often, the duo is debating political ideas in the midst of historical changes of civil war, occupation, famine and revolution at the expense of evoking a credible and intimate female friendship.
It ends with images of real life figures that has an emotional burden that lacks previous exchanges, but it is still more welcome about people behind this terrible period in Chinese history.
Shanghai Dolls extends at Kiln Theater Kilburn until May 10.
