Jean Chan’s set for historian Amy Ng’s compact 90-minute play presents three moveable boat trucks carrying rows of almost identical doors, but it isn’t going to be a door-slamming farce. The dark shadows and the mist that shrouds their grim, green ranks rightly seem ominous.
This is the story of Lan Ping (later known as Jiang Qing) and Li Lin (later called Weishi). If those names mean nothing to you, how about Madame Mao? That is how most of the world would know Lan / Jiang, while Li—who became China’s first female theatre director, was the orphan daughter of a political martyr and was adopted by future premier Zhou Enlai—became one of her victims.
Building on both known fact and surmise, Ng makes them close friends who first meet in 1935 at the Shanghai theatre where the League of Left-Wing Dramatists seems to have provided a Communist safe house. Lan is there to audition for Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Li has been sent there by Zhou Enlai. In a sequence of scenes that range across more than three decades, we see Lan change from a young actress fired up by the same thirst for freedom as Ibsen’s Nora into the ruthless leader of the Cultural Revolution, while Li remains true to her principles.
Why? Historical evidence is scant, most is destroyed or locked away. Shanghai Dolls questions rather than answers. You can’t really pack so much history into imagined meetings between two people, and exposition takes up much of them, so it is left to Gabby Wong as Lan / Jiang and Millicent Wong as Li / Sun to endow these women with personality.
There is little that actually happens, so Katie Posner’s production delivers dramatic effect mainly through Nicola T Chang’s sound design, Aideen Malone’s lighting and Akhila Krishnan’s explosive video and newsflashes until the intense live drama of Sun’s vicious torture is enacted.