As we sit in the Camden People’s Theatre, a performance of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly is taking place at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, at least for the purposes this play.
Relaxed, engaging and humorous
We are watching So That You May Go Beyond The Sea. Sitting on opposite sides of the auditorium are Joey Jepps and Gabriele Uboldi. They are the cast of two and the joint playwrights, who are also real-life partners Joey and Gabs who met by arrangement on Primrose Hill and are now engaged. From their sedentary position they begin to explain that 2256 people are about to leave the Opera House and file onto the tube. One of them shouts an oriental, racist abuse at Joey, who is Anglo-Japanese and was born in Hong Kong. That person had been watching an Italian Opera, featuring white performers playing Asian roles with make-up designed to make them look generically oriental. By chance, Gabriele is a white Italian.
This show is a direct response to such productions of Madama Butterfly and is a true story. It began twenty-five years ago when a Japanese stewardess and a British pilot walked onto a plane. They fall in love and Joey and are still together. There is none of the tragedy here that comes to dominate Madama Butterfly, just a simple parallel between Cio Cio San, and Lieutenant Pinkerton.
As Joey delves into his past we hear recordings of conversations he had with his mother about her romance and issues of Asian misrepresentation, orientalism and exoticisation. This raises questions about the nature of his relationship with Gabs. Do the same concerns underpin and indeed could they undermine their relationship? A complex series of scenes emerge in which this and much more is explored in a conversational manner that tells of the making of this play, their original intentions and the revisions that took place en route to the finished product.
This cleverly devised metatheatrical work is rich in audio recordings, video clips, photographs, and a set-designer scale model of a grand stage with toy figures representing all the characters mentioned so far. Both performances are relaxed, engaging and humorous. The casual tone of a chat show pervades but it’s interspersed with character performances and backed up by a team of imaginative creatives: Set & Lighting Designer Cheng Keng; Sound Designer Rudy Percival; Video Designer Douglas Baker; Dramaturg Max Percy and Stage Manager Vivi Wei.
There are also some serious points in this light-hearted, engaging drama. Not least that to be a spectator is to be complicit; if we simply go along with what confronts us then we are consenting to it. It’s incumbent on everyone to challenge the person who utters racist abuse.
