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British-Chinese actors. The play opened at the Almeida
Theatre in May 2013 and transferred to the West End in
August 2013. The play's title echoes the portmanteau
word "Chimerica", invented by economists to define the
intertwined economies of the US and China.
Inspired by one of the 20th century’s most powerful
images,
Chimerica
tracks two decades of complex US-
China relations alongside the
personal stories that exist
beyond the margins of history. At once intimate and
geopolitical, it is a gripping thriller, a touching romance,
a cracking comedy and a rich drama. It takes the form of
a
quest.
Joe
Schofield,
a
fictional
American
photojournalist who snapped the lone protester
confronting a tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989, gets a
tip-off that the man may now be living in the US: this
leads him on a journey through America’s Chinese
community, in the course of which he jeopardizes his
job, his friendships and his affair with a British market
researcher. In Beijing, meanwhile, Joe’s
chief contact,
Zhang Lin, has problems of his own. Outraged at the
death of a 59-year-old neighbor through smog poisoning,
Zhang Lin leaks the story to Joe, only to find himself
being tortured by the authorities and losing the love of
his factory-foreman brother. This epic play – told in five
acts and thirty-nine scenes – has a running time of nearly
three hours but it engages the audience through the
sophistication of its writing. At its heart, it is a political
drama, but it plays out on a personal level – it has
elements of the thriller, romance and comic genres.
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Chimerica” was a term
coined by economist Niall
Ferguson and historian Moritz Schularick in 2006 to
indicate the global dominance of the dual country that is
China and America. But Kirkwood’s play highlights the
sharp differences, as well as the similarities, between the
twin superpowers.
There are over 35 speaking roles in the play along with
various non-speaking parts. Joe Schofield is the
protagonist of the play. At the age of 18 he was in a hotel
room overlooking Tiananmen Square where he was able
to take the famous ‘Tank Man’ picture. Now in his early
forties, he is idealistic. Mel Stanwyck is a colleague of
Joe. He conforms to stereotypical masculine behavior;
all talk, cynicism and bravado. The
relationship between Joe and Mel is one of good mates.
Joe and Mel first meet Tessa Kendrick on a flight to
Beijing. She is English and is established quickly as a
ballsy character. The relationship between Tessa and Joe
warms
as the play progresses, as they move from their
initial business interactions to a messy romantic
entanglement. Zhang Lin is Joe’s main contact in China.
The audience sees him at two stages of his life – in 1989,
as a young man, and in 2012, as an English teacher. He
still grieves for his deceased wife, despite the long
passage of time and his brother’s best efforts to cheer
him up. He is haunted by her image; and she ‘appears’
from inside his refrigerator –
the significance of which
we find out in a flashback. He makes some reckless
decisions in his quest to find out the truth about air
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pollution which results in him being arrested. He is not
afraid to speak out against the communist regime.
As the title suggests, the key idea the play explores is the
relationship between China and America. Zhang Lin
embodies the dissenting side of the Chinese people and
we see a broad cross section of the American population
(from prostitutes to a man being arrested in Harlem). The
play is effective because it presents a balanced but
honest picture of these two superpowers.
The play also
questions the ethics of journalism. There is the
complexity of portraying an event accurately and from
whose perspective a story is told. Pollution in Beijing is
referred to throughout the text and most damningly, the
lack of concern shown by the Communist Party. The fact
suggests that what is more important is the front that
everything is ok, when the reality is far from that.