Naima Khan talks to Michael Walling about the merger of storylines, languages and cultures in his pan-global play Re-Orientations.
A monster of a play opens at Soho Theatre this week. I caught up with Michael Walling, its conceiver and director who explained why there's no playwright in sight, and how a team of more than ten took two years to create Re-orientations over two continents.
“We could only have created it as a team – you couldn't sit down and write this. It's extraordinarily difficult to describe this play, which is a good thing. It's a play that takes in several different storylines and to begin with they seem completely unconnected. Actually they're very intimately connected but you only find out in the last part of the play how those connections work.”
In a collaboration between multi-media production company Border Crossings and Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, artists from China, France, India, and Sweden have created the interwoven theatre that is Re-Orientations.
The plot sees the merger of different lives across the globe – as Walling explains: “There's a storyline set in Shanghai that deals with the aftermath of a personal tragedy. A young girl has died and her father has found her lover, who's a Chinese woman. There's a storyline in south India, and a story in northern China to do with a baby being abandoned”
Re-orientations takes a look at the decline of traditional Asian cultures and explores China’s single-child policy, which Walling reveals he learned more about from the Chinese members of his cast: “I suggested there might be a story about a Chinese baby being given up for adoption and the Chinese actors duly created a scene. But they also said this would never happen because babies don't get given up for adoption in China; it's illegal. Sometimes a family will relinquish a child to the state but usually they are abandoned. I thought, 'well actually that's a much more interesting story – what would lead somebody to do that?'”
Exploring tragedy and child abandonment all sounds as Michael put it “very doom and gloom” but in creating the play, he finds it to be quite the opposite. Walling puts this down to what is often a real consequences of tragedy: “As I've travelled around these societies where something very appalling has happened what you tend to find is an affirmation of life. Certainly with China, which is living in the aftermath of a whole succession of tragedies, actually it's a very vital, alive, buzzy, funny, sexy place and we really wanted to bring that onto the stage, so there's a whole series of different moods and energies.”
Set in Asia, Re-orientations draws on a wealth of performance techniques and languages that add vibrancy, comedy and realism. To Walling, the theatre “feels Asian as a form”. He adds, “in the West we've been quite good at writing. We have playwrights and structure, but performance in its fullest, most vital form is much stronger as a tradition in Asia. We can learn huge amounts as westerners, from the amazing colour and vitality of the Asian performance forms and the ways they integrate movement, design and music into one show – which is what we're trying to do with Re-orientations”.
Language is another matter. With a cast who have a multitude of native tongues, some of whom are not fluent in English, the play works across languages to find a way to communicate to the audience. Walling has no doubt this reflects a reality London audiences will be familiar with. “Lack of comprehension,” he explains, “is the point – there's a lot of comedy in that. The ways we grope toward communicating with each other say a lot about the way the world is right now and that's the kind of theatre I'm interested in making: something that tells us what it's like to be alive in the 21st century.”
Re-orientations runs at Soho Theatre until 25th September
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