Naima Khan review's Alexandra Wood's well edited but poorly scripted stage version of Jung Chang's Wild Swans.
Alexandra Wood's adapted version of Wild Swans feels more inspired by Jung Chang's novel than based on it, which is definitely a good thing. Her script provides an atmospheric depiction of a family living in China from 1948 to 1978 and prioritises its characters over its events. It forgoes an arc of incidents for a feel of a country under hypocritical, cruelly invasive rule. But while Wood's editing is good, her script is a poor, unsubtle, repetitive beginners' guide to Mao's communism that paints the family at the story's centre in a disappointingly basic way.
Executed through stifled performances directed by Sacha Wares, the play conveys the bare essentials of what made Chang's family – the early dynamics and principles that steered its path. We meet her dignified grandmother, who the Red Party deem a selfish member of the wealthy class thanks to the warlord who fathered her child and kept her as his concubine. We also meet Chang's resolutely principled father, whose strength and stubbornness are remarkable in the face of violence and manipulation. And at the centre of all this is De-Hong, Chang's mother who poses the most interesting questions but is smothered by Ka-Ling Cheung's acting-by-numbers performance.
However, amidst the elementary nature of the script, there are some scenes that prove its potential. The play opens on a bustling market already in action as the audience find their seats. The quiet performances from the huge cast are superb in this humorous, atmospheric depiction of a multitude of Chinese citizens – fascinatingly diverse, and miles away from the generic body of unison that Mao portrayed. The scene contains the same sense of humour as the one that sees Jung Chang's father propose to her mother as they plough a field under the supervision of his ex-girlfriend, Comrade Ting. It's not just the absurdity of needing party permission to discuss love that makes this scene so absorbing, but also the efforts of all three characters to establish human relations under such a controlling regime. It also highlights how dark and hopeless living under that regime must have been.
Both scenes are examples of Miriam Beuther's fantastic design, which takes us from that market to farms, fields, wetlands and polluted cities with remarkable video imagery and some very brave methods of scene-changing. Having the cast sweep away the mud from a field and wet down the walls to reveal an overwhelming array of propaganda posters is fantastic to watch, even if it does take much longer than a usual scene-change.
But despite this design, the script and the limited acting from the central performers make this feel like watching an educational play for teenagers. The surprising 85 minutes running time is proved fitting and unremarkable because this version of Wild Swans isn't an attempt at condensing the book but an attempt to explore the family at the core of it. It's a shame this happens in a disappointingly two-dimensional way. 
Wild Swans runs at the Young Vic until 12th May.
Image by Chris Nash
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