From being approached with an already well-formed idea to re-evaluating her opinion of Chinese culture, Amy Ng tells us about her latest play, Under The Umbrella. Read her fascinating interview, then book your tickets for the show having its world premiere at the Belgrade Theatre until 16 March!
Following its opening in the Midlands, the co-production between the Belgrade Theatre, Tamasha and Yellow Earth tours to Poole Lighthouse (19 March), Unity Theatre (21-23 March) and Tara Theatre (26-30 March).
Set in Coventry and Guangzhou, Under The Umbrella tells the story of Wei, a young Chinese woman living and studying in the UK.
As the single Wei approaches her 27th birthday, her grandmother begins to worry that she will be labelled a “shengnu” or “leftover woman”, and decides to intervene. Unbeknownst to Wei, her grandmother pushes her mother into helping with the search for a suitable husband. Affixing Wei’s profile onto an umbrella, they join the hundreds of parents at the Marriage Market where the only successful transaction is a first date for your child. Torn between the conflicting expectations of her family and her life in the UK, can Wei navigate a path between them without losing sight of her own hopes and ambitions?
Mei Mac leads the cast as Wei. Mac has previously appeared in productions including Wolf Totem, The Apology and Thatcher in China. She’s joined in the cast by Laura Tipper (City of the Unexpected, National Theatre Wales), Charlotte Chiew (Love in Newsprint, Arcola Theatre) and Minhee Yeo (Mountains: The Dreams of Lily Kwok, Royal Exchange Theatre and Yellow Earth).
Under The Umbrella playwright Amy Ng is a graduate of both Oxford and Yale universities whose previous plays include Shangri-La (Finborough Theatre) and Acceptance (Hampstead Theatre). She has been a member of writers groups at Tamasha, the Young Vic, the Criterion and the Royal Court, and is currently on attachment with Yellow Earth.
Justine Themen
The production is directed by Belgrade Theatre Associate Director Justine Themen, with design by Moi Tran and movement by Chi-San Howard. The play is based on an original idea by Lian Wilkinson. Lighting is by Fridthjofur Thorsteinsson, sound and music are by Arun Ghosh and the dramaturg is Ola Animashawun.
Under The Umbrella runs at the Belgrade Theatre as part of a spring season that also includes The Comedy About A Bank Robbery, Tamasha’s production of Ishy Din’s Approaching Empty and Emma Rice’s stage adaptation of Angela Carter’s Wise Children.
Amy Ng on Under The Umbrella:
The initial idea for the play came from Creative Producer Lian Wilkinson. How fully formed was the idea that she came to you with?
Lian came to me with a beginning, a middle and an end. She told me she was fascinated by marriage markets in China – markets where middle-aged parents go and pin the CVs of their children on umbrellas and shop their children around. She also wanted a story about a Chinese student in Coventry whose mother comes and visits her at some point, and she wanted the student to be a medical doctor, and the mother to have a life-threatening operation. So that was the brief she gave me.
When I first heard it, I thought it was a very interesting subject, but at the same time, I wasn’t entirely sure why we should be doing this in the UK. I was a bit worried that it would just end up being something about strange people doing really weird things on the other side of the world. But then we talked some more and I began to realise that it was a really good way of examining how societies value women, and how different societies evaluate or rank who’s more valuable on the marriage market. You know, there’s as much a marriage market in this country as there is in China, just not a physical one. How desirable somebody is deemed to be, that’s something that’s always very political, and that idea really appealed to me, as well as the set up of a Chinese student in Coventry – I thought it would enable us to say very interesting things about how women are valued both in China and in the West.
Is it unusual for a producer to come to you with such a structured idea for a play?
I’d never been commissioned to do a play on a particular theme at that point, although I have been since. It definitely feels very different. When I have my own ideas it always feels at the beginning like they’re very embryonic – I’m not always sure what they are yet. But this was a fairly robust, formed idea, so it was about how I could best serve the idea, and how I, together with the director and the choreographer and Lian, could together co-create a work.
It sounds a very collaborative process. How did the early workshop of the piece help?
That came right at the beginning. Lian spoke to me just before Christmas 2017 and the workshop was in early March. It was a one-week workshop with the actors (three out of four of whom have returned for the production), with Justine the director, and with a choreographer. That was also a new way of working for me. I’m used to R&Ds coming much later in the process, so a lot of my ideas came out of that initial week. But in a way, I also felt that I had to distance myself from it a bit because it was so beautifully formed, in some ways I had to step away from that and rethink it from the beginning. But it was very interesting. It was definitely a creative provocation.
How familiar were you with the inspirations for the play before this?
I’m from Hong Kong and the marriage markets are very much a phenomenon of mainland China. I’ve never seen anything like that in Hong Kong. Also, the one-child policy features really strongly, and obviously that wasn’t an issue in Hong Kong. But my father is a doctor and he’s very good at repairing the fallopian tubes of women who have had their tubes cut. Most of his patients for that operation are women who were forcibly sterilised on the mainland.
Did anything surprise you during your research for the play?
The dominant narrative is that the one-child policy was disastrous for women, and led to a huge increase in female infanticide. People say that there are 400 million girls that should have been born that weren’t. So I think the thing that surprised me most when I started digging in more, was that I found that wasn’t entirely true.
What happened was that a lot of the girl babies were hidden. I mean, of course, a lot of them were killed, but a lot more of them were hidden. Some of them were farmed out to childless relatives or just hidden in the countryside, and so they’re missing from the statistics rather than missing from life altogether. That actually caused me to re-evaluate my own judgement. My view of traditional Chinese culture has always been that it’s so misogynistic, that they don’t value women at all and they’d rather kill a girl than have her grow up and be a drain on the family resources. But my views on that are a lot more nuanced now. Yes, the sons were much more valued than the daughters, but the daughters were not “not valued”, and I think that comes through quite strongly in the play.
The leading character, Wei, moves to another country, away from her family. Having made a similar journey yourself, did you identified with that?
Yes, very much so. There are so many different levels of cultural shock. I think part of it is when you move away from your family and then you go back, you realise you’re just not the same person you were when you left. They have to adjust their expectations of you. Or not. think usually the clashes come when they still expect you to be a certain way. I almost feel like your DNA changes a bit, especially if you, like Wei, embrace the values of the other country rather than staying in your own little enclave. Everything changes. Your worldview changes. Therefore you have to recalibrate your relationships with your family. I think, to some extent, that happens in everybody’s lives, irrespective of whether you go to a different country. Everyone has a different relationship with their parents and grandparents when they grow up. It’s just that much more exacerbated if you move away.
For example, there’s an ongoing thing in the story with Lucy and Tinder, which is something that was definitely a shock for me, because sexual mores are different here than they are back home. I’m not saying that people back home are virgins until marriage, but that still is the ideal, whereas it’s no longer the ideal here.
How have the characters and story changed since those early stages?
I introduced the character of the grandmother because I wanted to look at different generations of women and the choices they made. I also introduced the ghosts, because umbrellas were such a strong concept and my main association with umbrellas is a very strong superstition that I grew up with, which is that when you enter the house, you do not open umbrellas because ghosts can smuggle their way in. I think of ghosts as a metaphor for things that are unresolved in the past, so that immediately made me think, “What’s unresolved in this family? What do the ghosts signify? What ghosts are in their closet, so to speak?” And so that spiritual element has brought a completely new dimension to the play.
There have been a lot of calls to improve East Asian representation on stage lately. Is it something you feel is starting to improve or is there still a long way to go?
You know, I don’t set out consciously to say, because I’m a British East Asian playwright, my duty is to create more roles for British East Asian actors. It just happens because those are the stories I tell, and it’s easier for me to write East Asian characters with a lot more interiority – that’s something that often comes up in my notes. So in that sense, I feel like my plays are quite different from a lot of other plays out there, where if there are East Asian characters, they tend to be quite two-dimensional.
I think there’s probably still a long way to go, and not for lack of good will, but it won’t change unless you have more playwrights like me who grew up in a different culture. It’s very hard to write about someone you perceive as a complete outsider with that kind of dimensionality. So I think there’s a lot of awareness of the problem, there’s good will and there are some good initiatives in place, but I think it’s still going to take a while.
