Theatre portrait of the artist
THEATRE Written and performed by Joe Lui
Letters Home
4 stars
What Do They Call Me
By Eva Johnson 3 stars
Blue Room Theatre REVIEW DAVID ZAMPATTI
The brave, skilled and endlessly industrious Joe Lui has been writer, composer, producer, director, sound and lighting designer and/or musician for many of our most adventurous and confronting productions. He's also something of an enigma.
Born Lui Shang Yu into a conservative Singaporean-Chinese family, Lui is bitterly estranged from his parents and exiled from Singapore because he refused to do national service. In his one-man show, Letters Home, the story he tells is his own.
A voracious consumer of culture, from high art to American football, Lui is, in many ways, an invention of himself - in one brilliant moment he speaks with the Singlish pronunciation of the young
man who arrived in Perth to study years ago; the effect is as revealing as it is startling.
Lui has plenty to think about and plenty to say. Letters Home is a torrent of words - part self-analysis, part confession, part didacticism - about Chinese culture, families, sex and death.
What emerges is a self-portrait of a man who holds very firm ideas but is still discovering how he came by them.
We learn about his heroes, his philosophy of art and sex, Chinese food and rituals. We also learn that he's stubborn, pugnacious and believes in work rather than inspiration.
What he reveals in Letters Home, though, is that you can reject things - family, country and way of life - without having to hate them.
Letters Home is visually rich (much credit to Cherish Marrington's set design, Chris Donnelly's lighting and Mia Holton's video design) and much more tightly staged than it appears (Humphrey Bower collaborated with Lui on its direction).
I can't imagine any of the hundreds of people who've been amazed and intrigued by Lui over the years will want to miss it; for those who haven't, you should take the opportunity to meet a remarkable person.
What Do They Call Me, Eva Johnson's seminal 1990 play about the lives of the three women of an Aboriginal family, was originally conceived as a one-woman show. This revival has a different actor for each of the characters; the brave, combative Connie (Amy Smith) and her daughters, the "assimilated" Regina (Alyssa Thompson) and activist Alison (Ebony McGuire).
Smith, Thompson and McGuire are all fine and the director Eva Grace Mullaley manages the narration and transitions between her actors well but, inevitably, each performance is one-dimensional, a quick sketch. The challenge for a single actor of moving between the characters would've made for more compelling theatre.
That aside, it's important we see revivals of work from the back catalogue of Aboriginal theatre.
Plays like What Do They Call Me, by reminding us of where indigenous people have been, make us realise how far all of us still have to go.
Letters Home runs until October 4; What Do They Call Me runs until September 27.
