Scenes from a Repatriation at the Royal Court Theatre – review

The small studio space of Upstairs at the Royal Court is transformed by TK Hay’s design. With spectators sitting either side, the narrow stage is covered in fine white sand. At one end, a statue wrapped in fabric, ties binding folded limbs so it looks bandaged, sits in a blue-lit recess. At the other, a huge screen – and a label as if we are in a gallery. “Performance in traverse. Joel Tan (born 1987). Wood, steel, acrylic, sand, linen, bodies.”

The setting is perfect. This is a play that shifts and swerves, its multiple scenes switching location, its perspectives and arguments moving like water, as unsettling as the mirrors on both walls that sometimes reflect and sometimes distort.

Its theme is different perspectives about a 1000-year-old statue of the bodhisattva Guanyin, symbol of mercy, now sitting in the British Museum but with a troubled colonial past of bloodshed, exploitation and theft. This particular statue is fictional, but the issues swirling around it are not.

“All of human history? It’s basically people taking things from each other,” says one character and the scenes where people grapple over ownership and meaning of an object that now overlooks the gift shop, recalls similar conversations around the Benin Bronzes, and the Parthenon sculptures.

This statue is both plundered and purchased and playwright Tan brings considerable subtlety and passion to his examination of the questions of repatriation that it raises. His scenes range from the opening when witches try to free a suffering spirit, to a board meeting when battling academics argue about whether a wall label can quell protests, to a terrifying party in China in which a cold-hearted billionaire whose bribery effects the return of the statue from the UK, reveals the terrifying real-politick on which his actions are based.

En route Tan brings in the Chinese government’s persecution of the Uyghur, migrant slave labour, 19^th century massacres, protests in Hong Kong, and the West’s attitudes to China. The action moves from China to London, from Mandarin to English.  Most interestingly of all, both play and production manage to evoke a strong sense of the spiritual power of the statue, the way in which whether it is sitting in the British Museum or in Shanghai’s Pudong Airport, (“Who goes to a museum?”) it affects different people in different ways.

One of the most touching scenes is when a museum worker silently sweeps the plinth on which it stands, making a small bow to the sculpture as he leaves. When it is packed into a crate, you feel its absence.

The production by director emma + pj (the collaboration between experimental theatre makers Emma Clark and PJ Stanley) is remarkably fluent and imaginative, making great jumps of time and tone with clever use of video (by Tyler Forward), sound (by Patch Middleton) and lighting (by Alex Fernandes). The six strong cast are tireless and clever, embodying multitudes.

The problem is that Tan simply has too much to say. The play is over-extended, packing so much in. There’s an interesting theme of exile, the way that refugees are so often witnesses to horror, but there are too many examples, and each scene feels slightly too long. The precision of the thinking gets buried.

For all its knottiness, though, this is an ambitious piece, unusual and challenging. It is exactly the kind of play you want the Royal Court to present in this space.