Reviews 2004
Reviews 2004
✭✭✭✩✩
by Marjorie Chan, directed by Kelly Thornton
Nightwood Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
February 19-March 14, 2004
China Doll, Marjorie Chan’s first play for the stage, takes the ancient Chinese practice of footbinding as its central image. For almost a thousand years until outlawed in 1911, it was the fashion for women to bind a female child’s feet deliberately to deform their growth so that they would make as small an imprint as possible. The most desirable “lotus feet” could fit “lotus shoes” only 3-4 inches long.
In China Doll footbinding becomes an all too obvious symbol for the forces of hierarchy, patriarchy and tradition that constrain all people of Imperial China, but most particularly women. Poa-Poa (Jo Chim) binds the feet of her granddaughter Su-Ling (Marjorie Chan) so that Su-Ling will be able to make the most advantageous marriage and perhaps raise them both out of their economic straits. Su-Ling encounters the pro-revolutionary fabric merchant Li (John Ng), who secretly teaches Su-Ling to read and passes her anti-establishment texts including a translation of Ibsen’s proto-feminist play A Doll’s House.
Unfortunately, the programme notes about footbinding and Ibsen in China are more interesting than the play itself that fails to create drama from these issues. Until Su-Ling takes action at the end, the characters’ relationships remain static with Poa-Poa and later the servant Ming (Keira Loughran) repetitively exhorting her to adhere to tradition while Li exhorts her to break from it. It’s not enough that Chan’s often banal, clichéd language underlines every point. Kelly Thornton direction does as well, as when Su-Ling is literally bound up in wedding silks. Thornton’s unvaried pacing saps what little energy is left.
What make the play watchable are Joanne’s Dente’s elegant set and beautiful costumes and the vivid central performance of Chan. She carefully details Su-Ling’s growth through 14 years from a delightfully mischievous child into a withdrawn, troubled teenager suffocating in the tightly restricted role society forces on her. If only more scenes were as emotionally complex as Su-Ling’s abandonment of Poa-Poa, the work would be much more involving.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2004-02-26.
Photo: Marjorie Chan. ©2004 John Lauener.
2004-02-26
China Doll