Theatre review: The King of Hell's Palace

The last in September's trio of new Artistic Directors to make their debut is Roxana Silbert, another experienced hand who comes to Hampstead straight from Birmingham. She breaks with the unwritten convention by not directing the season opener herself, in fact she won't be taking the wheel until the fourth main-house show of her tenure. Instead former RSC boss Michael Boyd directs The King of Hell's Palace - a challenging choice of opener but an exciting prospect as far as I'm concerned: Writer Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig was behind Snow In Midsummer, which I was completely smitten with a few years ago. This time around there's a more brutally down-to-earth subject matter, although death remains a common denominator as the early days of China taking on the West at its own capitalist game in the 1990s see a medical scandal and huge cover-up rock the impoverished countryside.

At the centre of the story are two sisters-in-law who see their jobs in medicine in very different ways: Yin Yin (Celeste Den) is an epidemiologist, talked by her husband Shen (Christopher Goh) and his brother Kuan (Kok-Hwa Lie) into helping them set up rural blood banks.

These aren't collecting blood for medical use though, but plasma for sale to US companies at a hefty profit. It's been reclassified as an agricultural product for tax purposes, and peasants, most of whom still remember the last major famine, are eager to donate as often as possible for the generous payouts. When Little Yi (Aidan Cheng) gets ill, Yin Yin realises the blood is being contaminated, and with a Hepatitis C epidemic already ravaging the countryside it's only a matter of time before something worse starts to spread. Instead of acting on her advice, her superiors have the test results classified as a state secret, so making the findings public would mean turning whistleblower against the whole power of the Chinese state.

I found The King of Hell’s Palace to be a very effective thriller. I try to approach new shows knowing as little as possible and it paid off for me here: Cowhig has a lot of background and plot to set up but I found it fascinating to find out, with Yin Yin, what was going on and predict where the story would inevitably lead. (Of course, the fact that I was even able to go in knowing nothing about this says something in itself about the effectiveness of the cover-up.) The playwright is comfortable on a large scale, which sometimes feels cramped, if not by Hampstead’s stage itself (Snow in Midsummer played in the Swan after all and still felt epic, while here Tom Piper’s design incorporates a pair of travellators that help move the action along and give the feel of the busy road that provides a couple of major scenes) then by the small cast of 8, all of whom are doubling: Even Den pulls double duty, the focused doctor contrasting with an entertainingly brash peasant auntie.

It means the stage doesn’t always feel as populated as some scenes require, but the cast do manage to create the two distinct worlds the story takes place in – the city where numbers are crunched to get the optimum yield, and Henan province where the people those numbers represent, led by Tuyen Do and Vincent Lai as Little Yi’s parents, go through the highs of finally having some economic stability and material goods to enjoy, to the lows of the horrifying price they have to pay for it.

Yin Yin has a nemesis within her own family in Kuan’s wife Jasmine (Millicent Wong,) whose journey from naïve nurse to evil mastermind is a bit too abruptly dealt with, but who’s certainly become a chilling figure by the end: Part of the effectiveness of Cowhig’s play is in the way we anticipate where the story’s going to go, and Jasmine starting to see dollar signs in an AIDS epidemic partly of her own making is a hair-raising moment that can be felt throughout the auditorium. Some of the story’s threads come to a bit of an abrupt end but overall this is a satisfying evening, an increasingly bleak subject made watchable through the thriller element and the sympathy for the characters willing to stand up against it.

The King of Hell’s Palace by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig is booking until the 12th of October at Hampstead Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Ellie Kurttz.