Theatre review: untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play

Arriving on the Young Vic stage in a blaze of chaos to match the flurry of asterisks in its title, Kimber Lee's untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play is an Asian-American actress' equal parts angry, exhausted and exasperated look at the stereotypes around East Asian women that have persisted in Western art for at least a century, and one story in particular that won't go away. And although the version hiding in plain sight in the title is the one that's most notoriously caused controversy (especially on Broadway,) Lee's metatheatrical version of the story takes us back to the original, and walks us through Puccini's tragic opera Madama Butterfly. An ebullient narrator (Rochelle Rose) breathlessly takes us through the tale of Kim (Mei Mac,) a Japanese peasant girl whose mother (Lourdes Faberes) convinces her the way ahead is to seduce and marry an American sailor.

Kim falls for Clark (Tom Weston-Jones) and believes that they're married, but after disappearing for four years he returns with his actual, white wife Evelyn (Jennifer Kirby.) Not only does he break her heart, he takes with him their son - that's either why he returned in the first place, or at Kim's insistence, depending on the version of the story.

Having secured her son's future in America Kim kills herself, only to find herself in South Pacific, with her fiancé (Jeff D’Sangalang) now the one who'll be pimping her out, but the rest of the story playing out in much the same way. With each iteration of the story Kim becomes more aware of the doomed loop she's stuck in, until eventually a 2023 version finally looks like it might allow things to play out differently - but by now she's been burnt too many times to trust in her happy ending, and rebels against this too.

Roy Alexander Weise's production is a frantic run through a story that especially in its first half is chaotically funny. While the cast dig into every stereotype ever thrown at a story set in South East Asia - Mac's beatifically choregraphed deaths, D'Sangalang's shifty, greasy con-men, Faberes' almost entirely silent but somehow clearly wise old women - Rose's narration relishes putting the subtext about the patronising way these stories are framed into text. And there's some good running gags through these retellings of the same tale, like Clark listing random foodstuffs ("Onigiri! Wasabi! Okonomiyaki!") to pretend he can speak Japanese, or the characters constantly breaking into watered-down versions of pop songs played on some suitably exotic instrument.

Lee keeps trying to find new ways to take her meta theme further, so the narrator eventually decides the food in a dinner party scene looks too good not to try and turns herself into a sixth character in the story (she's somewhat surprised to find out she's now called Brenda.) Faberes decides to take the mike Rose has given up, to deliver a defence of 1960 film The World of Suzie Wong that starts to unravel even as she tries to argue the case for it. And Kim (who'd really like to know why all these Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese women's first name is actually a Korean surname) finally unleashes all her frustrations, and tries to escape the loop.

From Khadija Raza's traverse set, which recreates the same claustrophobic hut in different configurations, to Loren Elstein's costumes which feel very familiar from all the versions of these stories that they reference, to Joshua Pharo's knowingly overdramatic lighting, there's nothing understated about Weise's production, which in this case suits the frenetic story. I also have to mention movement director Shelley Maxwell and fight director Haruka Kuroda, as Kim and Clark have a couple of balletic, acrobatic fight scenes that come out of the blue and steal the show. Lee's determination to take the play in as many postmodern directions as possible does mean it ends up overstaying its welcome, but when it gets things right untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play is a blast.

untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play by Kimber Lee is booking until the 4th of November at the Young Vic.

Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: The Other Richard.