Amy Ng's debut play is named
Shangri-La after an imaginary place - or at
least one that
used to be imaginary, until an area of Tibet was renamed after
the Capra film
Lost Horizon's setting, in a canny grab for tourist dollars.
In a play that jumps between two periods in the life of Bunny (Julia Sandiford,) the
real Shangri-La is where she lives in 2001, the 14-year-old daughter of a shaman who runs a failing guest house. An encounter with an Irish photographer gives Bunny the
seeds of a love of photography that'll endure into adulthood; but it also leads to
an event that'll make her loath to return to the Himalayas when we meet her as an
adult in 2014, working as a guide for an ethical travel company in Beijing.
