For at least three months now, (and unless you
have dropped off the face of the earth), you will know that Chimerica
has been pinpointed as the most exciting and relevant production showing in
London. Across the city, at bus stops and tube stations alike, the harrowing image of the 1989 Tiananmen Square riots’ ‘Tank Man’ and the confident quote
from the Time Out, ‘The Play of the
Year’ has created a frenzy of intrigue and curiosity amongst theatregoers. Naturally, and convinced they couldn’t be
putting something in the water, I took a trip down to the Harold Pinter Theatre
to see what all the fuss was about.
Of course, it was fantastic. A cocktail of
political thriller, love story and cultural commentary that spans continent and
generation, Chimerica is deeply poignant
and unapologetically thought provoking. The play follows the journey of Joe
Schofield (Stepehn Campbell Moore), a photographer in Tiananmen Square at the
time of the 1989 riots, and one of seven who captured the iconic image of the
Tank Man. Nearly 25 years on, Joe goes
in search of the individual whose image epitomizes human bravery and
solidarity. Although the photograph was indeed taken, both Joe and the Tank
Man’s stories are, in Kirkwood’s own words, ‘an imaginative leap’.
The true identity of the Tank Man is unknown.
In the plays’ ‘imagined universe’, Joe deems that overturning this anonymity
will give a suffering and hopeless world a hero: a reminder that humanity can
endure. The sincerity of Joe’s determination is repeatedly undermined by the
suggestion that his career could do with a shake up. Relevantly, the evolving
dominance and pressure of the media makes us question whether the hero is the
man who shies from attention, or goes in search of the truth.
Discovering the truth behind the images of
contemporary culture is one of the central ambitions of the play. In one of its most comic scenes, Joe and
colleague Mel (Sean Gilder), tease Tessa (Claudia Blakely), the third member of
their middle aisle cluster on a plane to Beijing, about her occupation as a
categorizer. Tessa's career anticipating one’s favourite film simply by asking a
series of impersonal questions, reveals the images and profiles we attain to
one another, and a crisis of individuality. In a later conversation, Joe
compares that images are becoming like people, ‘the more there are of them, the
less any individual means’.
The prevalence of images is repeatedly
stressed by the stage’s epicenter: a white cube that revolves during scene
changes to reveal New York offices, strip joints and ran down apartments in Beijing.
Minimal furniture creates this cross-continent effect. Scenery changes are,
fittingly, created only by projections of images on to the cube’s faces. As Joe
and Tessa debate the prominence of photography, Joe’s claim that, living rooms are
now ‘full of war, full of famine full of genocide’, uncomfortably makes us feel
we are drowning in a sea of images that are becoming less and less
shocking.
Defying this futility, Kirkwood’s play
presents us with our desires to anticipate one another, but inverts this with
life-affirming twists within Joe’s journey to find the Tank Man. What he
expects from the character’s he meets on the way acts as a metaphor for how we
profile one another and the images we acquire, and how far these can sometimes differ
from the truth. This affirmation is kept alive in the play by the question that
dominates the image of the tank man: what is it he carries in his shopping bags?
Kirkwood’s explanation for this, and indeed many of the questions surrounding
the Tank Man, is as traumatic and
distressing as it is considerate and hopeful.
Chimerica
play will leave you thinking for weeks; no topic is
touched upon without distorting it and presenting it a new light. As Sarah
Crompton has rightly suggested, it will be around for many years to come. Like
the image it is based upon, the play will stay with you forever. Chimerica is a reminder of human courage
and the mysteries that will never be explained by the click of a camera.
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