Eighteen-year-old photojournalist Joe Schofield peers, half panicked, half buzzed, out of his hotel room window. Below him is Tiananmen Square and a massacre is unfolding. Then, a single man stops in front of a procession of tanks, clutching two plastic bags, his right hand raised. Snap. Joe takes the money shot and history is born.
So starts Chimerica, British playwright Lucy Kirkwood’s extraordinary, award-winning West End hit, now transported across the globe for its Australian premiere. The image, of course, is that of the lone protestor known only as “Tank Man”. On that day – 5 June 1989 – he disappeared. In this fictional account Kirkwood asks: what happens if Tank Man was still alive?
Couched within this single narrative, which takes the form of a nail-biting quest, are bigger questions (a hint: “Chimerica” is a portmanteau coined by economist Niall Ferguson to describe the codependence of the world’s two major powers). Primarily, what has China’s choice in how it handled Tiananmen – and the subsequent pact it made with its people to swap freedom of speech for economic prosperity – meant for both the Middle Kingdom and, more remotely, America in the 21st century?
Fast forward 23 years to 2012 and Joe (the well-cast Mark Leonard Winter) is back home in New York, sporting unkempt hair and dated denim, a once in-demand photographer left behind by the advent of iPhones. Beset by insecurities over the meaning of his life, he becomes obsessed with finding Tank Man in what, surely, he reasons, will be a scoop to beat all scoops.
Meanwhile, in Beijing, Joe’s friend, also present that same day in 1989, lives in quiet, solitary grief. Like Joe, Zhang Lin (Jason Chong) is stuck in the past: he still mourns for his young wife who died on the square, along with their dreams. Unable to take advantage of the shiny new China in which others, including his factory-foreman brother, have thrived, he finally cracks, causing the authorities to close in.
When I first saw Chimerica in London in 2013 (full disclosure: I attended university with Kirkwood where we were both involved with the student theatre), a dozen or so actors played multiple characters. Frenetic scene changes were conjured up by a clever stage design involving a revolving cube and projections of contact sheets marked up by red pen (a reminder that the truth is always edited).
In this version, Kip Williams – in his debut as Sydney Theatre Company’s artistic director – has taken the opposite approach: forgoing technology for people power. Twenty students from the National Institute of Dramatic Art, out of a vast cast of 32, conjure up a background hub in multiple scenes, helping to transport the audience from an aeroplane to a newsroom to a crush of young, hopeful Chinese students searching for change.
The sheer size of this impromptu chorus produces a fissure of energy in a play already cinematic in scope: at one point, a well-heeled crowd is swilling champagne at a political event during election season. Then the lights change to red, the music is pumped up, the women step up on the tables to dance, the men lean back in lust, and the joint becomes a strip bar.
Among all this action, brilliant performances, with the exception of some dodgy accents, help to ensure the central characters are not lost. There is Joe’s sidekick, a sceptical, world-weary journalist; his angry, fast-talking editor at a powerful New York newspaper who finds himself having to bend to Chinese corporate interests; and his love interest, Tessa.
The latter – a witty English market researcher with a penchant for pencil skirts, played with panache by Geraldine Hakewill – is used to explore whether America’s worship of individualism and self-determination is a myth. Until her meltdown during a Powerpoint presentation (one of the play’s weaker moments – it’s all a bit too Hollywood), she’s certain that each and every one of us can be defined by our spending habits.
The will of the masses does not always prevail. In 1989, New Yorker journalist Fred C Shapiro described his shock at seeing so many young people, unarmed, blocking an entire army “with the single resource that China has in plentitude: Chinese bodies”. In Chimerica, only when the crowds part do we truly understand that heroism comes in different forms: that this man clutching his plastic bags on stage is one of many who dared to face a row of tanks.
• Chimerica is showing at the Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney Theatre Company in Sydney until 1 April
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