Stuart Wolfendale

Now I know why theatres don’t like free seating. It disorientates the middle classes. They use it at the Fringe Theatre in Hong Kong probably because there have nobody to work front of house. I did not detect one black shirted Fringe dude directing traffic before the Saturday night performance of Lyn Shakespeare’s one-woman review, ‘China Doll’. The punters drifted through into the close, 100-seat room, stopped and revolved like ballerinas in a musical box, utterly confounded as to where to sit.   

Even when they made an agonised decision after several feints to left and right, that was never the end of it. Nobody sitting in sight of me stuck with their first choice. Heads were always turning, craning looking for that better centred, higher placed portion of virgin bench or those two unstacked chairs together with perfect line of sight that were going to make all the difference in an ‘auditorium’ smaller than most Starbucks.  

Typical was a group of mixed Caucasian and American-born Chinese gays whose oh, so cool gave way to static in the pants over the seating. After a moment of highly charged dither, they actually sat but, behind the beams and the chatty rising and falling of the eyebrows, you could tell they were not seated in the true sense. A tall blonde among them was on agitated lookout and spotted a much higher bench, maybe two or three feet up, being abandoned by a straight couple- this is an inclusive problem- for somewhere ten feet over. ‘Let’s go, let’s go!’ urged the blonde and the queens upped and climbed. In the Fringe Theatre, not to see all the action, all the time, you’d have to put your own eyes out. I was happy with a bench end near the exit in case it was so awful, I could get out unnoticed in a speeding crouch.

You’ll have gathered I don’t like being in audiences and avoid auditoriums so it doesn’t seem fair to suddenly go out and pick on Lyn Shakespeare. I was attracted by the description of an edgy satirical review actress and singer from Sydney who discovered she was 1/49^th Chinese, tours China and dresses up as an inflatable sex doll.

Shakespeare has a powerfully mellow review singing voice and a nice line in the over keen, oversexed over-30 Australian girl over here. Her naiveté was engaging but occasionally nerves turned her comic timing off. Her biggest problem was the material. She adapted standard songs well, technically, but she was using antiquated, groaning gags that poked fun at Chinese names and pronunciations- the ‘Hu Flung-dung’ school of humour with a dialogue composed of the mispronunciation of `clock’ as ‘cock’. “Goes off every hour” was one line she didn’t use but the script wasn’t clever enough even for that.She did not seem to have quite decided if she was poking fun at her own charachter or the Chinese or us.

Most dangerously, you were not quite sure if she at least half believed that the gags were funny in their own right. I was left smiling, hoping for a punch that would make it all clear, whilst my toes curled.The sex doll routine was funny and could have been funnier if she hadn’t rushed some of the lines. Sat in front of me-finally- were a Chinese couple with two younger teenage sons. For the doll, Dad laughed appreciatively. The boys hid themselves between their knees. So, that worked. The whole show did not. It was worth making the effort to see but not HK$150.

Posted in All, Performance