12/16/2023 0 Comments Opera portable rus![]() ![]() ![]() These characters are deeply flawed, with even the most virtuous of the characters having imperfect politics or personal weaknesses. Working on this play with this team has been a highlight of my career – I have never had the chance to interrogate so deeply the origins of the Chinese diaspora in this country and look at how we as a people also contributed to colonisation. While Ping attempted to wrangle the narrative to support his ideas around morality and encourage his readership to push towards virtuous self-betterment – King makes space for the audience to look at these words and ideas anew, and questions the original writer’s authority to tout the perfection of Christian monogamy. This play by Anchuli Felicia King is a social homily adapted from Wong Shee Ping’s novella of the same name. It’s a sentiment all of us have felt working on this production – that in staging this lost piece of our cultural heritage, we’re speaking to our ancestors. ![]() I felt I was in conversation with a ghost. My approach was reciprocal, not parasitic. The play is infused with my own jokes, research, politics. While I have remained (mostly) faithful to the novel’s central events, I admit that I’m a promiscuous adaptor. As soon as I read Ely Finch’s mellifluous English translation, I felt it deserved a wider audience. It’s uniquely compelling and, to my mind, an Australian classic. Poison ricochets between two competing imperatives: to evangelise and to entertain. Yet it’s also a romp – a rollicking serialised saga written in Literary Chinese. In writing this social fable, Wong Shee Ping was driven by his values as a Christian preacher and political organiser for the Kuomintang. The newspaper’s readership was a nascent category: the Chinese-Australian. It appeared in fifty-three instalments in a Chinese-language newspaper in 1909-1910. The Poison of Polygamy’s epic scope can be somewhat attributed to its original form. Kip Williams, Artistic Director and Co-CEO You are about to experience a fantastic and thrilling work of Australian theatre, so sit back and enjoy the ride. Courtney’s extensive and profound theatre-making gifts make her the ideal director for this piece that so gracefully weaves together many different forms of storytelling. It also brings me great personal pleasure to be working again with La Boite Artistic Director and former Sydney Theatre Company Resident Director Courtney Stewart. Add to this King’s wry, sardonic and electrifyingly contemporary eye and you have an explosive cocktail. Wong Shee Ping’s tale contains all the pleasures of epic literature an expansive adventure that crosses seas and deserts, moral conundrums of the highest order and a cast of unforgettable characters. When our 2019 Patrick White Playwrights Fellow, the extraordinary Anchuli Felicia King, came to us with this classic, vast, and criminally under-read novel – indeed Australia’s first Chinese language novel – we knew it was a perfect match. Over the last few years of programming, my team and I have been particularly interested in exploring new and underrepresented perspectives on Australian history. It gives me and everyone at STC great pleasure to be collaborating with our colleagues at La Boite Theatre to premiere this remarkable and groundbreaking new Australian work. SYDNEY SEASON OPENED AT WHARF 1 THEATRE, SYDNEY 10 JUNE 2023Ī NOTE FROM OUR ARTISTIC DIRECTOR KIP WILLIAMS THIS PLAY PREMIERED AT LA BOITE'S ROUNDHOUSE THEATRE, BRISBANE Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts and Culture VILLAGER 3 / SLEEP-SICK’S MOTHER / MA’S MOTHER / MS LIN Sydney Theatre Company and La Boite Theatre Present The Poison of Polygamyīased on the novel by Wong Shee Ping, Translated by Ely FinchĪ note from Artistic Director Kip Williams ![]()
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