When two penniless actresses meet in Shanghai at auditions for Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, they quickly become inseparable. But as political upheaval rips through China, their tumultuous friendship will alter not only the course of their lives, but the course of history. One, Li Lin, will become China’s first female director. The other, Lan Ping, will become Madame Mao and the architect of the Cultural Revolution.
British-Hong Kong playwright and historian Amy Ng’s newest play “Shanghai Dolls” (which debuted last month at the Kiln Theatre) looks at the untold story of two of the most influential women in Chinese history. Jiang Qing was a stage actress who went by the name Lan Ping before marrying Mao Zedong and playing a leading role in the Cultural Revolution. Sun Weishi was a “red princess” who went by the pseudonym Li Lin, before becoming the adopted daughter of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and a prominent stage director. With a plot that takes us from the Chinese civil war and the Japanese invasion to the Cultural Revolution, the play charts the twists and turns in the probable friendship between these two prominent Chinese women – and their rise and fall in power.
In an interview with NüStories edited and condensed for clarity, Amy shared her thoughts on the making of “Shanghai Dolls,” how she approaches historical fictionalisation, and her creative process.
You’re a historian-turned-playwright. Tell us about that journey.
I grew up in Hong Kong and I’ve always loved play writing. One of my teachers at school, my economics teacher Augustine Mok Chiu-yu, is a really influential figure in Hong Kong political street theatre. I was really influenced by his take on political theatre and direct political intervention. He was one of the original angry young men protesters, way back in the 60s. There was a big protest back then because the British colonial government at the time had raised Star Ferry prices – he’s from that generation. Even though my work hasn’t really gone in that direction – I don’t do Brechtian street theatre, I don’t work on as grassroots level as he does – it just gave me that spark.
But then, growing up in Hong Kong, it doesn’t really feel like a career path, you know? I knew nobody who was a full-time artist. My father’s a really keen amateur historian, and I’ve always shared that with him. So, I thought that into history would be like telling stories, but it would still be respectable. I went down the academic historian path, did my PhD, did a couple of postdocs and research fellowships. Then I realised that academic history has quite a narrow audience and as a junior academic, you’re expected to write some really specialist monographs. That wasn’t really what I wanted to do, and it was fairly precarious. So, I just thought I might as well do playwriting. I sent off my first foray to the Royal Court Theatre – they didn’t produce it or anything, but they put me on their writers’ groups. I made connections, one thing led to another, and I just never went back to academia.
How have you used the skills you built as a historian in your theatre and play writing? How do you approach weaving fact and fiction when you’re retelling real stories?
There are several big things that I’ve taken from history. One is the sense that even in the most intimate relationships, like a friendship or a marriage – it’s never hermetically sealed. I’m never going to write a play where it feels like it’s taking place in a glass house and nothing from the outside comes in. I’ve seen plays like that. I always feel that everything that we think about is so socially conditioned. And so when we are interacting with somebody else, and we are intimate with them or fighting with them, it’s never just yourself. It’s everything – your entire history – embedded in a larger history. It’s all these big social forces like race, class, gender, poverty and geopolitical conflicts.
As a historian, when you go to the archives, you realise how fragmented our basis for understanding history really is. Any professional historian also constructs a narrative from fragments, according to their own biases. I think there’s definitely a trend within history for the last two generations to own those biases. To be, at the beginning, upfront and (say) this is my positionality, this is my background, these are my preoccupations. I’m going to look at this material through this lens, and therefore construct a story that makes sense out of documents, wills, marriage certificates, a few letters, diary entries, etc. It’s patchwork. But I didn’t make up anything that I knew contravened established historical facts.
What inspired you to write “Shanghai Dolls” and how did that process come about?
I didn’t start off wanting to write a play about the Cultural Revolution. Hong Kong is very much a city of refugees in the Cultural Revolution, so it just seemed like this big traumatic event that I didn’t particularly want to visit. But then I think what really sparked my interest in Jiang Qing was finding out that she wasn’t this talent-less movie star that I’ve been led to believe she was. I discovered that she actually was more of a stage actress, and her breakthrough role was playing Nora in A Doll’s House. I already knew that A Doll’s House was the most influential play in early 20th century in China – it caused a lot of women and men to walk out of their arranged marriages and try to create new family structures for themselves. And then I found some articles that she had written in the 1930s and published in various Shanghai newspapers. It was about theatre, it was about the position of women – she wrote a really big essay on International Women’s Day on the 8th of March, analysing the structural things that were still keeping women really oppressed, despite there having been a May 4th movement and a lot of lip service in the Communist Party for gender equality.
I just felt this seemed like somebody I could empathise with, that I understood where she was coming from and I agreed with a lot of things she was saying. I just wondered how somebody like that could become the Jiang Qing of the Cultural Revolution – and so then I was chasing a journey. We’re brought up to believe that everything (in the Cultural Revolution) was her fault. Now, I think it’s a really misogynistic thing to do, blaming everything on her instead of the society around her that formed.
Can you share more about your experience writing for western audiences as a minority playwright, and how that influences the way you approach your work?
It’s such a balancing act. My advice to myself, as well as to emerging playwrights, is that you (should) write like you are writing for your own community. Then, you show it to someone else who knows nothing. And then you (ask) where are the gaps? Where do they need bridges? Because if I write with the standpoint that I have to explain myself and my values and my community and its entire history, and represent all that to a Western audience who knows nothing – the story dies.
Then, you are justifying yourself and your history and your existence – and that’s no good. So, I always try to imagine I’m telling a story to my grandmother, and then try to build bridges. Sometimes it works better than other (times). Sometimes, maybe (there are) just too many bridges that need to be built.
What advice do you have for aspiring playwrights?
I think we’re really fortunate in the United Kingdom (in the sense) that you can actually learn the craft and not have to pay a fortune. I calculated how much have I paid to learn playwriting and screenwriting: I paid a sum total of £250 throughout because most of it was free or subsidised.
I think the biggest issue I see in terms of craft is that when (writers) have grown up watching more TV and film rather than theatre, they don’t really have that sense of what it’s like to write for a three dimensional space, for actual bodies moving around in the space. I found I was losing that (too) during COVID-19…(when I spent) two years without going to (see) live theatre. I was losing all that instinct and the only way to acquire that is by watching a lot of theatre.
About showcasing the work and getting people to know you – there are two schools of thought. Some people are really good at networking. They go to all these industry events, they have their three sentence pitch about their amazing project and they manage to impress people enough that they get a commission or get invited to a meeting. I’ve never had an elevator pitch. I just don’t have that personality to instinctively know when there’s a big networking cocktail event, who to pitch to. So, my approach has always been: I do the work, I just put it out somewhere and people come to it. I don’t think I’ve proactively sought out a meeting, and that’s worked for me.
Your plays grapple with similar issues: gender, colonial legacies, power. What themes and topics interest you the most, moving forward?
I’ve just revisited two (of my) older plays in the last two weeks, and I was like: “Oh my gosh, they’re all about the same thing!” It’s all about how women try to gain agency in a world that’s stacked against them. And some phrases just kept on recurring. I don’t set out to write a play about how women exercise agency and be true to their integrity and subjectivity in a patriarchal world, because that would be a very agenda-like play. I would say (I’m inspired by) specific situations, like finding out that Jiang Qing used to play Nora, and just having this image in my mind that the reason why she became (who she was) was because she was in this doll’s house. She slammed the door, tried to get out and found herself in a bigger doll’s house. And so she tried to burn it down. That metaphor just sparked that whole play. It comes back to that idea of women’s agency.
About the playwright
Amy Ng is British-Hong Kong playwright, screenwriter and historian. She frequently draws inspiration from history and contemporary issues in her work, but she prefers starting with an open question rather than an agenda. Amy’s plays include SHANGHAI DOLLS (Kiln Theatre, London), UNDER THE UMBRELLA (Belgrade Theatre Coventry, UK Tour), ACCEPTANCE (Hampstead Theatre, London) and SHANGRI-LA (Finborough Theatre, London). Radio plays include TIGER GIRLS (BBC Radio 4) and KILBURN PASSION (BBC Radio 3). She is under commission to the National Theatre and the Almeida Theatre in London. Amy also writes for the screen. She was included on the BBC’s New Talent Hotlist in 2017, and named as one of the Broadcast Hotshots in 2022.
Amy trained as a historian with a research interest in multinational empires, imperial decline, and nationality conflict, and is the author of Nationalism and Political Liberty (Oxford University Press). She is fluent in English, German and Chinese and regularly translates contemporary Chinese plays into English.
Photo: Gabby Wong (Lan Ping, Jiang Qing) and Millicent Wong (Li Lin, Sun Weishi). Credit: © Marc Brenner.