There was a mixture of excitement and also a bit of skepticism when I first heard about this theatre project, LIMEOUSE NIGHTS. It wasn't the doubt on the abilities of the production cast and crew, or the fear of yellow-face casting and the general stereotyping of the Chinese, but the simple fact that, there was little to no record of the history about the Limehouse Chinatown.

  Like many new migrants settling into London, I was interested to find out about the past and to rediscover that pocket of history. Whilst there have been projects which tried to capture the oral and photographic history of the place, as well as the occasional walking tour of the Docklands, the Limehouse Chinatown is currently no more than a few old signs remaining in the area. The rest lies only in our imagination of the place.

  Given so little to work with, I was deeply impressed when finally meeting the play's director James Yeatman and with his commitment to the theatre project. Not only has James and his team taken on the mammoth task of converting the Limehouse Town Hall, but also their creativity has and should inspire us all to rediscover more about our past and to actively engage the Chinese community to finally give the Limehouse Chinatown a proper record in history. 

Why did chose this project on Limehouse?

Very broadly, I wanted to do the play about Limehouse because it seemed to combine several things I was interested in into one story. Mainly I wanted to do a play about the city - I am very interested in how people function in the urban environment - how they all live in the same space and interact with each other on the tube or whatever but are all locked up in their own desires and emotions and feel very isolated. I am also from Mile End and have always been interested in the history of the local area, and indeed the history of London in general - when I was 11 I had to do a local history project and I chose to look at the London Docklands and in many ways this is probably just an extension of that... Thirdly, I studied in Hong Kong for a year in 2007 where I had learned quite a lot about patterns of Chinese emigration and the provenance of Chinatowns all over the world. When I found out about the Billie Carleton story, I thought it was a perfect way to combine lots of these things.

What is so special about the Limehouse Chinatown to you?

Well lots of it, is that I grew up in the East End and I have a very romantic attitude to the history of the area (pretty common round here I think). It is also fascinating the way the Chinatown has completely disappeared. What wasn't done for by slum clearances in the 1930s was bombed during the Second World War, and it only really exists now in these very exoticised, basically racist stories about sinister people with opium pipes such as the Fu Manchu novels or indeed Thomas Burke's Limehouse Nights stories. I was interested in looking at the community as a very small group of people probably struggling to live normal lives in this little enclave at the edge of this big city. It must have been difficult for them to read that they were sinister and corrupting British values everyday in the newspapers.  

What was the influence of Thomas Burke's novel?  

Burke's Limehouse Nights is a collection of very melodramatic short stories about Limehouse. It has a cast of characters of noble and villainous Chinese people, as well as a colourful group of cockney dock workers and bolshy women. The play now doesn't really bear any resemblance to any of these stories in narrative terms, but I became very interested in Burke himself - he claimed to have been an orphan born in the East End, when actually he was from suburban south London. He was basically a fantasist who liked to give himself a bit of mystical glamour by claiming to be an authority on the Chinese and Chinatown - he struck me as an early prototype of a disaffected white youth trying to be cool by aping foreign cultures - listening to hip hop or pretending to be French, going on Gap Years to India, that sort of thing.

I understand that the play was also influenced by Ann Witchard's work?

I went to a lecture given by Anne Witchard last summer at the Docklands Museum - she's written a fascinating book about Thomas Burke and most importantly for the provenance of the show I suppose she gave me a huge amount of information on representations of the Chinese in theatrical productions at the time - it's thanks to her that we've found the songs that you see at the beginning and end of the show. 

How much research did you have to do give there isn't much history recorded on this?

We tried to do as much research as possible into the history of the area but yes it was very difficult - generally the Chinatown is mentioned in passing in quite a lot of history books but no-one's written a very thorough study of it. We found lots of newspaper articles from the time and as many of the few photos that survive as we could. Unfortunately, lots of the articles merely propagated the 'sinister' myth of the area, so we tried to imagine what their lives must have been like based on other sources about different areas of Chinese emigration. Two of the people who were arrested for the Billie Carleton case were a Sino-Scottish couple, Lau Ping You and Ada Lau Ping, and although there is not very much information of their lives, they were the inspiration for Mita and Chee Kong, the couple at the heart of our piece.

Synopsis of the play?  

The play takes place in December 1918. Following a big party to celebrate the end of the First World War, a young actress has been found dead of what is thought to be a cocaine overdose, and a police inspector, Thomas Burke, is put on the case. He is told that the actress was thought to have bought cocaine and opium from a couple who live in Limehouse, but when he goes there he finds them to be not the sinister master criminals he was expecting, but actually a very nice, warm couple and part of a thriving community. He gradually becomes fascinated with the Chinatown even as he is pressured to find a Chinese villain he can blame the actress' death on.

What can the audience expect?  What do you hope to achieve with this play?

It's always difficult with a new play to say what audiences can expect because you never really know what they think until the opening night. But certainly we are trying to create a fast-moving, fluid, visually imaginative play that is a fun theatrical experience, while also hopefully being very moving. 

I suppose the aim was always with this play to make people think about the city they live in - about the people who maybe lived there before them and how the echoes of these communities might remain in the streets they once inhabited. 

What was it like to cast and work with Chinese actors in the play? 

It has been a pleasure to work with all the actors on the show, whether Chinese or not. All the Chinese actors in the cast have been so generous with sharing their experiences of life here in Britain and of the experiences of their families. It has been lovely being more aware and more involved with the Chinese community in Britain and I would love to continue to after the show has finished.

Tell me more about the devise process you did with the actors?

We spent about eight weeks part time last summer in a horrible rehearsal room in Tottenham getting to know each other and doing as much research as we could into the area. We tried to find ways to show the whole city - of lots people doing their own thing in the same space, but according to a deeper pattern. Then we started work on the story, and the characters - finding out how they met each other and how they got on.

What challenges artistically did you or the cast face?

One of the greatest challenges has been converting the Limehouse Town Hall, certainly. I don't think any of us realised quite how much work that would be, but I'm convinced being there, right next to Limehouse Causeway, in this beautiful old building that we have converted specifically for this purpose should make the play at east 20% better! It is a brilliant chance to come to Limehouse, which is quite a strange and neglected area, I think.

Lastly, describe your Hong Kong University experience. What inspirations did you gain from that city?

I lived in Hong Kong for the 2006/2007 academic year, as I was doing an exchange at HKU, studying history and literature. I lived up on the twelfth floor of a grotty university hall, overlooking the Pok Fu Lam road graveyard that seemed to go on forever, and I suppose I was just struck by both the hugeness of the city and the transience of it. I loved it - how complicated it is, how it has these strange quirks - the way the Filipino maids take over all the covered walkways to play cards and gossip on their days off, for example. I don't know, I'm no expert on the place, but I was lucky to study its history while at the university, and it has a similar atmosphere to the things I like about the East End (even though it's a lot richer than here!) - a sort of decompression chamber for new arrivals from every culture - where people arrive and have to try and find their way, negotiate encounters with people from all over the place in this almost comically limited space. It is quite a sad place, I think, a place where people have often found themselves because they had to leave where they were from and can't go back, but it is also an incredibly vibrant, exciting metropolis. Going there had a very important impact on the way I've thought about the world and my place in it and I'd love to go back...

Kevin Han

Photo credits: Dan Patrick

LIMEHOUSE NIGHTS is currently playing until 11^th June 2010.

For bookings, please visit http://www.kandinsky-online.com/

 

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