“Scenes from a Repatriation” at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs
Tom Bolton in West London
9 May 2025
Joel Tan’s new play Scenes from a Repatriation is an ambitious overview of a post-colonial world, examined through the fraught question of museum repatriations. A 1,000-year-old statue of the Boddhisattva Guanyin, on display in the British Museum overlooking the gift shop, becomes the focus of attention in the UK and in China, from where it was stolen during the destruction and looting of the Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860, by British and French troops. The violence of this act echoes in the opening moments of the play. The production, directed by emma + pj, has powerful sound design by Patch Middleton, who conjures the screams and earth-shaking roars as soldiers burn the palace in a fire which killed more than 300 servants.
Sky Young and Fiona Hampton.
Photo credit: Alex Brenner.
Scenes from a Repatriation switches characters and sometimes eras with each scene. They are announced on a screen formatted like object labels in a museum. The play is in two parts. The first half, set in the present day, tells the story of pressure on British Museum curators to return Guanyin to China, while exploring the experience of people of Chinese origin living in the UK. The second half takes place in China after the return, and features more loosely connected scenes, probing politics, money, and social relations in China itself. Tan pushes the limits of the format, staging an epic with a cast of only six, in the Royal Court’s small Upstairs space. It is not entirely successful, but when it works it works well.
The cast, constantly switching roles, do a very good job of telling a narrative that always remains entirely clear. The cast are predominantly performers of Chinese origin, and some scenes are performed in subtitled Cantonese and Mandarin, rare on the London stage. Kaja Chan switches with great fluidity between roles from English curator to Mandarin-speaking secret police interrogator. Sky Yang shows similar range, moving among roles that include a protesting Chinese student and the Scottish soldier who first looted the statue.
The play gives us much to admire, and is also frustrating at times. It would have benefited from an edit. There are a couple of scenes that do not work well, in particular an encounter at a party between a wealthy Chinese businessman, an ingratiating employee, and his hired female companion, in which the characters appear either stupid or viciously misogynistic. The production’s tone is also confusing at times, shifting between broad parody – a comic posh curator, a doddery professor, a protest group called Islington Witches for Change – and the intense realism of an interrogation in a Hong Kong prison cell, which diffuse the play’s focus and impact.
However, many scenes do really hit home. A student, boycotting the British Museum, explains to his tutor how Guanyin is a surrogate mother figure for young Chinese people far from him. A flashback takes us into the mind of a soldier looking down on himself as he loots the Summer Palace. The tokenism of a Chinese-themed British Museum late is neatly skewered. And the interrogation scene, in which a cartoonist is questioned about the political intentions of his work, is powerful – the interrogator perched high up behind a screen and a civilized veneer that fails to hide that the outcome is never in doubt.
Scenes from a Repatriation brings wider issues to the stage that are both current and neglected. The conduct of the British and colonial armies in China in successive Opium Wars during the second half of the 19th century, intentionally forgotten in the West, is well-remembered in China and influences international politics now as much as it ever did. The return of looted objects is an issue becoming impossible to ignore. But the play is also about human dislocation: Chinese people looked down upon in the UK, Chinese students propping up the higher education system, oppression of Uyghurs, crackdowns in Hong Kong. Empires then and empires now use people as their currency.
The production is urgent and exciting – video from Tyler Forward and lighting by Alex Fernandes are integral to the fast-paced story-telling. Tan’s entertaining play brims over with so many stories to tell that they cannot be contained. Perhaps if more work by writers and performers from Chinese backgrounds was staged, there would be less need to cover everything in one go. However, Tan has created real political theatre, dramatizing debates that are difficult, unresolved, and unavoidable, and reflecting our society in an unexpected light. The Royal Court is fulfilling its mission by staging plays like these.
