Tank Man Takes On Trump In Kip Williams' Production Of 'Chimerica'

Lucy Kirkwood's Chimerica was a hit on a scale rarely achieved by a new play when it took London by storm in 2013. Given this barnstorming track record — complete with an Evening Standard Award and Olivier Award for Best New Play —  this text's sparkling credentials alone would be enough to justify programming it. While its stature as a tried and true success was no doubt the original impetus for including it in STC's 2017 season, the company's newly installed Artistic Director, Kip Williams, has since found what he describes as "an extraordinary synchronicity in this play being staged at this moment in time".

Chimerica is a study of personal quests set against the maelstrom of geopolitical tensions that sculpt our cultural identities. American photojournalist, Joe Schofield, sets out to find the lone Chinese protester immortalised in one of the most powerful and iconic images of the 20th century, the so-called "Tank Man", who on the morning of June 5, 1989, defiantly stood in front of four advancing tanks sent to clear pro-democracy demonstrators from Tiananmen Square. Schofield's mission to seek out this anonymous rebel becomes the vehicle for a witty and poignant exploration of the competing differences and similarities between the two biggest superpowers in the world, and how that common ground is often overlooked.

"Everything that has transpired in the past six months would have been an impossible notion to the majority of people when Chimerica premiered."

It is the business of art to interpret the world around us, so it's hardly surprising that the creeping influence of Donald Trump's brouhaha Presidency, which has left very few facets of the human experience unmolested (quite literally in some instances), has become such a persistent undertone in our theatres, concert halls and galleries. In Chimerica, however, Williams has been struck by how explicitly its theme's vibe with the zeitgeist.

"This play was written over four years ago at a point in history where the word Brexit hadn't even been dreamt up yet and the idea of Trump beating Clinton was a laughable absurdity. Everything that has transpired in the past six months would have been an impossible notion to the majority of people when Chimerica premiered, and yet this play is almost tailor-made for the times we're currently living through. It really is uncanny," Williams notes. "The politics of greed and the politics of self-interest, we're acutely aware of how rife they are at the moment, and Kirkwood's play lays those bare for us, not just in a geopolitical sense, but in the sense of the personal as well. It distils ideas and debates that we're used to engaging with in the abstract and in the intellectual domain into something very deeply personal and emotional."

Kirkwood's prescience may well be striking, but those seeking answers to the conundrum of our current political fracas aren't likely to find anything definitive in Chimerica, Williams explains: "It's the kind of storytelling where you can relish the multiple interpretations that can be taken away from it. In one way, there's a clear lament for the loss of idealism and the complexities of what happens when someone is mythologised as a beacon of protest and resistance, like Tank Man. But Kirkwood goes further than that; she unravels the myth, demystifies the notion of making a god out of this individual, revealing him to be an everyday, ordinary person. In fact, the individual who wants to uncover Tank Man's identity in an attempt to restore idealism to the public consciousness is actually someone who is one of the most morally compromised people in the play. So, there is a moral ambiguity in the end, that really is a question for the audience to take away and solve for themselves."

The tragicomedy of Trump's scorched earth approach to democracy has commanded wall to wall coverage in the past several months. Indeed, with such a comprehensive saturation of Trumpian gaffs plastered online, on screen and in print, artists choosing to tap those political resonances risk giving their audience Trump fatigue. However, Williams believes the medium of theatre can unriddle the white noise of the alt right's dog whistle fear-mongering in a way the news media cannot. "The act of consuming theatre is one that is innately social. It's something that you do with people who share similar views with you but also those who have a different opinion, so there's a collective negotiation that occurs when you engage with the theatrical art form," he suggests. "Ultimately I believe that any active storytelling is a political act, even down to See Spot Run — there's a politics of gender in play in the role of the mother in that story. So no matter what story you're telling, its politics guide our understanding of it, we cannot avoid that connection. But art reflects those ideas back at us in a way that reveals the human tragedy, the individual tragedy, not just the faceless, en masse impact."

Sydney Theatre Company presents Chimerica, 28 Feb — 1 Apr at the Roslyn Packer Theatre.