Little Emperors

Chinese director Wang Chong is known for the experimental, trailblazing technicality of his theatre and there's no denying his latest production, a collaboration with Australian playwright Lachlan Philpott for Malthouse Theatre, boasts plenty of well-heeled tricks. The stage is submerged in half a foot of water, which the performers wade through, splash about in and attempt to navigate with strategically placed chairs. Multiple cameras, both backstage and underwater, capture images projected in real-time to add an additional layer of cinematic intimacy to the storytelling.

This is all very impressive, but what of the story itself? Little Emperors' impetus - a study of the psychological and emotional consequences of China's controversial One Child Policy - is ripe with possibility. However, the narrative used to reveal this potentially fascinating cultural and personal interplay is maddeningly glib; an exploration of the most audacious social experiment in human history, pitched at the level of a soap opera.

At its heart is a broken family attempting to rebuild itself as the Policy that shattered them is finally abandoned. Thirty-one-year-old Huishan (Alice Qin) was an authorised offspring, but she is not an only child. Her brother, Kaiwen (Yuchen Wang) has had to be kept in secret for much of his life, sent away to boarding school as a boy. Now a young man, he studies overseas in Melbourne, far away from his family's Beijing home. The pair's mother (Xiaojie Lin) embodies the regret and anxiety of a generation of parents forced to abandon, and in some instances even kill, their children to follow the letter of the law. Her emotional state is wrought and urgent as she struggles to accept how badly her children have been damaged by the cultural influences weighing on them, and yet she cannot help but exacerbate the issues. She berates her unmarried daughter for not securing a spouse despite being largely dependent on her. She deludes herself that Kaiwen is a doting son while in reality, their relationship is barely existent.

The complex dynamic of this family unit, gnarled by influences too colossal and unfeeling to resist, is bristling with narrative potential. But the plot chosen by Philpott and Chong is by turns trite and corny, and often veers onto tangents that seem entirely oblique to the subject matter. In Melbourne, rather than attaining the academic success his parents expect, Kaiwen is attempting to stage a play about the One Child Policy, also titled Little Emperors - the colloquialism used to describe the entitled arrogance of these coddled only children. Ironically, his directorial efforts are scuttled by his own arrogant sense of entitlement, although since he is neither an only child nor spoilt Little Emperor, this behaviour seems to disprove its own logic.

Kaiwen is also gay, a major taboo in China where fathering the next generation and preserving the family bloodline is a vital obligation. But rather than being personally conflicted over this tussle between desire and duty, Kaiwen appears entirely comfortable with his sexuality, to the point of being incredibly forward and even promiscuous, as shown in a rather superfluous side plot about an extra-relationship dalliance with a chipper but largely underdeveloped token Aussie character.

The scenes set in Beijing, between Huishan and her mother, are more successful, but still suffer from a split personality. One minute channelling the farcical silliness of a Carry On movie, the next displaying all the emotional melodrama of a telenovela, any sense of authenticity or genuine pathos is hard to pin down as the intention of this text follows a wild pendulum swing between campy comedy and dramatic hyperbole.

Certain aspects of this production might be said to reveal poetic ideas. The water the characters are surrounded by could represent the inescapable drag of the past, water-logging these people as they try and fail to resist the rising tide of a damning truth. But discerning this subtext is expecting the audience to draw a pretty long bow, and given the artlessness of some scenes, it seems unlikely that something so subtle and nuanced could play a significant part of Chong and Philpott's vision.

There are some brief moments where the potential this play holds is realised, notably in Yuchen Wang's searing and beautifully delivered soliloquy, spoken in Mandarin. Unleashing the outrage, the sorrow, and the deep, desperate shame of young Chinese men and women unable to reconcile their national identity with their personal anguish, it's a powerful flash of sincerity, sorely absent for much of this piece. Strangely, this minute of well-judged poignancy almost heightens the disappointment; Little Emperors could have made waves, but it's ended up a damp squib, drowning in poor choices.

Malthouse Theatre presents Little Emperors to 26 Feb