Untitled F*ck M*ss S**gon Play
Royal Exchange Manchester

AS Manchester’s biennial International Arts Festival gets into full swing there are a multitude of wonderful, outrageous, unfathomable and quite frankly downright absurd events across the city. 

If there is only one thing you can attend, then head to the Royal Exchange where you will be served up a delicious new play from Kimber Lee. Her Untitled F*ck M*ss S**gon Play won the inaugural Bruntwood International Prize in 2019. Now having its world premiere, it shouldn’t be missed. 

It’s a wonderful, funny, thoughtful and very angry play. 

The Narrator, a marvellously deadpan Rochelle Rose, takes us on a journey from 1905 to 2023 through the depiction of Asian women in Hollywood film and TV. Starting with Madame Butterfly, by way of South Pacific and Miss Saigon, the Narrator guides Kim and Clarke through their Asian adventures. 

Guess what, whether it’s Japan, Polynesia or Vietnam, it amounts to a plucky Asian village, with plucky Asian peasants and a plucky, pretty girl. A beefy US soldier, sailor, airman arrives, rapes the young woman (tastefully of course) then abandons her. Four years later he returns with an appropriate Western wife, steals the child and leaves an appropriate knife, gun, rope, poison in order that the young woman can do the decent thing. 

Each vignette is hilariously played out with Kim, the young girl, a fabulous mix of shy naivete and pent-up rage from Mei Mac, and Clarke (Tom Weston-Jones) oozing testosterone as they go through their allotted roles. By the time we reach the late 1970s and Miss Saigon, Kim is becoming apoplectic at the number of rapes and tasteful deaths she must encounter. By 2023 her rage boils over and she explodes at those around her, desperate to find an escape from this stereotypical Asian hell. 

And therein lies Lee’s point. Western appropriation of a whole continent’s culture is reduced to a generic small peasant village where its women are gagging to be freed by Western men and values. 

When the laughing stops, Lee’s excellent play hits you between the eyes. What is the legacy of this discrimination? Are we complicit in perpetuating the stereotypes? Should the likes of Miss Saigon still be performed? What about Puccini’s Madame Butterfly? As Kim finally declares this is the “end of the f***ing play” Lee leaves the audience to decide the answer to those questions. 

Long after the tears of laughter dry, the underlying horror within this play will stay with you for a long time. 

Go see this important play but if you can’t get to Manchester, the play transfers to the Young Vic on September 18.

Runs until July 22 2023; royalexchange.co.uk
Then Young Vic Sep 18 – Nov 4; youngvic.org