Rice
The North Wall Arts Centre
 

ATC’s latest production is a stylish two-hander exploring the communication and identity issues of immigrants, in this case a third generation Indian Australian businesswoman and a first generation Chinese Australian cleaner.

Effortlessly slipping between a dozen or so roles, Anya Jaya-Murphy and Angela Yeoh, playing the respective main characters of Nisha and Yvette, establish a raft of family and business associates with amusingly sharp physical and vocal changes. These abrupt transformations and brief interchanges on a sterile, minimalist office set create a cartoon strip style to the production.

Ambitious, workaholic Nisha sees herself as the company’s Indian executive but is totally at sea when returning to India to try to land a contract supplying Australian rice to the government for public distribution while failed entrepreneur and cleaner Yvette has alienated herself from her Chinese roots and cannot deal with her feisty daughter’s generational values and attitudes.

Rushing from office to office with a two-minute deadline for each room, Yvette’s first encounters with Nisha are comic disputations over the regular meal wrappers left cluttering the desk. Their two worlds are widely different but the sense of struggling with their ethnic identities and goals in the cosmopolitan Sydney workplace creates a temporary bridge.

The original style of the play written by Michele Lee and directed by Matthew Xia allows the women to step outside their roles to comment on the function of scenes and posit alternate outcomes and despite their growing relationship intentionally keeps the two characters isolated from each other even when playing the roles of boyfriend and girlfriend.

The range of other strongly etched characters from a high-powered Indian civil servant and an indicted, socially campaigning daughter to a range of typically self-important business executives provide the obstacles and generate a good deal of humour as the two women try to navigate a supposedly familiar world under the strain of their different cultural backgrounds.

This 95-minute play is surprisingly evocative and thought-provoking. The themes are universal and the characters are winningly sympathetic in a production well worth catching during its national tour.

On tour until April 14 2022. Box-office: atctheatre.com.