Minority ethnic actors ask why is Equity scared of doing their job?

It really is about time trade unions started fighting for those they are supposed to represent, rather than sliding out of their responsibility at every twisty-turny opportunity. For some workers it's like nailing jelly to a wall — jelly on a jolly nice salary paid for by their members.

GUEST POST BY PAUL HYU AKA CHINESE ELVIS

The problem for Equity and minority ethnic actors
March 4, 2015

Actors, like any other profession, benefit from a Trade Union, which represents them in matters relating to work. Equity has been this body, representing actors for a long time. An Equity Card formerly stood as a status symbol – a badge of honour.

I became a member in 1989. I did a tour in a smoky van for 6 months doing TIE in schools to become eligible and get my card. Today it is not as difficult as it was then to become a member and membership numbers are flourishing, with over £4 million of income from subscriptions alone in 2013. According to the latest statement available, 2013, Equity are doing pretty well with over £9 million in cash.

I have been working with actors for approaching 30 years and they are not in the least bit racist. The acting profession is one of the most inclusive, it seems. The people are nice and reasonable and it’s a pleasure to be one of them.

The year I joined Equity, 1989, was the year that Miss Saigon opened in the West End. I ended up in that show in 1992. I was cast in 1989 instead in the German language premiere of David Henry Hwang’s Tony-award winning play, M. Butterfly, in Hamburg. I left the UK to do that and was pretty much out of it, being as I was in Germany before the Berlin Wall even had come down.

I did not think of it at that time, but Equity did not make any noise whatsoever about the fact that Jonathan Pryce was playing an East Asian part, complete with make up. It was a different time, with Michael Gambon yet to play a blacked up Othello (as an Arab) and the theme tune of It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum was still well known. I only started to think about the issue when, a year later in 1990, US Actor’s Equity kicked up an enormous fuss – in the US the protests were fronted by the playwright, whose play I had been working on, David Henry Hwang.

We all know what happened. Actor’s Equity backed down. Miss Saigon was a big hit. Everyone seemed to forget about it.

But who was right? What is the right side of the argument? As time passes, do the choices seem more or less acceptable?

No one said much (to my recollection) at the time about Gambon’s Othello, but which white actor has plans to play him as a black man today?

25 years is a long time. A generation. A different time. It couldn’t happen today. But are arguments about black representation equally applied to East Asians?

Last year, 2014, very much in the now, Miss Saigon reopened with an East Asian actor, Jon Jon Briones in Pryce’s controversial part. Jon Jon was the actor I replaced in 1992, as it goes. Jon Jon has won awards for his work in the reboot. He does it very well.

In 2013, Cameron Mackintosh’s casting department was unable to rule out again casting a white actor in this role. It seems ridiculous now the point has been tipped, but it’s the truth. I even invited head of casting Trevor Jackson to speak to Equity’s BAME members to tell us about his dilemma, which he gamely accepted. Standing in front of 50+ Equity members, Trevor told us he wanted to do the right thing but could not promise anything. The talent just wasn’t there, or he could not find it. He knew it was the right thing to do but what if he couldn’t? Trevor simply could not make promises.

Those of us present were seeing for ourselves whether society had indeed moved on in 25 years; whether we were indeed living in another time and as this episode unfurled, we looked on, mouth agape. Could it actually be possible that a white actor could play this part? And could Cameron Mackintosh really come to Equity and say it is so without Equity saying a word?

Yes! That is exactly the situation! It appeared as though Equity could and would make no statement about this – even though US Actors Equity did exactly that 23 years previously. As far as Equity was concerned there was no generation gap. It was not a different time at all. Equity was still rooted in the 80s.

In 2012, the RSC decided to produce the play, The Orphan of Zhao, sometimes known as the “Chinese Hamlet”. When casting was announced, of a cast of 17 (yes, seventeen) only 3 (yes, three – minor) roles were actually filled with East Asian actors, the other 14 (fourteen – 82%!) were not. A quick check of the history of the RSC revealed that the last Chinese actor they had ever cast at all was in 1992, 20 years previously! No actor with Chinese heritage at Stratford for 20 years.

It came as a surprise to us all. We know that actors and people who work in acting are not racist. They are in fact very much for inclusivity. Yet somehow here were statistics and proof that Chinese actors had been excluded. Somehow. And to compound the matter, two of the three East Asian actors cast in this production were playing a dog – paying little heed to the long established and well known historic racist conflation of “dogs and Chinamen”. It seemed incredible to East Asian actors, Chinese or not, and to broader members of the theatre community.

So where did these actors turn to make these points on their behalf? Their trade union, of course. Equity. Equity is comprised of these very inclusive and non-racist people. Could Equity speak for them in this matter?

No.

What I discovered shocked me again. I was at that time a member of Equity’s “Minority Ethnic Members” committee – an anachronistic term in itself. The only other East Asian on that committee at that time was Daniel York and we both asked why Equity would not say anything on our behalf. Make a statement. Do something – anything – for the right side of the argument.

What was wrong with Equity? We could not believe they were twiddling their thumbs. We were long standing members and yet, looking back, they had done very little on the behalf of BAME members that we could recall. In fact, Equity’s record on this was not very good. Anthony Hopkins played a blacked-up Othello for the 1981 BBC film, after Equity had refused to allow James Earl Jones in to play the role. Mike Newell has also stated recently that when he was casting Sour Sweet, he had a meeting with Equity, which actually advised him to cast white actors and make them up.

It often seems as though Equity has a legacy of favouring white actors over BAME actors.

So it was in keeping with this legacy that in 2013 Equity would not make a statement backing the BAME actors, who felt so discriminated against. Equity could not support them.

To make matters worse, the BAME actors were told that it was actually their own fault.

You see, Equity follows a Policy, for which we, the BAME members, are apparently responsible. If that Policy doesn’t translate into Equity being able to act in a way to support and protect us from being excluded, then we, the “Minority Ethnic Members Committee”, have to change it. We shouldn’t expect non-BAME or majority ethnic (aka white) actors to do it for us. But here is the rub: it’s not easy to do.

We can propose what we like, but the other Equity members need to vote for it - and the membership is 98% non-BAME. These 98% are the same people who I have worked with for decades, am friends with and like. They are not racist. If they understood how we have been discriminated against (20 years without a single Chinese actor working at the RSC has affected me personally, for instance), they would surely listen, sympathise and be willing to help. In theory we thought it would be easy enough to get the changes through and approved. Sadly it hasn’t been.

It is now nearly three years since that meeting and that original ineffective Policy is still in place. Equity appears still unable to say anything in any matters of casting controversy to do with race. And these controversies are still happening. The film, Exodus has had its share, with one of the actors actually apologising for it. We don’t blame Joel Edgerton, he’s one of us. An actor. But we do blame whoever thought it was a good idea to cast him and make him up dark-skinned – as do a lot of people all around the world.

Equity should be able to make these statements on our behalf, so we don’t jeopardise our careers, which may or may not have already happened in the case of Daniel and me. Equity in actual fact, however, said precisely nothing at all: leaving us in effect isolated by making public protestations such as this. http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/oct/19/royal-shakespeare-company-asian-actors

How could a trade union, supposedly set up to protect actors’ work rights, who supposedly agrees with casting inclusivity not do anything to protect its BAME members? How could it stand by and say nothing as their two East Asian “Minority Ethnic Committee” members denounced the decision as individuals?

During the last 3 years, we on the “Minority Ethnic Members Committee” have tried to remedy this (seemingly obvious) contradiction in Equity, and have failed. Now in 2015 we are still concerned that the same outcome would happen again, were the Zhao situation to repeat itself. Would Equity say nothing at all and again leave those of its membership brave enough to speak out (for what most people believe in, lest we forget), hanging out to dry?

However, Equity is now on the cusp of making a change. The “Minority Ethnic Members Committee” has drafted and sent to Council a rewrite of the unfit-for-purpose Policy, in which Equity now “advocates” good practice. The council needs to approve it and that is why I am writing this. To encourage them to vote for it while perhaps feeling a touch guilty that this has not happened years ago.

Getting to this stage, the Committee met with obfuscation, mis-direction, needless arguments and bad temperedness. It has not been easy. We were told by Equity staff we would get professional help to word the Policy. None came. Daniel York resigned in frustration – a sad end for the most effective member the “Minority Ethnic Members Committee” has ever had. Equity, it seemed, did not want to change. I have been close to resigning, also out of frustration at the slow pace and seeming resistance to what I consider to be just the right thing.

At our last meeting, we were warned by an experienced Equity staff member that the new wording , below, would not be accepted by the Equity’s Council. Look at it, the proposed new “Inclusive Policy Statement”. It is puzzling to imagine what any of the actors on Equity’s Council could possibly object to and yet we really remain worried that it will be rejected by our friends and colleagues and fellow Trade Unionists. No one on our side can understand how this can possibly be.

Proposed new wording for Equity's Policy on Inclusive Casting:

Proposed new wording for Equity’s Policy on Inclusive Casting – which has taken 3 years to write

But something seems to scare Equity from simply adopting this. At the first reading, the Council decided upon a tactic, which an old Equity Council member recalls as “kicking into the long grass” – a tactic, which I have never before in 4 years encountered; not voting straight away, but first asking other committees to examine it and take a view.

This is OK, but when I asked why we were not told this might happen, so we could have saved time by contacting them first, instead of wasting even more time than the present 3 years and counting, I was openly pilloried by an Equity staff member.

I was used to that by this stage, though. This is my own trade union, just to remind you!

The situation can be summed up as: Given that actors are not racist, Equity members are not racist and Equity staff are not racist; yet Equity’s BAME members feel that they are discriminated against (as in these two specific examples of Miss Saigon and Orphan of Zhao alone), what is going on?! Is Equity itself racist?

Equity have, at long last, hired an equalities officer, who I imagine will examine this possibility and determine whether this is the case or not. I will be interested to see what she comes up with.

Equity does not want to commit to the generally accepted correct side in the above inclusive casting arguments. Equity does not want to commit to making any statement on matters such as the ones outlined. Why? Because Equity views that by doing so it would in effect be criticising (albeit on behalf of its BAME members) other members (ie the actors who have been cast ). I think the staff believes this scenario can’t and won’t work and foresees it eventually becoming a potential ethical nightmare.

Why is Equity scared?

Equity, you understand, does not want to get involved in matters of artistic choice. Equity believes that the decision to cast a white actor in a BAME part is an artistic one, so they must not interfere. This point of view – for an arts organisation – would be acceptable.

However Equity is not an arts organisation. First and foremost it is a trade union, protecting its members working rights, which includes protection from discrimination. And the question for Equity is whether artistic rights trump workers’ rights.

What about the BAME member of Equity, whose right to be seen and considered for this part has been harmed by an artistic decision? Who is speaking up for them? Protecting them? When the outcome of these artistic decisions always seems to exclude actors of colour, someone needs to speak. When the artistic decisions all seem to be exactly the same i.e choosing a white actor and excluding an actor of colour even from the casting process, it is not artistic. It is prejudice, bias and convention.

Equity is compromised and has chosen to hide behind the status quo, which everybody accepts provides poor outcomes for BAME actors.

Equity feels scared because it has placed artistic license extremely high up on their priority list. Equity needs to look at this and re-set the dial. Surely when the right of the BAME member to work is in direct opposition to an artistic ideology, at least in cases such as this, then the actor – the member who pays his subscription fees – should be a higher priority to his Trade Union? In this day and age (after all), which of the two oppositional standpoints do you think should be set as a higher priority for Equity?

I believe that Equity needs to re-prioritise itself. I also believe Equity is the correct place BAME actors should turn to in cases like this. Equity should be proud to support its BAME members instead of running scared and saying nothing.

Why is Equity scared?

The fact that Act for Change and British East Asian Artists have formed in the past 3 years to make these arguments, shows that these arguments have a great deal of support among UK’s BAME acting community. Equity has donated money to Act for Change, supporting their ideology. Lenny Henry argues the point so very well. There is a general feeling in society that it is time for a change with regards to depictions of race, portrayal and representation. Yet Equity itself stays silent, rooted in the ’80s (and arguably before even then).

Equity, I believe, wants to support its BAME members but is scared of being compromised. I don’t think it should be. I believe it should be bold and brave and be leading from the front, not playing catch-up from a generation ago.

The rewritten policy document states :

Because African, Caribbean, South Asian, East Asian, Arabic and other minority ethnic artists continue to be the subject of discrimination they should be given preferential consideration in the casting of parts specifically written for these ethnic minority groups. Equity calls for this to be attempted wherever possible.

To lead from the front, Equity and its members must try and redress historical imbalances before worrying about any artistic points of principle. It should not tacitly approve of any productions casting a white actor in a black role or any role of “colour” by making no comment. This lets down its BAME members and is not the way forward.

The change in Policy does not call on Equity to denounce the actor – but to disapprove of the process of making that choice as not being best practice. It’s simple, and to us all paying our subs, very important.

If Equity can’t do that then no matter how nice the members are and how non racist they are, if they don’t allow this change to become Equity’s policy, they are supporting an old fashioned status quo, which discriminates against BAME members and puts the white members in a position of privilege, wittingly or not.

By adopting this new policy as best practice, Equity will, for the time being at least, be redressing the historic imbalance that has long seen minority groups be discriminated against in the past. Equity will become truly a vocal supporter of inclusivity. It is long overdue and about time too.

by Paul Hyu
Read original article here.

Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang opens tonight National Theatre Shed for 3 weeks

Gemma Chan and David Yip in Yellow Face, opening at the National Theatre Shed tonight.

Here's wishing that the cast of Yellow Face, by Tony-Award winner David Henry Hwang, break a leg in style when they open tonight at the National Theatre Shed.

I thoroughly enjoyed the play when it launched London's Park Theatre opening last year, reviewing it for the Morning Star. I also interviewed Hwang and found him to be charming, witty and self-effacing. He was still as politically aware as when he became the reluctant "poster-boy" for the Asian American community's angry campaign over Jonathan Pryce's reprisal of his role as the Eurasian Engineer when Cameron Macintosh's production of Miss Saigon transferred to Broadway.

This play, Yellow Face, was written as a response to the draining experience of that campaign, about issues of race and equality. The argument about sticking white actors in yellow face make-up to play east Asian roles resurfaced in Britain at the end of 2012 over the Royal Shakespeare Company's casting of only three minor roles out of 17 with Asian actors when they staged the The Orphan of Zhao, a Chinese classic play from antiquity. It was no surprise when Hwang and a host of East Asian American actors weighed in on our side, excoriating the RSC for their "contradictory and fallacious" self-justification.

Not one main role was played by an East Asian actor.

Various British theatre critics, including Mark Shenton, defended the RSC with some shockingly antiquated arguments. Shenton attacked both myself and Hwang in The Stage for daring to object to colour-blind casting that only goes one way. (Do check out the comments.)

One strawman argument was that the effniks were demanding that every character be played by an East Asian. Some of us were, but most of us were not, especially as The Orphan of Zhao was part of an RSC trilogy.

Shenton's position was that east Asian actors could not play roles in the other two plays produced in the same season and played by the same ensemble cast: Pushkin's Boris Godunov ('cause no Russian ever looked Asiatic, right?) and Life of Galileo by that master of defamiliarisation and arch-questioner of "reality", Bertold Brecht.

So it is with curiosity and optimism that we note Shenton's participation in the NT's Pre-show Platform on Wednesday 7 May, when he joins writer David Henry Hwang to discuss Yellow Face. One hopes that Shenton's presence on the same platform as the author of a play specifically dealing with the issues of racial exclusion from the culture means that some of what we've been saying has sunk in. I'm a great believer in the ability of human beings to learn from past mistakes and acquired wisdom.

So let us, like Bill Clinton, come from a place called Hope.

Yellow Face is on at the National Theatre Shed until 24th May.

Review: Mark Shenton

Review: Michael Coveney

Chinese diaspora limelight in London: South China Morning Post

My column for the South China Morning Post magazine 9th June 2013.

City scope: Chinese bask in the summer limelight 
Anna Chen in London

Following one of the longest winters on record here, I've emerged blinking into the light to find my hometown has become a hot spot for Chinese diaspora theatre. An eruption of British East Asian talent on stage this summer is finally putting paid to the notion that Pacific Rimmers can play only one-dimensional, buck-toothed, orientalist monsters.

As the bass rumblings of theatre-industry initiatives and the clamour of international protest (prompted by the British East Asian Artists' objections to the Royal Shakespeare Company's casting of The Orphan of Zhao with predominantly non-Asians) have risen to a crescendo, the resulting pyroclastic flow of productions has been hard to ignore. Highlights have included Border Crossings' stylish love story Consumed, set in Shanghai; and Howard Brenton's #aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei (featured in an earlier column) at the Hampstead Theatre and streamed live over the internet. The most exciting of them all, however, has been the British premiere of David Henry Hwang's comedy Yellow Face, which last month launched London's newest venue, the Park Theatre.

Elegantly, but devastatingly, Yellow Face lampoons Western popular culture's embedded assumptions about white superiority, all served in the round by a seven-strong cast that includes David Yip - he of British television's The Chinese Detective fame - and the beautiful Gemma Chan.

The arrival in London of not only Yellow Face but Hwang, two decades after his mega-hit M. Butterfly - a Tony Award-winner on Broadway, New York - took London by storm, has been greeted by squeals of delight.

With all his accolades and achievements as a leading American playwright, Hwang is our Yoda, our pole star; living proof that we - the Chinese diaspora - exist. Yes, we knew it all along, but The Establishment didn't.

Children have been born and grown up since Anthony Hopkins and Glen Goei frolicked in the M. Butterfly limelight all those years ago. Now, a new generation of young, savvy East Asian audiences are flocking.

Park Theatre on press night was the place to be if you were a British East Asian creative type. Champagne flowed, oiling the sense of excitement and relief that the production of excellent drama could be as natural and normal an activity for Chinese as plotting to take over the world.

David Henry Hwang interview: race, class and Yellow Face

My Morning Star interview with David Henry Hwang, whose play Yellow Face launched London's new Park Theatre last month.

‘We're pretty good on race sometimes but terrible on class’ 
East Asian playwright DAVID HENRY HWANG talks to Anna Chen about issues of cultural assimilation and equality of opportunity 

ONLY six months before I finally meet David Henry Hwang, the Western world's most famous playwright of east Asian heritage, the British East Asian Artists (BEAA) led an international protest when the Royal Shakespeare Company gave a miserly three — minor — roles out of 17 to east Asian actors in their first Chinese play, The Orphan of Zhao.

Now we're enjoying the British premiere of Hwang's play Yellow Face which launches London's brand-new Park Theatre, a mere quarter of a century after its Tony Award-winning author first had a play performed here, the Broadway and West End mega-hit hit M Butterfly.

And there are several more on the way with Chinglish and Golden Child expected this year.

Everyone's walking around the theatre with huge grins 'cause our Dave's in town. He's the nicest bloke you could wish to meet with the gentle manner of someone totally at ease with himself.

Hwang isn't just the first ethnically Asian playwright to succeed in the West. He’s got 20 plays, 10 musicals, plus film credits and writing galore on his CV and is recognised as one of the leading US playwrights and as a Grand Master of the theatre there.

Los Angeles-born in 1957, Hwang is the son of a penniless immigrant who became a millionaire banker. But the hip, young and educated Hwang is also a child of the civil rights, Vietnam and hippy eras and his writing reflects much of that progressive mindset.

His works have explored Chinese people’s experience from their first arrival in the modern US. After the first wave of immigration following the discovery of gold in California in 1848, the Chinese worked the mines, grew the food and built the railroads but were treated savagely by the dominant white population.

Suffering racist lynchings and mob attacks, their ill-treatment ran native Americans and African Americans a close third, To cap it all, the Exclusion Act of 1882 — only repealed in 1943 — specifically targeted the Chinese, banned miscegenation, denied them citizenship and turned them into aliens even unto the umpteenth generation.

Chinese Americans have played an important part in US radical politics since the civil rights movement of the 1950s. Perhaps the reason they are so far ahead of the British Chinese in fighting racism and exclusion is down to numbers, Hwang explains.

“When I was a kid, the majority of Asian Americans had actually been born in the US. We were inspired by the Black Power movement which expanded into a general third world power movement that Asians were part of,” he says.

"Since 1965, US immigration law has not favoured working-class labourers from Asia but people with tactical skills. So you have a generation of Asian immigrants who are upper class and educated with certain notions of entitlement that they apply to the US political system."

With that background, it might be expected that they are more likely to vote Republican than Democrat but that wasn’t the case in the last election, where 84 per cent of Asian Americans voted for Obama, Hwang says, the largest of any group except for African Americans.

"There's been a tendency for the Asian American community to split because a lot of Chinese Americans were anti-communist, but nobody really cares any more and so Democrats are perceived as being more fair to minorities. And Republicans are seen nowadays as being anti-science."

Asian American actors were lightning-fast in supporting the British east Asian struggle to take on the theatre establishment over the omission of our third largest ethnic minority from the stage.

Within days, while we were stunned rabbits in the headlights, both Hwang and the Asian American Performers Action Coalition (AAPAC) issued statements critical of the RSC's "laziness and lack of artistic integrity" and the "contradictory and fallacious nature" of their argument.

"We're pretty good on race sometimes but terrible on class. The US has obviously fallen short of its ideals but the ideal of equal opportunities is still there.

“So when Asians advocate equal opportunity in the States it's consistent with the Asian impulse to assimilate in a way that maybe is not as much as in Britain."

Hwang’s play Yellow Face garnered rave four-star reviews. A lone critic said it was irrelevant to a British audience but, as Hwang says, the play is about “some of the pitfalls in trying to create a multi-cultural society. It seems to me that would be relevant here."

As long as history doesn't veer into Pacific conflict and the Chinese don't suffer the same fate as Japanese Americans in 1942, which Hwang acknowledges is a slim possibility, we may have advanced the cause of anti-racism.

Each victory should be celebrated but "equal opportunity" is merely the first step to true equality and to that end we are going to have to look at what Hwang has to say about class.

Runs until June 16. Box office: (020) 7281-8813

Anna's 4 star review of Yellow Face

[EDIT: date of the Chinese Exclusion Act corrected to 1882 — not 1888.]

David Henry Hwang Yellow Face Q&A video Part 1

Here's the first part of the video from Saturday's Q&A session with Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang talking to Dr Amanda Rogers at London's new Park Theatre in the week of the British premiere of Yellow Face.

Produced by Special Relationship Productions (helmed by Kevin Shen and Lucy Fenton), Yellow Face was DHH's first play in the UK for a quarter of a century since his mega-hit M Butterfly opened in the West End in 1989.

Video by Anna Chen

Review of Yellow Face

Feature article on David Henry Hwang

Yellow Face review: triumph for David Henry Hwang launches London's new Park Theatre

Pic by Simon Annand

My review of Yellow Face in the Morning Star 
4 stars

Tuesday 28 May 2013 by Anna Chen
Yellow Face
Park Theatre, London N4

This smart and savvy comedy delivers a knock-out blow to any still-entrenched belief in certain crepuscular crannies of theatre land that east Asians can't produce culture.

Racism no longer has an outlet in blackface performance but yellowface lingers as a method of corralling an ethnic minority into a ghetto, depriving them of jobs and creative participation.

That's the context of the Obie award-winning Yellow Face, an admittedly autobiographical indulgence by David Henry Hwang which tells a funny and fast-paced story of his perennial war against the surreptitious devices used to keep Asians in their place, in particular the 1990s yellow-peril hysteria targeting President Bill Clinton and threatening to engulf American-Chinese people.

Having burned out as the "poster child for political correctness" in the battle of Miss Saigon - when American-Asian actors protested noisily against white British actor Jonathan Pryce reprising his part as the Asian engineer for the Broadway transfer of the musical - Tony award-winning playwright DHH (Kevin Shen) buckles down to work on his next play Face Value.

He inadvertently casts white actor Marcus G Dahlman (Ben Starr) in the leading Asian role and the subsequent cover-up reveals much more than it conceals.

Too sophisticated to lecture, Hwang skilfully navigates a series of real-life anti-Chinese events including the accusation that his banker father Henry (David Yip) is aiding an enemy - China - and the failed prosecution of Dr Wen Ho Lee as a nuclear spy for Beijing, harking back to the Rosenbergs' execution.

In reversing the situation and trying to manipulate his star Dahlman - "dollman," geddit? - Hwang exposes the absurdity of judging people by their skin.

It's the Siberian Jew Dahlman, building a successful career on an erroneous assumption that he is part Asian, who pleads: "It doesn't matter what someone looks like on the outside."

Hwang has long been respected as a writer of depth with an impressive body of work permeated by a progressive political perspective. In Yellow Face he argues that we should all be part of "the big song" as experienced by Dahlman, who finds peace and an identity with the Dong tribe of China.

Director Alex Sims mounts a technically sharp, elegant and enormously effective minimalist staging in-the-round for an excellent cast who mostly play multiple roles.

Actor-producer Kevin Shen pulls off several firsts with this British premiere of Yellow Face at north London's brand-new Park Theatre.

Following last year's still-rumbling RSC The Orphan Of Zhao controversy, Hwang's long-awaited theatrical resurfacing in Britain after a couple of decades provides a welcome addition to the debate around representation of east Asians in this country's culture.

Runs until June 16. Box office: (020) 7281-8813

See Anna's Morning Star feature on David Henry Hwang

David Henry Hwang comes to London: Yellow Face at the Park Theatre

Anna Chen and David Henry Hwang in the Park Theatre (Thanks to Kathryn Golding for snapping this one)

Anna and Dr Amanda Rogers at Thursday's Yellow Face press night

Amanda and Charles Shaar Murray on press night

Kevin Shen (who plays DHH in Yellow Face) introduces today's Q&A session with David Henry Hwang and Dr Amanda Rogers

Amanda and David in the Yellow Face Q&A

David Henry Hwang

To the spanking new Park Theatre in north London for the British premiere of David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face only 20 years after David's Tony-award winning M Butterfly which starred Anthony Hopkins was a smash hit on Broadway and beyond. (As he wrote one of the few parts for east Asian women, practically all young actresses have played the chilly Comrade Chen in various productions ... including me!)

It's a sparkling stylish comedy, witty, clever and very tightly directed and acted. And it's made a timely appearance in the wake of the RSC The Orphan of Zhao controversy, having something to say about the absurdity of judging human beings by their skin.

Actor Kevin Shen, who produced and stars as the leading character (a certain award-winning playwright called "DHH"), said his production company had offered it to all the theatres who turned it down on the grounds it wasn't "commercial", so thank heavens for the Park Theatre for having the vision to take it on.

My review will be published in the Morning Star on Wednesday. I gave it four stars.

You have until 16th June to catch it.

Review, interview, South China Morning Post column, and video of the Q&A to come ...