Chinese Take Away: The Stage Play (DVD)

by Anna Yen

Review by Karen Wighton, October 2011

Chinese Take Away: The Stage Play was conceived, written and performed by Anna Yen, a first generation Chinese Australian performer, director and circus/movement teacher. It is the deeply personal, autobiographical account of the playwright, and her mother and grandmother.

This lyrical 52 minute film, (2002) is performed by Anna Yen as a captivating, one-woman staged narrative of an immigrant family’s memoirs. Its story moves from China in the early 1900’s, through Hong Kong in the 1930’s, suburban Sydney in the 1960’s, and into the present day, combining performance with archival footage. The past influences the present in this personalised history. It explores universal themes of cultural heritage and choices by associating the domestic and the political in the worlds Anna Yen inhabits.

Filmed as a live performance of the stage play, this is a co-production between Gum Yi Productions and the Queensland Performing Arts Trust. Chinese Take Away was first produced at the Stage X Festival, an initiative of QPAT, 1997, at the Cremorne Theatre, Brisbane. It was co-created with Dramaturg Hilary Beaton and Director Therese Collie. Anna Yen toured to festivals in Asia, Europe, Australia and USA and received the Matilda Award Special Commendation for this play. http://www.playmoves.org/aboutus-Anna.html

The ideas of the show are as complex as the set is simple. Anna Yen uses inventive ways of depicting changes in generations, countries and eras on an uncomplicated stage setting. Performed to original music by Charlie Chan in a striking, very physical style, her characters reveal a life which spans two worlds, Old China and Modern Day Australia. Anna delivers with honesty that is brutal and surprising, playing herself, her mother and father and grandmother, and occasional other voices of their family’s journey through the decades.

There are no Kodak moments – instead images of loss and struggle: glimpses of poverty and rape, children being sold, forced marriage, mental illness, domestic violence, attempted suicide. Audiences are shown this cultural clash in a thoroughly intriguing, enjoyable and clever way. This is genuinely liberal work – in her beautiful, expressive style, Anna Yen’s revelations of herself and her life have enormously powerful benefit for audiences’ understanding of the idiosyncrasies of our respective cultures. It resonates. She achieves this through sharing her insight into her own family’s conflicts and foibles and her own resulting sense of survival. Anna Yen unbounds her heart through the stories she tells in a performance where she strips naked metaphorically and literally.

Described as unusual and confronting in style and having both documentary and theatrical roots, it is an interesting and complex blend, and its cinematic language is understandably dramatic. While the show is multi-dimensional, the filmmaking itself is limited to the challenge of recording a live stage show, so while there are a variety of shot sizes and camera angles, like any staging the location changes only symbolically through her performance. The video production Director is Mitzi Goldman.

The content is best suited to upper Secondary or Tertiary. The film lends itself to a wide range of approaches: in Drama as a study of an aspect of physical theatre, storytelling, verbatim theatre or Australian theatre, or for students of Film and Television, History, English, Australian Studies, Media Studies, Psychology, Women’s Studies, Cross Cultural Studies, Social Science, Human Development or Religious Education.

The script of the stageplay Chinese Take Away is published by Playlab Press/QUT in ‘Three Plays by Asian Australians’ edited by Don Batchelor. Also included in the book is an interview with Anna Yen and an essay by Hilary Beaton, Dramaturg’s Reflection on the Script Development of the Stage Play.

A comprehensive study guide produced by ATOM (Australian Teachers of Media) is also available.

Click here to download CHINESE TAKE AWAY study guide (PDF 228.0 kb)

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