We have had conversations and there are some problems.’ But they proceeded without ever naming what those problems were. “It was like ‘we understand some people feel this and some people feel that. When the controversy broke, Lee had no intention of getting involved – until she read what they said.

Miss Saigon’s creative team, led by Robert Hastie and Anthony Lau, released a statement giving reasons for reviving the musical. New Earth Theatre, a touring company of British east and south-east Asian artists, pulled out of staging their play Worth at the Crucible in protest at that decision. We are interested in putting those things under a bright spotlight.”Ī co-production between the Royal Exchange, Manchester international festival, the Young Vic and Headlong, the play’s programming brought an added charge because Miss Saigon itself is to be revived this summer at the Crucible in Sheffield. It is interested in dismantling things in culture that we have all consumed because they are in the air. It is not a soft pedal of anything, but it is a machine that knows itself very deeply. “I’ve been telling the cast that we’re juggling with batons on fire. Lee acknowledges it may be too “spicy” for some. ‘It knows what it is doing’ … Mei Mac as Kim during rehearsals of Lee’s play. A close-to-the-bone satire, fuelled by coal black humour and fierce intelligence, the play won the inaugural Bruntwood international prize for playwriting in 2019.

Its characters are glaringly stereotyped and the drama unpicks these tropes with every repeat, until we arrive in present-day Harlem for a reckoning.

The scene speeds through the plot of Miss Saigon in miniature: a GI lands in a village, falls for a local woman, abandons her after the war and then comes back with his American wife to claim his child, leaving her to take her own life. Beginning in Japan in 1906 and spanning over 100 years, it is structured around a scene that repeats across the ages and references South Pacific and M*A*S*H as well as Miss Saigon. Lee went home and wrote her response: untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play. I’ve been telling the cast we’re jugging with batons of fireĪside from racist tropes around the Vietnamese characters and the reductive, she says, sexualised portrayal of Asian women, the misogyny and cultural imperialism were staggering.

Music lab songs