Caught

Cast member Jing-Xuan Chan (as herself?) thanks us for coming to this performance of Caught but she warns us that there is content some may find distressing.  However, Red Stitch staff are on hand in the foyer to help.  Curious.  No other Red Stitch show that I’ve seen has begun like this.  Of course, we accept that this is ‘real’.  By the end, we’ll realise that this welcome was another fiction, one of many serial fictions (or tricks), that we have kept accepting as ‘real’ only to have our trust disabused and the carpet whipped out from under us.  We keep accepting these fictions because we are in a theatre, watching a play and the quality, plausibility and sincerity of the very fine cast keep us suspending our disbelief – just as we generally do…

Now the play begins (it has already begun) in an art gallery in which the exhibits are cloud shapes covered in calligraphy (or what we take to be calligraphy).  Design is by Silvia Shao.  Charming, handsome Chinese dissident artist Lin Bo (Louis Le), dressed in a stylish mix of Chinese and Western fashion gives a smooth and confident lecture.  He tells how he spent two cruel years in a Beijing prison for creating a ‘virtual protest’, commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.  We believe his description because (a) it’s a good story, and (b) it’s what we think we know about Chinese repression.  Lin Bo’s dramatic story has been written up in The New Yorker.  But the editor, Bob (David Whitely) and the journalist Joyce (Jessica Clarke) have gone to print with inadequate fact checking.  It seems Lin Bo has invented a little, and plagiarised factual details from other writers.  Thus, Bob is angry and aggressive, and Joyce is panicking.  Bob is all too aware how this scandal will affect his magazine.  That the story is not entirely ‘true’ becomes the issue rather than the fact that artists are persecuted in China…  For Joyce, it’s all about her.  ‘I just don’t think you know,’ she tells Lin Bo, voice quavering, ‘how hard it is to toil at the bottom of the journalism food chain.’  Jessica Clarke plays it with a fine line of pathos and self-absorbed solipsism.  Do we feel sorry for Joyce?  No.  We laugh at her.

But then ‘Lin Bo’ is revealed as a fiction (well, until the third act), a creation, too…  And his interrogation at The New Yorker is revealed as part of a larger work by Chinese artist Wang Min (Jing-Xuan Chan) who is interviewed, post-show, by the gallery Curator (Jessica Clarke).  This ‘interview’ is an all-too-familiar example of obfuscation, contradiction, condescension, and evasion.  Here, Clarke gets more laughs as she takes bewilderment through to rage as she loses control.  Her Curator just cannot get a grip on her contrarian interlocutor who keeps saying ‘No, that’s not what I mean.’  Although she never does say quite what she does mean.  What she implies, however, is that the Curator, as an American, cannot possibly understand Chinese culture and so criticisms of China must be set aside. 

Around this point, there are audible groans and squawks of irritable frustration from some sections of our audience – revealing perhaps that they have suspended their disbelief yet again and thus they want some straight answers from this woman!  But this woman, Wang Min is a character in a play (superbly played by Jing-Xuan Chan with sublime confidence) so our expectations are frustrated – yet again.

Caught asks that old question, ‘What is Truth?’  And do the requirements of ‘Truth’ differ depending on the context, or the medium?  Everybody knows the saying, ‘Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.’  Is that because we’d rather have a ‘good story’ than the facts?  It’s irritating, isn’t it, when ‘facts’ break flow, or muck up the drama or the dramatic structure?

Here is a play that fits right into the zeitgeist in which we have, besides ‘truth’, the useful modern category of ‘truthiness’ – i.e., if it feels kind of true, then…  Paradoxically, an apparent obsession with ‘truth’ exists in a climate of uninhibited but virtually expected lying for which there are no sanctions.

Playwright Christopher Chen’s inspiration for Caught came, back in 2016, from the brouhaha around monologist Mike Daisey’s piece The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, later broadcast on This American Life, about the manufacture of Apple products by child labour in Chinese factories.  Daisey was revealed to have fabricated certain details (just like the fictitious ‘Lin Bo’).  Cristopher Chen commented in an interview back then, ‘We’re relieved in a way, to not have to worry about workers’ conditions in China.’  It’s a telling point and possibly the most powerful of Chen’s demonstration that ‘truth’, much of the time, is what we make of it especially when it enables us to ignore the real truth beneath.  Believing is seeing – not the other way round.

Some readers may also remember the MTC production The Lifespan of a Fact in which an assiduous young fact-checker found numerous errors of fact in a journalist’s piece about the death of a teenager.  He was right: the journalist had got several details wrong, some deliberately so that his piece ‘read better’.  Were these details crucial?  But the fact, the real fact, was that a teenager had been killed and the piece brought that to the readers’ attention.

So, who is caught by Caught?  Mostly the audience.  The play is, if you like, a play of ideas.  There are no ‘characters’ (although this cast creates characters) and because there is no plot, the play rather staggers to an end with an argument between two performers (Jing-Xuan Chan and Louis Le) in a theatre dressing room when each discovers that the other has had an intimate relationship with the same mentor.  The point being that ‘what is truth?’ is an issue in personal relationships.  Which will, I suspect be news to no one.

Director Jean Tong holds this tricksy, physically static meta-theatre piece together with humour, brisk pacing, and fine performances – a real achievement considering that, really, there’s not that much there.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Jodie Hutchinson