MISS BRITISH by The Art of Strangers

“One Day We’ll Arrive at the Big House”

Reviewer: Edward Eng
Performance: 4 April 2019

On the back of Cake’s riotous examination of schoolyard power in Rubber Girl on the loose, The Studios now desaturates its space to bring us another study of power, this time in the earthy settings of race and the postcolonial.

But while this take on race/power is as deeply aestheticised and beautiful as any other, it is most obviously limited by its reprisal of the same devices and arguments found in recent plays and films. Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai’s Building a Character, Grace Kalaiselvi’s Goddess of Words and Sharon Frese’s Ayer Hitam all collide in this play, but nothing really new comes out of it.

Miss British is a muddy poem. Director Felipe Cervera combines live cinema, archive, personal story and rhythm to suggest how the issue of race is shaped by our own biases, as well as the biases of every author in history.

It also delves very much into the idea of jaggedness. So when Dorai, Kalaiselvi and Frese are dancing to the line, “white, brown and black”, we are aware that each iteration of the lyric is greatly inflected by the preceding scene: for instance, Dorai’s sobering encounter with a racist in the UK, or Kalaiselvi’s giggly encounter with a Sri Lankan man who asks her out.

There is live cinema, which reflects the three women’s faces on large screens. The cameras are a multi-faceted device: they make visible the women for the first time, and capture them re-performing historical tableaus with the passion of hindsight. But more than aiding reflection, they also intervene in the theatrical space, overlaying text quoted from post-colonial theory onto the images.

The scenes themselves are subtle and yet powerful – the most poignant being the incident of a washerwoman who is abused by her colonial master, played once each by the three actors. Another touching segment is the barren ritual of tea being served, whilst an infant is held by a nearby surrogate.

Which leads me to question how a theatre of struggle is felt. By some standard of judgement, Miss British is quite excellent. It is hauntingly beautiful and while not too inventive, it depicts its subject well and appropriately. At the end of the day, we want to see the three women win. Or as one character says, “arrive at the big house.”

But having seen the agency and urgent hurt in other productions that take a similar approach, there is a ‘liveness’ that Miss British is missing. Perhaps it comes from the sense of curation arising from the mishmash of theatre and live cinema. Or from the straightforwardness of the answer that racism and colonialism are always awful. Either way, I left the theatre feeling slightly empty.