Kiln Theatre, til 10 May 2025

⭐⭐⭐

Historical drama is compelling but shortchanges the potential of a fascinating true(ish) story.

My boyfriend often laments the recent trend of ‘villain origins’ stories (think Cruella, or Maleficent) that offer new, often more sympathetic perspectives on known baddies. It would be too simplistic to put Amy Ng’s ambitious Shanghai Dolls into that category, but it does have something of that flavour in the way it explores the fascinating life story of Lan Ping – later Madame Mao, Mao Zedong’s fourth wife and a fearsome figurehead of China’s brutal cultural revolution. Recounting the story of Lan Ping’s life alongside another key revolutionary woman, trailblazing theatre director Li Lin*, Ng offers a different perspective on the uncompromising leader and a nuanced exploration of how women built influence in a historical era that didn’t have a place for them.

The narrative begins in the 1930s at an audition for the Ibsen classic A Doll’s House – the inspiration for this play’s name and the production that first made then-actress Lan Ping a star. It’s here she meets the young and naive Li Lin, scared of making a fuss but with an undeniable talent for theatre that the brassy Lan Ping is determined to foster. The two thus begin a tumultuous friendship that the play charts over more than three decades. The Chinese political zeitgeist is not just a backdrop for the two women’s lives but actively shapes their destinies, each becoming a powerful figure and building their own sphere of influence. As their paths diverge their relationship changes fundamentally, each developing very different ideas of what it means to be a revolutionary and a communist.

Let’s start with the good. Shanghai Dolls is full of drama and intrigue and there’s never a dull moment. There are diabolical political manoeuvres, Machiavellian alliances, historical upheaval and violent martyrdom. It’s a fascinating period in Chinese history of which these two women were not just eyewitnesses but architects. Shanghai Dolls packs over 50 years of history into an 80-minute runtime, with projected montages filling in the chronological gaps.

There’s also, if you’re into this kind of thing (as this reviewer definitely is), some pretty interesting explorations of feminism, revolution, culture and the intersection between all three. Though the men around Lan Ping and Li Lin speak of progressivism and equality, their obsessive grip on power offers no seat at the table for women. Li Lin and Lan Ping are both ambitious in their own ways but must take a different pathway to power, exerting influence in the only way they can – relying on but also exploiting the men around them. It’s an intriguing examination of soft power and how women in particular have employed it to make their mark on history.

With a good story and compelling themes, Shanghai Dolls really does have all the key ingredients for a winning historical drama. Its only flaw, which becomes more and more apparent as the play goes on, is that it is too ambitious in the scale of the story it tries to tell. The problem with using real people in a story is that they don’t really function like fictional characters – they’re contrary, and complicated; their motivations are muddled and they don’t have neat, satisfying character arcs. Madame Mao is the perfect example of this – from teacher to actor to revolutionary to political prisoner, she was obviously a woman of multitudes and contradictions, far too many so to square away in a one-act play. It’s jarring to see so many variations of this character stitched together without seeing the intervening years. One of the most disconcerting jumps, for example, starts with a scene in which Lan Ping angrily refuses Li Lin’s father’s help, claiming she doesn’t want to be reliant on men – only for the very next scene to fast forward to when she has married Mao and is feeling as though she has been sidelined as merely a wife. This seemingly hypocritical choice may well have been one made by the real Lan Ping – It’s a matter of historical record that over her life she was both a freewheeling artist and China’s first lady. But when decades of her life are squeezed into just a few scenes, there isn’t enough room for these contradictions to be explored fully and the result is simply discombobulating.

Li Lin’s character arc similarly doesn’t ring true (ironic though that may be given her real-life inspiration). Though she starts the play the more devout party patriot of the two, by the end she’s the one persecuted by the state for her heretical views – and I was never quite sure when or why that switch happened. Add to that the whirlwind of CCP heavyweights alluded to but never seen onstage, and the end result is that there are parts of this play that feel hard to follow. It’s probably also worth noting (though I’m personally of the belief fictional stories, if presented as such, don’t need to adhere strictly to their true-life counterparts) that Ng has taken plenty of liberties in the presentation of this story. Although Li Lin and Lan Ping did once audition for the same play, it was many years after A Doll’s House, it wasn’t in Shanghai and by all accounts they hated each other from the get-go, rather than ever being friends.

The chronological jumps are masked with expository projections that dominate the stage – newsreels and headlines tell us the key historical events like a school textbook. These transitions are backed by a booming, often overwhelming score. It’s technically very good – I can’t fault director Katie Posner or production team on that. But overall the flashiness of it detracts from where the play is strongest – exploring these two fascinating characters through well-written dialogue exchanges.

Shanghai Dolls proves that the Chinese cultural revolution is particularly fertile ground for dramatic storytelling, and I can’t criticise Ng for choosing the intriguing life stories of these two women as the inspiration for her work. But jumping years at a time and blurring together very different eras of their lives is jarring. I’d love to see this as a TV series, in which the characters could be explored in more depth to offer a more rounded portrait of these two women across the decades. Shanghai Dolls is definitely compelling, but Ng deserves more space to tell this story.

*In both the play and in real life, the two protagonists of this story changed names many times. For the purposes of this review, I will refer to the first protagonist as Lan Ping or Madame Mao, and the second protagonist as Li Lin (this is how she is first introduced in the play, though she is also referred to by her real and better known name, Sun Weishi).

Visit the Kiln Theatre website for tickets to Shanghai Dolls.