'Shangri-La' Finborough Theatre **

Tourism can be extremely beneficial for places that are in need of cultural investment and a boost of money in building sustainable tourism facilities such as; hotels and shopping centres, nonetheless, this could make some of the locals quite angry as livelihoods are being eroded due to a surge of tourists entering their areas. The Finborough Theatre’s production of Amy Ng’s debut play, ‘Shangri-La’ was a rather mundane show about a place in China being bombarded by tourists and how it is making local citizens isolated, plus the performances were pretty lifeless and heinous.  

‘Shangri-La’ is set plainly in Shangri-La, a Yunnan province in the Chinese Himalayan mountains where we’re enlightened with Bunny Mu, a tour guide for Authentic China who has been an observer of her family’s income blighted because of a conglomerate of tourism. Along with her Tibetan co-worker, Karma Tsering makes a slight dig at putting on fake accents for the betterment of the Americans visiting the Yunnan Province and in this instance visitor, Sylvia Bass who truly wants to engross herself into the Chinese culture. Over the course of the performance, Bunny has to make a drastic and personally devastating choice where in order for her to elope from a country that is briskly disappearing in front of her eyes. She wants to be a world travelling photographer, yet, she has a gigantic problem when other photographers take images of people without their permission; such as Irish photographer, Hope Leathy. Nevertheless, Hope does help Bunny on how best to take the most flawless photo, however, what Hope tries to instruct Bunny on that in order for photos to make more of an impact to a widespread audience that you may have to break taboos so that your political and artistic messages can come across almost immediately. The CEO of Authentic China , Nelson Wong perceives that his company is trying to preserve the traditional Chinese values so that tourists like Sylvia Bass can have a worthwhile experience, but for Bunny she is apprehensive by Nelson’s vision. This is because Nelson has been taught in the Western world where business and money is more imperative than his cultural routes. We soon learn that Karma is a double-crosser as he is an entrepreneur who fleece’s tourists where at first he dresses in traditional Chinese dress for cash then with the money he has earned from this he spends it on Italian suits and as such; he is a rather shifty character and is not to be trusted.  Bunny thinks that Nelson should understand and value his background and not to be constantly thinking about how much money he can obtain from tourists, unfortunately he doesn’t seem too bothered by this. At the finale, Bunny has achieved her goal and emigrated to America and is exhibiting her photography in a gallery in New York City where Nelson is present there and states to Bunny that Authentic China helped her escape from a life full of poverty. Ng’s narrative is increasingly rubbish as the political issues are mentioned but never analysed, also, the actual characters and plot did not exactly ignite how China has been affected by tourism by the tourism industry and this is due to a lack of a coherent plot so not a good debut play whatsoever. 

One found the performance by the company of, ‘Shangri-La’ to be bland and dreadful as there are no real emotions and the Chinese accents were woeful and to be honest, I did find it offensive and disgraceful as an actor must vocalise this with realism and intent. Julia Sandiford is satisfactory as tour-guide come successful photographer, Bunny Wu; chiefly when she confronts her boss about his lack of honesty with how Authentic China is actually run and you can see that she wants her area of China to be truthful to what it is and this is shown through her imagery. Andrew Koji is okay as Tibetan fraudster, Karma Tsering; for example how at first we see that he does want to keep his county retaining its traditional values, on the other hand, when he is seen in an expensive suit we know he is just the same as anyone wanting money before honesty. Rosie Thomson is conventional as both Sylvia Bass and Hope Leathy; especially how as Sylvia she does instigate the miniscule amount of humour and there’s not a lot of it in this play that’s for sure and as Hope she does show her intellectual side which is a distinct comparison to the hipster character that is Sylvia Bass. Kevin Shen is passable as the CEO of Authentic China, Nelson Wong; mainly as you can really witness that he hasn’t got a moral bone in his body and that money is what he wants and that his background doesn’t matter to him, yet there’s a little bit of integrity in a small rare moment. 

Charlotte Westenra’s direction is lamentable here as she has not even given us an appropriate portrayal of how tourism has destroyed the actual residents’ lives and even when this is attempted, it doesn’t scrape the surface, and moreover, the characterisations were drab and not even worth the time to give it a thorough grilling. Yatkwan Wong’s design is horrendous and desensitising as just simply putting pieces of ripped sheets of paper just doesn’t cut the mustard and I wasn’t transported to China whatsoever and for me, I would rather boil my own head then go through how bad the design was. Overall, the experience of, ‘Shangri-La’ was rather monotonous and shameful as there were hardly any positive things to express about this show that makes you want to drink more than one or two pints of booze, so not for me I am afraid.