Review: SCENES FROM A REPATRIATION, Royal Court

In between the usual tweets footballers post (gym workouts, lolling round a pool in Dubai, grins and thumbs up after a win), an outlier went viral in August 2023. Mohamed Salah took a selfie at the British Museum, surrounded by the plunder of The Pyramids - it was a departure from the kids and Christmas trees he usually features for a man acutely aware of the impact of anything he says or does. As ever with the player they call The Egyptian King, the politics were left understated, but, in a city stamped more than most with the mark of Empire, in Liverpool, it did not go unnoticed, nor unpraised. 

I recalled my own first visit to the imposing, even intimidating, building (which led to a three decades-long hiatus, before art won out over ethics) and its overwhelming feeling of “What has this stuff got to do with me?” I’m a member now, but it still jars that the British Museum prompts that thought and, more pertinently, that it is not a question that would ever have arisen for Mo Salah.  

That paradox (that the Museum labeled 'British' carries much more meaning for those who would not identify as British, or not fully so) is the jumping off point for Singaporean pl,aywright, Joel Tan’s,stars sprawling, provocative, fascinating new play, Scenes From A Repatriation. 

A statue, wrapped in bandages, as if its subject has suffered severe injuries, and bound in cords as if to restrain action, sits overlooking the gift shop. To the ogling tourists and security staff, it’s just another artefact, the Boddhisattva Guan Yin, a gift acquired from a Chinese benefactor in 1917. To protesting Chinese students, it is an icon of an ancient culture, an example of imperial plunder and genocide, the tangible representation of a story to be reclaimed. As the titular scenes play out, the shifting dynamics of power in a rapidly changing cultural, political and economic environment push and pull the statue as it is eventually (and literally) hauled out of London and set down in China. 

Under the dynamic direction of emma+pj, who make fine use of a panopticon mezzanine space above an end of the traverse stage and also effect a fine coup de théâtre in the first half, an ensemble cast play multiple roles. We get comic and tragic, pathetic and frightening, stereotypical and surprising in a dizzying array of characters brilliantly sketched in seconds. Much is asked of Kaja Chan, Aidan Cheng, Jon Chew, Fiona Hampton, Robin Khor Yong Kuan and Sky Yang and they deliver wonderfully well, especially Ms Chan who morphs from hard-nosed State interrogator (in Mandarin) to louche lounge singer in the blinking of an eye.

If the bitty nature of the structure, and a loss of subtlety when the action switches to China in the second half and the financial muscles of a historically wronged people are flexed, pulls the production back a little, this is still a fine and important contribution to a growing debate, and not one confined to museology. If Hamilton leaves you humming the refrain “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”, Scenes From A Repatriation expands a debate often confined to The Parthenon Marbles and artworks acquired by the Nazis. 

What does a Western eye see when it alights on the Gyan Yin? Does a sentence or two on the wall next to it provide explanation or exculpation? How should pleas for an enlightened and progressive approach be received when their source is an authoritarian and illiberal regime?  

As the Trump Administration is learning very quickly, the Chinese state is a ruthless and patient animal that will accumulate such power as it requires before making an offer that we can’t refuse. 

Unless, that is, the British state gets in first, and does the right thing in agreeing a balanced and phased return of far too much material drenched in the old (and the not so old) blood of the victims of an Empire that still casts a long shadow. Great art may be owned by all humankind, but it really does matter where the stories are told and by whom - and a reckoning is surely coming.  

Scenes From A Repatriation at the Royal Court until 24 May