Hungry Ghosts

In a programme note Tim Luscombe, who also directs his own play, makes the jaw-dropping assertion that to a large extent the Chinese Communist Party is all about winning back the dignity that China lost after those humiliating Opium Wars with the English. Really?

On that basis, his media-savvy pragmatists who toe the party line and wear beautifully cut suits, dresses and heels Western style, are patriots if not folk heroes, while the protesting peasant in chains, with a metaphorical pistol at her temple, is indeed a traitor.

Luscombe, a keen observer of human rights abuses in South-East Asia, is also a fan of Formula One racing which he imports to the Shanghai international racing circuit when an English driving champion, played with dogged assurance by Andres Williams – finding himself upstaged by a Chinese motor racing rival – devotes his energies to a hapless and endangering attempt to fight an obviously false case of treason against a Chinese woman.

The Formula One element gets in the way of the central human rights plot. There is a good deal of Buddhist incense burning before a life-size seated sculpture of the Buddha, not to mention a tender scene in a Chinese prison when a brother and sister spend her fraught final hours telling themselves what each already knew very well of their complicit behaviour during the 1966 Cultural Revolution.

Luckily there are three strong performances that help make the evening shine – from Benedict Wong as a successful Shanghai journalist and property developer, Lourdes Faberes as the racing driver’s svelte minder, both with an acute sense of what goes and what doesn’t in present day China, and from Lucy Sheen as a champion of Chinese democracy.