Wharf 2 is a really small space but it also isn’t. You can feel close to the actors but there is really quite a lot of us in here. The set is one long room. A high window on the left lets in dawn. A door bolted shut is set beneath it. Banquet chairs stacked against the wall. A few are set around a family table. A small cot in one corner beneath a small photo of someone the Thai king maybe. I can't make it out from where I am. Sitting at the table in one chair is a man. His head on the table. Asleep? Dead. He's the chef the head of the kitchen and the primary reason the restaurant, the family has been kept alive in Australia. Now he's dead. He caught something. Coughed and choked and died. No one knows what it was they couldn't take him to the doctor. No time. No papers.
We are far out west in a country town. The only non-whites here and unwelcome for it. The boy is a teenager and young still, this is for him. This slaving in a restaurant. For his future. This is for her. This slaving in a restaurant in a foreign land, sending money home, never seeing her. The mother, the owner is ridgid and stiff in all her movements. The couple who work in the kitchen are flightly and panicked. They fight and love and regret their daughter who they have not seen in so many years. He desperately wants to return to her. She does not.
Then it starts.
Someone has written a big black letter in paint on the wall of the church. A thai letter. The local police burst in. Aggressive and racist enough. The town already suspicious and unwelcoming, turn hostile. Throwing glances and bricks.
The mother pushes them all each night to prepare for a restaurant full of customers who never come. They rage against the futility but she pushes.
The dead chef, concealed in the family room throughout all of this, cajoles and whispers and instructs the young boy in life, cooking, family and the impossibility of escape.
There is a riot. They town comes to throw them all out and the young woman who has realised now that she is sick with whatever killed the chef leaves with them. A sacrifice. The burn the boy of the chef for they are Thai and escape into the night. To the next place. Or maybe to home. They lie to the man about where his wife has gone. The young boy meets the girl by the waterhole again. The girl who is the policeman's daughter. The girl who didn't want to be part of the riot but was. The girl who can't look at her village as beautiful anymore because she can't unsee what was always there but hidden. She will leave. She loves it but will leave it one day because she can't unsee the ugliness that was always there.
This play is so sinister in an almost supernatural way. It feels like racism is a malevolent spirit hovering over all of them. Igniting the town against them. Pushing them to turn on each other. The kindness of the dead chef in sharp contrast to the supernatural summoning of black paint on a church wall that everyone claims they aren't writing.
You do it all for your kids and then what? What do the kids do? All for theirs? Or does it stop here with this first generation? You give your life so theirs will be better but the same but a better same because you won't let them flex or change or leave.
We are far out west in a country town. The only non-whites here and unwelcome for it. The boy is a teenager and young still, this is for him. This slaving in a restaurant. For his future. This is for her. This slaving in a restaurant in a foreign land, sending money home, never seeing her. The mother, the owner is ridgid and stiff in all her movements. The couple who work in the kitchen are flightly and panicked. They fight and love and regret their daughter who they have not seen in so many years. He desperately wants to return to her. She does not.
Then it starts.
Someone has written a big black letter in paint on the wall of the church. A thai letter. The local police burst in. Aggressive and racist enough. The town already suspicious and unwelcoming, turn hostile. Throwing glances and bricks.
The mother pushes them all each night to prepare for a restaurant full of customers who never come. They rage against the futility but she pushes.
The dead chef, concealed in the family room throughout all of this, cajoles and whispers and instructs the young boy in life, cooking, family and the impossibility of escape.
There is a riot. They town comes to throw them all out and the young woman who has realised now that she is sick with whatever killed the chef leaves with them. A sacrifice. The burn the boy of the chef for they are Thai and escape into the night. To the next place. Or maybe to home. They lie to the man about where his wife has gone. The young boy meets the girl by the waterhole again. The girl who is the policeman's daughter. The girl who didn't want to be part of the riot but was. The girl who can't look at her village as beautiful anymore because she can't unsee what was always there but hidden. She will leave. She loves it but will leave it one day because she can't unsee the ugliness that was always there.
This play is so sinister in an almost supernatural way. It feels like racism is a malevolent spirit hovering over all of them. Igniting the town against them. Pushing them to turn on each other. The kindness of the dead chef in sharp contrast to the supernatural summoning of black paint on a church wall that everyone claims they aren't writing.
You do it all for your kids and then what? What do the kids do? All for theirs? Or does it stop here with this first generation? You give your life so theirs will be better but the same but a better same because you won't let them flex or change or leave.
