Because I’m worth it. Are you sure?
Daniel Nelson
Chinese-Canadian-British playwright Joanne Lau has the last laugh in her comedy drama, Worth.
She assembles four siblings in their family home in England for the first time in years, ahead of their Chinese for the first time in years, ahead of their Chinese mother’s funeral. They are all different: a mousy mum and her phone-fixated son, a spivvy, aggressive just-out-of-jail chancer, a self-satisfied dentist, and the youngest, a touchy doctor of theology with a weird morality (“My family doesn’t believe in wheely suitcases. They’re immoral.”) who resents being called the baby of the family.
The dialogue is witty and fast, as you would expect of a writer who had a stint as a stand-up comedian, but each character feels like stereotype.
Even when Lau sets the ball rolling towards the end of the first act with the group’s realisation that mum must have left a useful stash of cash in the house, and that they all desperately want to get their hands on it, you feel this is all a little too light, too predictable, too undemanding.
Wow! – as the man behind in the seat behind me said out loud in a shocked voice at the end – how wrong we were.
Having got the treasure hunt in motion, Lau combines the slapstick search for money with a searing analysis of the attitude of migrant – in this case, Chinese – parents who make huge sacrifices for their children but resent them for having everything the parents didn;’t have.
That dangerous behavioural split, it is revealed, erupts and manifests itself in brutal physical child abuse. The revelations escalate as the siblings compete to outdo each’s experience of ill-treatment.
Lau further stokes the drama by turning a withering spotlight on each of the characters’ motivations and asks, Where do you put your self-worth?
The all-too-easy theatricality has given way to a far darker humour, and finally explodes as the ex-con son uses violence, cunning and insistence on “respect”, aka fear, to mentally and emotionally pinpoint the others’ weaknesses, particularly, in an action that verges on the Theatre of Cruelty, the dentist.
Wow! Indeed. Lau says she suffered physical abuse as a child but that writing about it “made me think about it more sympathetically”, with the understanding that her parents had it worse (I hopefully have chosen to let it go”). She has also experienced anti-Chinese racism in the streets of Britain as well as from a flatmate. But she’s brave enough not to deny or dodge but to write about gray areas.
“Sometimes i think “Oh, I shouldn’t have written about that. But then I think: ‘But it’s true.’”
* Worth is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8, £10-£30, until 29 April. Info: https://www.arcolatheatre.com/whats-on/ 7503 1646