White China
7 – 17 June 2023
Underground Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, New Farm
Playlab Theatre’s latest mainstage production, White China, premieres this June at Brisbane Powerhouse, directed by Ian Lawson and starring Tegan Braithwaite, Deborah Faye Lee, Elise Greig, Emily Liu, and Tracey Tainsh (aka Isheeni).
The experience of Brisbane’s flooding rivers has been etched into memories of high tidelines. Their numbers are shorthand for scars: 2022, 2011, 1974. White China invites generations of Queenslanders to reflect on what binds us, and question where we come from. The play centres around Daisy, a devout do-gooder of Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland, her daughter Jaz the defiant hippie, and grandmother Lily who has disappeared from her retirement home. In a tin dinghy, Daisy and Jaz frantically search for Lily, but what they don’t know is that Lily is also searching. Having rediscovered her half-sister Joy, Lily seeks her mother’s grave, desperate to find it before Ancestor’s Day.
A flash back to the tensions of Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland and the chaos of the raging river that remade Brisbane – this play seeks to remind us of how far we’ve come, and that in some ways we’re in exactly the same place. White China features reminders of the 70s protest movement and a zeitgeist that echoes today: the marches calling for women’s rights, the protests to end pointless wars, and the ugly truth that we’re having the same arguments 50 years later.
“White China is my contribution to the too-long suppressed history of Chinese in Australia,” says playwright Therese Collie. “I hope that audiences recognize the individual price paid personally by those who were forced to deny or be shamed by their difference.”
For ticketing and further information, visit the Playlab Theatre website
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