Chay Vong Vong, Sept 4, 1996

Chay Vong Vong by Tony Le Nguyen

Napier Street Theatre until September 15, 1996

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around Sept 4, 1996

We should despair that each cultural group which arrives in Australia as migrants suffers frighteningly similar troubles.

The Vietnamese characters in Tony Le Nguyen's play, Chay Vong Vong, echo the pain and loss of European refugees from the Second World War or those from the Middle East in the 70's or Bosnia in the 90's.

They do not simply escape oppressive regimes, war-torn homelands, decimated families, poverty and starvation. They arrive to the same cool reception of the "natives", the same soulless Housing Commission flats, the same language difficulties, racism and abuse.

But the likenesses do not end outside their walls. The families suffer similar internal explosiveness. The teenager’s battle against restrictive parents rules, culture clashes, the incompatible but twin desires to please the parents and to fit in to a new culture.

Nguyen's characters have dragged their bloodied lives from Vietnam into a new environment where father still plots with their cronies to bring down the Communist government, mother is abused and oppressed and a teenage girl is treated like a chattel by her boyfriend.

Khoi, played with great sensitivity and truth by Thanh Vu Nguyen, is a quiet, serious teenager whose parents died in Vietnam. This is a recipe for disaster. His intensity leads him not to studiousness as it might with another, but to isolation, depression and drugs which have become an enormous problem in this community.

Nguyen seems to have based his play firmly in the Community Theatre tradition of intensive research into the Vietnamese community. He intersperses naturalistic scenes with monologues telling often wrenchingly tragic personal stories. His direction is well supported by Jane Rafe's wonderful geometric design on floor and banners.

The play takes off about half way through its two hours when the family conflict intensifies suddenly and the dramatic temperature rises steeply. At the beginning, it seemed to be a series of unrelated vignettes. 

Although these are explained at the very end, the style is not quite coherent and the text could benefit from a vigorous edit of the dialogue. The level of performance varies. This is the charm of community-based projects.

KATE HERBERT