Turning the streets into a stage ... Moonwalking in Chinatown. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
There is something both thrillingly ambitious and perhaps a tad foolhardy about Soho Theatre's Moonwalking in Chinatown. It's a piece of promenade theatre that takes place when the surrounding streets are at their busiest, packed with after-work drinkers and tourists hunting for a cheap place to eat.
Inspired by the Chinese Moon Festival, Suzanne Gorman's show takes its audience on a journey through those bustling streets and into the heart of London's Chinatown, past its shops and restaurants, into the back alleys and (in the play's best realized scene) a wonderful, hidden residential courtyard.
As we followed our lantern-bearing guide, a series of scenes unfolded at various points along the meandering route. These involved a young Chinese woman and her concerns about introducing her white British boyfriend to her traditionally-minded family. As narratives go, it was rather slender, but the main joy of the production is the way it surprised its audience, the way we were never sure where the next scene would come from, or even if what we were seeing was a planned part of the show. Certainly there was a lot of scope for things to go awry, with people out on the town for the evening naturally taking an interest in this odd spectacle: some heckled, some asked questions, and others simply tagged along.
In a way the audience became as much a part of the show as the actors. A sense of the theatrical permeated the glittery, gaudy hub of Chinatown with its seedy alleys filled with kitchen smells and bemused restaurant workers. To my mind, this is what urban outdoor theatre should be about, it made me see streets I thought I knew well in a new light; it made me take the time to look around and above instead of simply straight ahead.
But if the play encapsulated all that excites about theatre without walls, it also highlighted the drawbacks of this kind of performance. Though the acting (admittedly by a mixture of professional and community volunteers) was pretty broad, it was still easy for dialogue to get lost amid the buzz of people going about their lives; all the walking around between scenes made for a rather disconnected experience and, had the material been presented in a more conventional fashion, I suspect the thinness of the script would have become glaringly apparent.
Maybe these are necessary compromises in order to enjoy an evening like this. I'd certainly love to see the Bush or the Arcola attempting similar projects in their respective neighbourhoods, and with the BAC currently using their whole building in so imaginative a fashion for Punchdrunk's production of The Masque Of Red Death, the bar is being raised in terms of creative use of space. So should more theatres be looking outside themselves in this way or are these kinds of shows gimmicky at best?
