Culture

Chimerica

What happened to the man who stood in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square?

May 19, 2013
© Johan Persson
© Johan Persson

What happened to that man who stood in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square? In the new play by Lucy Kirkwood, an American photo-journalist who was in Beijing in 1989 is now covering the 2012 US presidential elections. In the middle of a debate on the outsourcing of jobs to Chinese factories, he reads a cryptic newspaper message that reawakens his curiosity and he sets out to discover the fate of the man in the photo.

Lucy Kirkwood’s last play, NSFW, was a savvy survey of pornography and celebrity journalism, so hopes are high for her new piece for the theatre company Headlong, which invariably lives up to its name in tackling issues such as climate change, drugs and terrorism. Kirkwood’s text is taken on by director Lyndsey Turner and designer Es Devlin, looking to follow such notable Headlong hits as Lucy Prebble’s ENRON and last year’s The Effect.

Chimerica runs at the Almeida Theatre from 20th May to 6th July