Plunder, art and the British Museum: Time to go home
Photo: Alex Brenner
Daniel Nelson
It’s incumbent on us
as always
when faced with these spurious
anti-museum circuses,
to do absolutely nothing.
We do not feed the beast
We do not engage
says the British Museum official dismissively as a noisy protest rages outside about the labelling of plundered, bought, traded foreign artefacts.
Many such objects exist in the museum, and in other galleries and institutions, but the work that is the focus of London-based Singaporean writer Joel Tan’s kaleidoscopic new play, Scenes from a Repatriation, is a 1,000-year-old Bodhisatvva Guanyin.
The statue sits mutely at one end of the tunnel-shaped stage, drawing the attention and comments of a series of visitors: Islington witches, British soldiers, museum guards, curators, student demonstrators, academics, lecturers, lion dancers, a poetic dumpling provider, drag king, artist, an oligarch, cleaner, interrogator, a social butterfly from Arkansas, a small boat emigrant, a people smuggler, a Uighur protester, a stonemason.
All these characters live in China or the UK. For most, the statue is a background to their lives, for a few it is the centrepiece. Their reactions vary according to their standing and outlook, ranging from awe to “I’m not much into art”.
The variations are the point. They don’t fit neatly onto a British Museum label; they show what the statue really means to different people, and why the reasons for backing repatriation are also varied.
It’s fascinating, but what makes the play so outstanding are the derlicious cameos, the razor-edge dialogue, the sharpness of the situations, Tan’s penetrating ability to skewer attitudes in the British-Chinese community, as well as the hypocrisies on display in a meeting of academics, in the confrontation between a professor and a student, in the coded clash between a museum official and an unimaginably rich businessman, and the cat and mouse between an interrogator and victim.
Many words have been uttered and written about the rights and wrongs of returning art and artefacts from British museums to their countries of origin, but Tan has found an exciting new way of dramatising and putting a human face on the debate (even when using stereotypes), and giving an important additional boost to its emotional resonances. It’s funny, thoughtful and hugely entertaining.
* Scenes From A Repatriation, £15-£30, is at the Royal Court, Sloane Square, SW1W 8AS until 24 May. Info:Royal Court