Musical on colony’s past

Press, 27 September 1982, Page 9

Musical on colony’s past

NZPA-Reuter London As Hong Kong frets about its future, Britain’s Royal Shakespeare company is mounting a musical about, the colony’s past. The opium war of 1840, in which Britain forced China to buy drugs and cede Hong Kong, will be recounted as a sarcastic pantomime “Poppy” in which the audience will be invited to join in comic songs styled after those of Gilbert and Sullivan. It will be the first modern play staged by the company in its new theatre in London’s Barbican complex. Britain’s lease on the New Territories, vital to Hong

Kong’s economy, runs out in 1997,-and concern about the future has been sending shivers through the local stock exchange. The issue is expected to have been a main topic of discussion for the British Prime Mrs Margaret Thatcher, oh her recent visit to China. < “Poppy” will use the Barbican theatre’s facilities to the full, laying on spectacular sets, a pantomime dragon, tiger, elephant, horses and six metre opium poppies. But the playwright, Peter Nichols, has a serious message. “He lays bare the Vic-

torian hypocrisy of a foreign war waged solely to ensure that China remained addicted to opium, the single most profitable export of the British East India Company,” said an R.S.C. leaflet. “The play is a history. It is anti-imperialist. Nothing about the opium wars could not be,” said Mr Nichols. He said that "Poppy” was based substantially on the story of Jardine, Matheson and Company, the East India traders who were central to the development of Hong Kong and are still a main trading concern in the colony. The hero is Dick, a boy

who is taken to China by his uncle, a merchant called Upward, on a ship laden with bibles and opium. They are trapped in Canton by the Chinese authorities and rescued by British gunboats, to live happily ever after — except that the hero’s girlfriend has become addicted to laudanum, liquid opium that was a popular British medication at the time. Asked whether “Poppy” might be staged in China, Mr Nichols said that none of his work had been performed in Communist countries. “Maybe it is too downbeat,” he said.