Date of Interview: 2 September 2025
Interviewer: Robin Khor
Interviewee: Leo Wan
ROBIN KHOR
This is New Earth Theatre’s 30 year anniversary. So why don’t you just tell us about how your journey with Yellow Earth Theatre or New Earth Theatre began?
LEO WAN
Before I met anyone from there, and I think I got invited to audition for a show maybe when I first started out and this is back in like twenty twelve or thereabouts. The most distinct memory is Kumiko, who was the artistic director at the time, came to see a show that I was doing called Dusting, which was a European play in translation in which I had to do lots of multi rolling on.
Kumiko noticed that I was doing all these different accents and came to talk to me after the show because she wanted to put me forward for this thing called the Norman Beaton Fellowship, which is run by the BBC. So basically you enter a competition to join the radio drama company. And she thought, because I was playing all of these different characters, that I’d be quite well suited for doing that. And so, yeah, I think that my first kind of concrete relationship with New Earth was Kumiko grabbing me after a show and saying she wanted to put me forward for that.
ROBIN KHOR
And how did it go? I mean, we knew that you won the fellowship.
LEO WAN
But more impactfully. What that was for me was the first time that I was getting properly paid long term as an actor. That was six months of employment as an actor that came about as a result of winning that, which meant I could leave all my various part time jobs and for the first time ever, actually just focus on being an actor.
ROBIN KHOR
So what was your first impression when you first encountered New Earth Theatre at the time?
LEO WAN
I’m not sure if I’d seen any of their shows before I met Kumiko for the first time, I knew what New Earth did. I knew that their focus was on East and Southeast Asian stories and performers and creatives. I grew to know New Earth Theatre through actually working with them, and then started to see more of their stuff after I’d started working with them, and my career started in 2011. And I would say that’s not that long ago, but fourteen years ago, the context for being or trying to be an actor and looking the way I do, or looking similar to the way I do, wasn’t easy.
There weren’t many East or Southeast Asian stories being told. There weren’t many theatre companies or theatre buildings programming or platforming those stories, and all the other stories which we might think could have been passed blindly in terms of race it seemed like I still wasn’t seeing many people who looked like me on stage. That has changed massively over the past decade or so, but given that that was the context, New Earth was playing a very, very vital role in not only giving people like me opportunities. Yes, to be paid and do work, but also opportunities to practice and hone skill and make sure we gain the skills and and gain the experience to hold on to being in the industry. So for me, that was the main thing that New Earth was doing when I first came across it.
ROBIN KHOR
How has that helped shape your career or your personal life, if any?
LEO WAN
So after that fellowship, I’ve worked with New Earth Theatre on full scale productions three times. So already that’s a significant amount. But I suppose, again, not having come from a drama school background, one of the benefits you get from drama school is you meet lots of other people who are trying to be actors who are similar age as you, and who are going through the same struggles or trying to overcome the same obstacles. So I didn’t have that.
But what I did find through New Earth was a community of ESEA and BESEA actors and creatives who were going through the same struggle, or overcoming the same obstacles as me from a racialised perspective, in terms of how we dealt or navigated the industry. An industry that at the time didn’t seem to want to employ us and didn’t seem to notice that we weren’t being employed as much as other people.
And having community and having colleagues and peers has probably been the most useful and constructive thing for me in my career because, as we all know, careers in the creative industries are very tempestuous and go up and down. And you know, when it’s at a low moment, you need some people and some friends and colleagues to support you, but also during the high moments. It’s really brilliant to see those people come out and celebrate you. And it’s also really brilliant that you can go out and celebrate them as well. So finding community is what New Earth facilitated for me.
ROBIN KHOR
Are you able to articulate the obvious shift that you could see because of their existence, or because of what New Earth has been doing since you know them? That actually helped push forward for the representation for East and Southeast Asian in the industry.
LEO WAN
There’s a couple of things. Quite often, when the complaint was made in the past that there aren’t enough East and Southeast Asian on stage, for example. When that complaint was made, the answer from the powers that be or the institutions would be, well, there aren’t those actors to put on our stages. We can’t find them. We don’t know where they are. New Earth has been brilliant in not only responding to that by going, actually, there is a list and they have the list. Not of all of them, but New Earth has always been very, very brilliant at going out and trying to find people.
Not only has it played that role, but it’s also played the role of making sure, actually there are lots of people who look like us who have the skills to perform on stage. So I would say it’s only over the past three to four years that I’ve really come to realise how successful and instrumental and significant the New Earth Academy has been in all its various iterations.
I was aware that it was going on, and it kind of started kind of at the same time as I was already starting performing on stage. So when it first started, it didn’t feel quite right for me. But it now exists in lots of different forms, and it has been such a brilliant success in giving access to training and again, access to community. And lots of people who have come from those academies will cite having gone to those academies as being crucial to their progress. That’s been a really, really big impact that I think New Earth has had in terms of making sure that there are as many people as possible with enough skills as possible to step into roles when they’re offered.
And then the final thing I would say is probably an unspoken and unseen thing. For most of the time, whilst I was involved with New Earth as a performer, Kumiko Mendl was the artistic director, and she worked so tirelessly to make sure that she was seen in the theatre industry so that New Earth Theatre was seen in the theatre industry.
So over the course of her tenure as artistic director, everyone knew who she was. She really, really worked hard to make sure that she was going to events and meets. And I don’t just mean people from our community, I mean people throughout the theatre industry to make sure that all the various artistic directors knew who she was and knew who New Earth Theatre was, and also knew that there was a problem with not enough representation on their stages and in their programming. And that kind of interpersonal stuff is slow and takes time. But I think that was probably the biggest shift in terms of getting more recognition for New Earth Theatre within the wider industry. And as a corollary of that, getting more of our voices platformed and programmed on our stages.
ROBIN KHOR
Now that you have worked with so many times in different productions and you have encountered and know Kumiko so personally, what is your most fondest memory with New Earth?
LEO WAN
A poignant memory for me was the last show that I did with them, which was Miss Julie, which was just as we were coming out of lockdown, a weird process of kind of going from lockdown to rehearsals on zoom, to actually being able to perform in front of human beings in a shared space again, felt like really, really powerful and really, really poignant. And I was really, really impressed and grateful that during this moment of kind of despair for our industry, New Earth was doing everything it could do to kind of get the show quite literally back on, on the road again.
ROBIN KHOR
Do you have any challenges then, whilst you’re working with New Earth Theatre? The challenge might not be coming from New Earth as a company, but as how you guys sort of navigate the industry together.
LEO WAN
In the early days. And it’s I guess it still is the case. It still doesn’t feel like there are always that many of our stories being told, and that has got better. But both we as individuals and New Earth had to try and navigate wanting to have those stories be told, whilst at the same time kind of not being so antagonistic that people didn’t want to tell the stories with us. It’s a really, really difficult line to walk. That has been a challenge and will always remain a challenge.
ROBIN KHOR
Yeah, you’ve been through, I mean, like I see that you also do some as a guest visiting speaker for the New Earth Academy as well.
LEO WAN
So now my most recent relationship with New Earth is that I’m now on the board of trustees. I’ve been on the board of trustees for a couple of years, so I asked if I could go and observe the Academy just because I’d never attended it myself. And I knew it was such a success and such a big part of New Earth’s story and output, that as a trustee, I thought it’d be useful if I could go and attend and just see what was going on. But they wouldn’t let me do that without making me do some work. So I had to go and talk to the people who were on the course, which was really, really interesting because on both occasions, the person who was running the course on the day was James Cooney, who’s an actor I know and have worked with for quite a while. We spent eighteen months together at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
ROBIN KHOR
Can you talk a little bit about this relationship as a board of trustees?
LEO WAN
I think we’ll be approaching two years. Yeah. So all charities have a board of trustees, and basically they exist to advise the executive team and to keep an eye on the various risks that the company may face. And during lockdown, I’d been very mouthy about trustees and boards because in a moment of great disaster and therefore great risk, that’s when trustees kind of come into their own and suddenly have to be more active. Obviously, during the pandemic, that means a lot of theatre was suddenly relying on their trustees to make really big decisions about what the theatre was going to do and what the future of the theatre was going to do. And with big companies like The National and the RSC and so forth, those trustees had a really massive role in terms of what the industry was going to do. And I found it very, very frustrating that on most of these theatre boards, you didn’t have any people who actually worked in the industry, and that’s quite common.
But I was very mouthy about the fact that there weren’t, for example, any actors on these boards making any of these decisions or being able to inform any of these decisions. And I think Kumiko took note of that. And when it came time for them to recruit some more board members, Kumiko asked me if I would apply. And then once I’d applied and been invited to join the board, that’s when she told me that she was leaving. But I was grateful that she asked me to do so. I hope one of the reasons why she wanted me to do it was because we’d worked together so often over the previous few years, and she trusted that I had the company’s best interests at heart.
ROBIN KHOR
What have you been doing ever since? Have you been in, you said about board making decisions, and have you guys been meeting a lot? Have you realised that your existence in the board now has, you know, come to an awareness.
LEO WAN
So yeah, so generally we meet kind of four times a year. And it depends on the relationship between the board and the executive. And I think we have a very good relationship at New Earth. Basically it’s just a group of people in a room trying to make decisions, which will give New Earth as much success as possible in the future.
ROBIN KHOR
So before we finish, what does it mean to you to be part of New Earth’s 30 Year Legacy?
LEO WAN
It’s been the most significant relationship I’ve had in my career in terms of relationship with a theatre company, and the journey has been quite long now and has manifested itself in various ways, whether that’s going back to the very, very beginning and New Earth being the people who were responsible for me to actually work full time as an actor for the first time in my life, to where we are now, with me being a trustee of the theatre company. All the various people I’ve met through the theatre company, not just other actors as colleagues and peers, but other people such as designers and directors and writers, producers, artistic directors. It’s hundreds of people I’ve probably come into contact with or formed relationships with, or friendships with over the years.
And as I’ve got older and tried to like, do more things. So, for example, me and a few others set up this mentorship organisation for East and Southeast Asians called Rising Waves. That wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the support that New Earth Theatre gave us when we were first trying to set ourselves up and working out what we were doing. And then there’s lots of different relationships that I’ve now formed through that. But again, you go back to what the root is or who it was who was helping at the beginning. And it often was New Earth Theatre.
ROBIN KHOR
And so any final words to anyone who is visiting or encountering New Earth Theatre for the first time?
LEO WAN
I think the past thirty years have been a huge success, but I would like to think that this is more of a launch pad for the next thirty years, which I think will be very, very exciting as well.