Date of Interview: 29 August 2025
Interviewer: Joanne Leung
Interviewee: Wai Mun Yoon
JOANNE LEUNG
How did your journey with New Earth Theatre begin?
WAI MUN YOON
Okay. Well, basically, I was a friend of David Tse, who was one of the five founders of New Earth or Yellow Earth, as it was at the time. And he invited me in 2008 to basically join the board. He didn’t tell me that he was planning to leave as artistic director when he invited me to join the board, but that’s how I basically got involved with New Earth.
I joined as a board member, just a normal trustee to start off with. And those days were, it was very different. We’ve been around for 30 years, you know. But the focus of the Arts Council at the time was very different. I don’t know whether, you know, but the Arts Council was not one singular body, but it was actually split into about ten different regional individual funding bodies.
That got changed I think it was, in 2000 and, I can’t remember, 2007, Something like that? But before that, it basically didn’t have the same kind of focus as it has now. On representing the demographics of the UK look. So things like diversity initiatives were not really a thing.
JOANNE LEUNG
When you joined the board or first joined as a trustee. What was your first impression of New Earth?
WAI MUN YOON
It was basically one of the very few supporters of what were then called British and minority ethnic. That’s now become more granular, as the title is now, you know, we call ourselves BESEA or ESEA because at the time, diversity was not taken as seriously as it is now. So, you know, it was good to be supporting a company that championed the progression of creatives in the theatrical sphere.
I kind of reflected a bit on that, because the educational or sort of pedagogical side of New Earth really came into its own under Kumiko’s artistic directorship. So when I first joined, it really was a case of just providing roles for BESEA and ESEA creatives, mainly actors who were, to some extent, excluded from the mainstream.
In terms of, you know, how I felt about it. I was very happy to support an organisation, or an institution that was promoting those values.
JOANNE LEUNG
In what ways has New Earth influenced or shaped your personal or professional growth?
WAI MUN YOON
You know, my role has really been that of governance. So I’ve always been a trustee. I can’t remember exactly when I became chair, but probably I would say around I don’t know, 2014 or so. I’ve been the chair for probably around a decade.
In terms of professional and personal growth. I’m not sure how relevant this is going to be, but, you know, my sector is technology and finance, and in that arena, the success metrics tend to be quite hard.
So you either succeed or you don’t. You either bring in business or you don’t. And I think what working with a theatre company has helped me to do is to understand, you know, how difficult it is when you are judged by creative criteria. You know, which by any measure is quite subjective. So in terms of personal growth, I think it’s really helped me to appreciate how hard it is.
JOANNE LEUNG
Do you have a moment when you truly felt part of the New Earth family?
WAI MUN YOON
It’s hard to answer that question because, as I say, I don’t work in a creative context. So in a way, I’ve always felt part of the family by basically keeping an eye on finances, the governance, the sort of gently nudging in particular directions. But quite frankly, it’s the role of the trustees to be supportive and not to get involved on the day to day executive level or the operational level.
Actually, in terms of personal growth, but this is more of a generic answer about serving on a board. I think that as one gets older, one realises that the role of a trustee is one of quiet encouragement as opposed to action. So when I first joined the board, I was far more interested in basically getting my hands dirty sort of helping out where I could.
I was trying to push for a lot of various things to happen. And I think as time has gone on, I’ve kind of realised that actually the role of a trustee, you know, needs to be more of a guide and more of a kind of a steady hand, as opposed to the sort of startup mentality which I first had when I first joined.
JOANNE LEUNG
Well, now it’s still a small team growing, but I imagine that the time when you were also chair or when you started as a trustee it was an even smaller team. Would you say that the New Earth team was a way smaller team than the New Earth team now?
WAI MUN YOON
I think that’s a really good point. I think that New Earth is unrecognisable from what it was when I first started. So it started for all the right reasons, but it went through a number of phases. So we have the David Tse founder, to when he left and I think, you know, his and the other four founders’ legacy is, you know, it’s very much part of the DNA of the company.
And then we went through a period of time when things were a little bit sort of the direction really wasn’t very clear. And I could muse on why that might be, but I think it was a whole host of factors. One of the macro factors I think that influenced it was the fact that the Arts Council was really changing its focus from being a kind of traditional funding organization to becoming something more about the creative process and trying to reflect the changing demographics of the UK.
So they started pushing far more for a skills based trustee board structure. Or it’s previously, to put it slightly unkindly, trustees for arts organisations were basically members of the same golf club as the chair. And so it was good that they focused a bit more on skills and skills recruitment. And through that phase and the different chairs of the Arts Council I think it left it slightly unclear as to what our role would be as a BESEA company.
And it ended up with us actually losing our funding from the Arts Council. So Kumiko became artistic director in 2011 and 2012, and she started an ambitious programme of education. She started what was then called Yellow Academy, now New Earth Academy.
She started playwriting festivals, a Typhoon Festival, and she did a lot of things which were far beyond the original conception of someone like David Tse. And the irony of all of that is, despite the fact that I think it was in maybe 2015 or so when we lost our funding, that was the year when, and you’ll have to check this out, but that was the year the guy who created Big Brother, a guy called Peter Bazalgette, became chair of the Arts Council. He basically said that they’ve never been more supportive of minority arts companies, and I think that pretty much coincided with the time that we actually lost our funding from the Arts Council. So I found that was a little bit of an irony.
But to Kumiko’s credit, and to the board’s credit, I have to also say we basically came up with a plan to keep ourselves running on fumes for the next 2 or 3 years, and cut back on the staff tremendously. Going back to your question about how much the company has grown. And I think it was in 2017 that we regained our funding again, and we’ve kept it ever since.
So I’d like to think there was a combination of two things. Well, one, obviously it was the hard work of Kumiko and her team basically putting in the applications and building up something which was worth having. But two, it was more of a culture shift from the Arts Council actually starting to appreciate what we were actually doing. Despite having said that was what they were doing I think it took a little bit of time before the actions matched up with their lofty words.
JOANNE LEUNG
I imagine you might’ve watched a lot of New Earth Theatre productions as a trustee. Is there one that you would like to share with us where you felt it’s meaningful to you as a trustee instead of a creative?
WAI MUN YOON
I think I would draw attention to the acme of the Kumiko era, which I think started with production at the Royal Exchange in Manchester called Mountains. And this was basically a biographical treatment of the family of Helen Tse, I think her name is, who founded a restaurant in Manchester called Sweet Mandarin. So the interesting thing there is that I think that was the turning point for the company, because Manchester Royal Exchange you know it’s quite a large venue, it’s a mid-sized venue. We got a lot of publicity because Helen Tse is well known in the Manchester region, but also because I think she’d appeared on TV as some kind of celebrity chef.
And I think that was really the culmination of a lot of what Kumiko had been doing quietly, developing talent whether it is acting talent through the Academy, playwriting talent through Typhoon. And it sort of really came together in that mid-scale production.
I’d also like to point out The Apology. It’s such a difficult subject material, and yet it was, the treatment of it was not overly sentimental, was not overly provocative. I thought the set design was amazing, and the ability to tackle difficult, potentially political questions like that is very hard when you are a minority ethnic theatre company to deal with difficult subject matter.
You know, like The Apology, for example. Because you need a certain degree of authority beyond just the ethnic side of things. And I thought that, you know, the fact that that was put on, there was another play that was put on during the pandemic, which was an agitation of Miss Julie. It’s an adaptation, you know, of a play that is often seen in rep, and yet it was translated and transported to Hong Kong. So and in fact, one of our current board members, Leo Wan, was one of the actors in it. He was amazing. He’s a really valuable board member. Because again, going back to the composition of the board, I think we’ll talk about that in a bit. He provides the point of view of the working actor, which we never had before.
So again, just thinking about how things have changed over the last 30 years, or at least since I joined, the governance challenges haven’t changed. But I think what has changed is the pool of really impressive board members that we’ve been able to recruit.
JOANNE LEUNG
Would you mind sharing a bit of a headline with us, with this composition of the board? Do you have like, apart from the working actor who’s just joined that illustrated that change, is there another example that makes you feel like that change was obvious to you?
WAI MUN YOON
So I think that, you know, we’ve always in terms of composition, we always need a lawyer on board. What we’ve actually done is we used to have sort of theatre professionals. We had two very strong board members in the form of Clive Duncan and I think the artistic director at Tara. I need to look it up. But both Clive Duncan was at ALRA, the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts, and he was instrumental in helping us set up the New Earth, or Yellow Earth Academy, because he offered us space there.
Because we don’t have a venue, we’re able to use that space as our own, you know, for 1 or 2 weeks over the summer. And that really kind of kickstarted the New Earth Academy, which is now in, I think, seven different locations. But we wouldn’t have been able to do that without the contribution of a board member that was very, very supportive of us.
So they were the theatre professionals we had, but we’d never had people who actually were working creatives as opposed to sort of working executives in the space. And so it’s quite nice to have someone like Leo there.
In terms of other board composition, as I say, you know, it’s essential to have a lawyer. We did have a marketing person for a small length of time. I think marketing is slightly difficult because you need to be quite hands on. And as I mentioned earlier, board roles need to be more guidance as opposed to operational. So we still haven’t found the right balance in terms of that sort of recruitment.
JOANNE LEUNG
How would you describe New Earth’s approach to storytelling?
WAI MUN YOON
I mean, I think that, you know, one of the clear mission goals is to try and give voice to the voiceless. So to really surface stories that otherwise wouldn’t be told, we have a very vibrant cultural sector which will happily work with anything that is Netflix compliant. But it’s those stories, you know, which are perhaps a little bit marginal, perhaps a little bit forgotten, that we aim to try and champion.
And I think we do that through not just being a perpetual outsider. I think the appointment of our latest artistic director is testament to this. Ailin has shown that you can have a commercially successful production in the form of Totoro, and also ensure that representation and casting decisions are as equitable as possible. So no yellowface, for example. And she was instrumental in achieving that.
So that’s really important. But I think it’s more of a reflection of how British society has changed to become more accommodating of that type of advocacy. I think it would not have been possible when David Tse first founded the company. And, you know, so his goals were more modest, not because he wanted them to be, but because that was basically the limit of what you could get away with at the time.
But I want to just make one point about audiences, because although diversity and inclusion has been one of the Arts Council’s goals, and the figures have basically borne out an increase in representation amongst artistic directors, increased diversity more in keeping with the percentage in the population. Audiences have become less diverse. And that is a problem. And I think that’s something that we need to look at as a sector.
In fact, you know, we are in consultation. Well, rather, you know, we are in conversation with Margaret Hodge. You may or may not know she’s responsible for the review of our Arts Council funding. She’s currently in the middle of that. We had a call with her a few months ago. We have a follow up call with a group of touring chairs of theatre companies on Monday to basically really look at these broader structural issues, because I think that if there’s anything that needs to be said, audiences are getting older and they’re getting more and more homogenous.
If you go to the National Theatre, you kind of wonder where this institution is going to be in ten years time. Basically everyone’s going to be dead. So I think it’s something that we, it’s not our sole responsibility, but we are actually very good at developing theatre for very diverse audiences. I think that our audiences are over 50%, or at least over 45% BESEA or ESEA, which is obviously higher than any other theatre company in this country.
JOANNE LEUNG
What are your hopes for the next generation of BESEA theatre artists or New Earth’s future?
WAI MUN YOON
That’s a really difficult question. And that’s an essay style question. It really depends very much on the political climate, to be honest. Obviously, the hope is for more stories to come out of the diaspora that come out of East and Southeast Asia, that there is equitable representation in theatre. You know, for actors, there’s no glass ceiling there, no yellow face.
You know, all of these things are hopes. Some of these things are going to be achievable. Some of these things are going to be actively fought against by basically reactionaries. So having been on the board, in the trustee seat for New Earth for long enough, I’d rather not commit myself to any predictions. I think that, you know, we’re definitely on the right track in terms of promoting the pipeline of talent.
I think that’s always been key to the success of the sector, and I think that is what I’m most proud of during the Kumiko years, that she basically had enough foresight to realise that it wasn’t just about putting on a production every year with her starring in it. It was basically about giving people opportunities, giving them the confidence to enter into career paths that they otherwise might have thought inaccessible.
JOANNE LEUNG
You also mentioned the audience and the work that you’re doing, I think you sort of mentioned your hopes for a very diverse audience. And do you think there’s anything you would like them to take away from the future work of New Earth?
WAI MUN YOON
I mean, what you want is you want them to be stimulated to think about the issues. Theatre is not meant to be didactic. It’s not meant to be propagandist. It’s not meant to reinforce one’s own opinions or prejudices. That’s what good theatre is supposed to do. So long as we aim for those ideals of good theatre, I think we will be achieving that.
Though the hopes are that the next generation of BESEA artists are able to be viewed as not exclusively BESEA.