Date of Interview: 15 August 2025
Interviewer: Robin Khor
Interviewee: David Tse

 

ROBIN KHOR

David, hello. Thank you very much for joining us in this New Earth Theatre’s 30th anniversary archive project. I mean, we all knew that you are one of the co-founders. How did it all start? 

 

DAVID TSE

Basically, there was very little representation of East and Southeast Asian people on our screens and on our stages and on radio. And I was really starved of that growing up in the UK in the 70s and 80s.

And so whenever there was an opportunity to get any kind of representation, I would always go and watch. So it might be Chinese or Japanese or whatever East or Southeast Asian film that was showing at the ICA, or dance that was showing at Sadler’s Wells, or any kind of ESEA workshop that was taking place at the International Workshop Festival.

I took part in all these things, and that helped to positively reinforce who and what I was. And then various political events happened in Asia. You know, something quite catastrophic in 1989. And also in 1991 there was a visit by a certain person who was slightly censored in Asia.

And, those two events made me feel a responsibility that I wanted to develop a voice for our community. And because we have freedom and democracy, we live in a democratic society in the UK, so we have far greater freedom to say what we want to say and have an opinion about certain events going on.

And I felt a responsibility to do that. So that’s where all the seeds were sown for the idea of a company. I started directing a few rehearsed readings in response to these various events. And then I think it was the rehearsed reading of Tibetan Inroads that the group of actors involved, a lot of them were saying to me, well, why don’t you try and apply for funding to try and get this off the ground to make a full production?

So I tried for a few years, at least three years, and we were unsuccessful in getting funding from the Arts Council. And then, purely coincidentally, I was working at Polka Theatre for children and Vicky Ireland, knew that I trained in East and Southeast Asian physical theatre. As I told you, from the International Workshop Festival, I got a scholarship to go back to Hong Kong to learn Beijing opera movement. And I worked with Tom Wu on the West End production of M Butterfly, which used Beijing opera movement. So Vicky knew that I had that training. She was very keen to adapt this for Polka Theatre for children to do a version of a children’s folk story called The Magic Paintbrush, and she asked if I would be interested to adapt it, but using that kind of very physical theatre style. 

It was, you know, serendipity. I mean, it was kind of that’s what I was interested to explore at that time in my own practice anyway. So it was kind of perfect timing. I was inspired by the work of the great Japanese director, Ninagawa and that kind of approach to visual, physical theatre, I thought, you know, I want to try and explore that. Just because we’d been to Western drama schools and had all that training, but there was nothing for my own cultural heritage. So while I was at drama school I got a scholarship to go to Hong Kong, and as I said, I trained in Beijing Opera Movement, you know, that led to my first job in M Butterfly. 

But when Vicky knew that I had those physical theatre skills she asked if I was interested. I said, yes. I wrote her a first draft of The Magic Paintbrush, which was adapted from this Ladybird book version of it. I sort of researched the story in Hong Kong. Got a sort of better version of it, and then I adapted it, and added other characters. Polka liked the first draft I wrote, and particularly the kind of physical theatre approach that I actually wrote into the sequences.

And then we workshopped the play. I wrote a second draft, and then they commissioned me to write the final draft, and then I helped introduce a lot of East and Southeast Asian actors to Vicky to workshop. And she ended up casting Tom, Kumiko, Kwong, Veronica and myself. So the five of us were in this fantastic hit show that did very well, both commercially and critically.

And we got on very well both on and off stage. And during this period, as I say, I’d been applying to the Arts Council over three different separate occasions. You can only apply once a year, and we applied over three years, and didn’t get any funding. But the success of The Magic Paintbrush resulted in an officer from the London Borough Grants Scheme, which no longer exists.

This chap came up to me after the show and invited me to apply to the London Borough Grant scheme for us to do whatever I wanted to do next, you know, for an arts project. So I did, with the support of a freelance Hong Kong administrator called Mei Yung. Mei and I put that application together and we were successful.

We got 5,000 pounds as our very first grant. And that enabled me to write and direct the first work in progress show that we did. Which was an adaptation of a Hong Kong play called The School and I, and I expanded it, added other characters. The Hong Kong version was about a small, young girl, the only student left in her village in the New Territories, and I gave her an older brother, a teenage brother who got a scholarship to study in the U.K. When it went to tour, So the workshop version was called The School and I, and it became New Territories when we toured it. So yes, I wrote and directed that. And then Kathy Hamilton, who was an officer at the Arts Council, came and saw the workshop version, and at the end of the show, she had tears in her eyes. And she said to me, David, you must apply for a grant to tour this show.

So we did Mei and I again, me writing the kind of artistic content and some marketing ideas, and Mei Yung helping me do the budgeting, putting together the business plan basically. And Mei and I, we got our very first grant from the Arts Council as a result of that. And then I approached a freelance tour booker called Leila Jankovich, and she helped book us the tour.

And that’s why we changed the name because we were a new company, and The School and I, seems like it’s for children, whereas actually it was a piece for a general adult audience, as well as kind of teenage and older teenage audience, because it was coming of age, discovery of sexuality, all these kinds of things and, you know, encountering racism or, you know, bullying, dealing with all that.

So I thought, well, the guys from the New Territories are exploring new territories both physically and psychologically. So that’s why it became New Territories. And as a result, the tour didn’t happen until we got the grant in ‘95, the tour didn’t happen until the spring of ‘97, but that was fine.

And actually the show, which was Yellow Earth’s official first show, was voted Time Out Critic’s Choice, and it meant that I think we played at The Oval and, you know, the first week struggling for audience. As soon as it was Time Out Critic’s Choice then there were queues for returns. It made such a difference in those days being voted Time Out Critic’s Choice.

So that show really put us on the map. And, the review was glowing from Time Out it said, this is the kind of fringe theatre you absolutely yearn to see, you fight for tickets and what have you. It was a kind of glowing review, and that really helped launch the company. So yeah, that was the first show. And then in terms of getting the company off the ground as a limited company, as a registered charity.

So the success of The Magic Paintbrush in ‘94. I did a show in Singapore in 1995. While I was there in Singapore, I approached the National Youth Arts Festival in Singapore, negotiated the deal, and we sold the show with Polka’s consent, to them. And as a result, there was a fee that came in, through my negotiations and obviously advice from Stephen McLane, who’s the general manager at Polka. When the fee arrived, I said to Stephen, look, this opportunity only happened because I made those efforts to contact the National Youth Arts Festival.

So I wonder whether Polka might consider giving us half the fee rather than Polka taking it all themselves. Stephen agreed. And so as a result, we got 6,000 pounds and it was that 6,000 that enabled Yellow Earth to be a limited company and to be a registered charity. That was our initial investment to start the company in 1995.

And that’s the money that enabled me to also approach Leila Jankovich and employ her. Do you see what I mean? So there’s nothing kind of particularly planned or strategic. It was all quite random, but all these things kind of came together. And, you know, whether it’s 缘分(fate, traditional Chinese) and good fortune or fate, it happened right time, right place.

And it enabled the company to start officially in 1995. We consistently, we always got good reviews. Always at least three stars and occasionally four stars and never anything below that. So that’s how the company gradually grew. And then after a few years of touring and on project funding, then in 2000, I approached Soho Theatre with another project that I was going to write and direct called Play to Win.

And Soho was just starting out, you know, they just had a new building on Dean Street, and they said yes to this co-production with us. So we cooked up an application for the Sainsbury’s Check Out Theatre award, which is something that I brought to Soho because I discovered this and I said, you know, I’m planning a project called Play to Win, which is again, for the teenage market.

This award is specifically to create new work for 10 to 14 year olds. And Soho said yes, and we won the Sainsbury’s Check Out Theatre Award. And again, that show toured and did incredibly well. And it sold out everywhere. Good reviews, from all the broadsheets. And because we were about to embark on a much bigger scale show, this used a lot of high tech digital animation and there was kind of martial arts dance martial arts, fighting and interacting with this projected computer game. So it was very, very technically ambitious. And as a result, the Arts Council invited us to join the national touring programme. So that was in 2000. So we got an uplift in our grant. This national touring program then enabled us to employ our first part time general manager, who was Diana Pao, again from Hong Kong. But she relocated here, had been working, I think, at the Arts Council at the time, but she was a very close friend of Veronica’s who was from Hong Kong. And so I asked Diana whether she’d be interested. She said yes. And then in 2001, we were invited, Yellow Earth  was invited to apply for revenue funding, which is a very different scale from project funding.

Revenue funding means you have to put together a three year business plan. And so I consulted the others in Yellow Earth. But it was mainly Diana and myself putting together the business plan. Diana, again, from an admin point of view, me from a creative, and I had to think of a three year business plan of what we were going to do.

So incredibly, we were successful. So 2001 was a complete game changer for Yellow Earth, because then we had three years of revenue funding. You could plan ahead, because we were only funded to do one tour a year. That was it. One show, you know, develop new writing, whatever you want to do, adaptation of a classic or whatever you want to do.

But it was to tour one show a year, and that was all the funding allowed for. But because Diana was a smart cookie, managed our resources really, really well and I also said to the board, look, instead of paying me five days a week, like Diana was paid full time, I said I’d rather be paid part time three days a week, so that I’ve got a little bit of freedom to still occasionally go and do and be a jobbing actor on short term freelance acting jobs.

And then with those two days a week of salary saved, I want to then use that money to enable the company to do other things. So that’s how we really managed our very limited resources very, very well. So we did far more than we were asked to do by the Arts Council. Yes, we toured a national show every year, so we went to three regions around the country that also did well in terms of box office.

We always broke even and we often made a profit from revenue from the venues. But we also managed with those limited resources to start a scheme called Yellow Ink in partnership. I approached Soho Theatre and I said, look, there’s no scheme trying to support new East and Southeast Asian writers and that’s what’s lacking the most at that time, at that moment in time, in 2000.  So, Soho agreed to work in partnership with us. So that was headed by our literary associate, Philippe Cherbonnier. 

I also approached the Young Vic and asked them to do something similar for East Southeast Asian directors. Because at the time I was the only, I was the first British Chinese person, the first ESEA person to get a bursary from the Arts Council to trade in a regional theatre for a year. I happened to be at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre as a kind of potential associate director, so I trained for a year.

That’s how I became a theatre director. Learning from other established professionals. But I was the only one in the whole of the UK who’d had that training, so I wanted to encourage other people. So Yellow Ink was for writers, and Yellow Stages, in partnership with the Young Vic, was to encourage new directors. And then hoping that those who took part in Yellow Stages, if they started, then doing fringe theatre and so on, they might then be encouraged to apply to the Arts Council for a bursary to also go through the same training that I did.

So from the beginning, Yellow Earth was always trying to empower the wider community. And finally the last thing we did was Typhoon, which was an annual East Asian play reading festival that we did at Soho Theatre because of the dearth of British East and Southeast Asian writers at that time. There is far more now, which is great, and that’s as it should be.

We have a far healthier literary ecology now. But way back at the beginning of Yellow Earth, there was nobody, there were very few writers and those who were doing it, they joined Yellow Ink. And, you know, Philippe was trying to encourage them and help them develop. But there really were very, very few. And so at that time I thought, well, okay, we haven’t got ESEA writers currently doing it in this country.

But in East and Southeast Asia, where you’re the majority, people are doing it all the time. They’re writing all the time. So how about the Typhoon Festival, where we bring the best East and Southeast Asian writers, translate it into English, and then we invite established theatre makers here. So i.e. those who are running, regional reps or running, companies like Tamasha, Talawa, Graeae.

I, you know, all these different companies similar to words getting revenue funding from the Arts Council and then touring, why don’t we ask these artistic directors to engage with established East and Southeast Asian writing? And then through a kind of crazy workshop process, they cast very quickly a whole bunch of, you know, we invited up to 50 or more East Southeast Asian actors to the workshop and then the directors very randomly cast, you know, suitable people in the plays that they were doing readings for.

And it was fast and furious because there was very little budget, but everybody was paid as well as we possibly could, and we would have a week of five quality eastern Southeast Asian plays directed by people who ran venues such as Hampstead Theatre. We invited the director from there. We invited the artistic director from Soho Theatre, from Polka, from Tamasha.

So, so basically, you know, we invited black, South Asian, LGBT, disabled, white, across the board anybody who was a prominent person working in the British theatre sector, I invited. So that one, they encountered quality East and Southeast Asian writing. And two, they encountered quality East and Southeast Asian actors. Many of them had never worked with any East or Southeast Asian actor.

 

So it was me reaching out to them to say, oh, we’re building a bridge, why don’t you meet us halfway? And so they did, you know, they were paid. They were very happy to have a freelance job for, you know, a day and a half. They’d spent half a day casting and then they’d spend a day rehearsing with the actors. And then they were on that night. And so that became an annual festival. 

And those core members of Yellow Earth,  Philipe, Veronica, Kwong, Kumico and myself, we read as many plays as possible, and we would vote and then we ended up with five one each day. So that’s how Typhoon happened. And you can imagine doing all this activity.

And then on top of that, I was trying to encourage education and outreach workshops to train the next generation, because gradually, you know, people were finding roles within the company. Tom was naturally our movement director. Yeah, because he’s a Wushu expert, martial arts expert. He helped train all of us. I already had some of those physical theatre skills, but his level is much, much higher.

So he helped train me and all the other members of Yellow Earth. That’s why The Magic Paintbrush was such a success. It wasn’t just a pastiche, it was something rooted in really high quality, physical theatre skill. That level was very, very high. It was very inventive. So it used Beijing opera physicality in a very new way, in a way that even sometimes in East Asia, it doesn’t happen. It’s done in a more traditional way usually. 

That was what I was interested in. So I trained in Japanese kabuki and noh movement, and butoh and I tried to take some of those qualities and explore, experiment and find new ways to show that in the work. And the same with, you know, martial arts, Taichi, Beijing opera movement, Balinese dance Kwong later learned and looking at Vietnamese water puppetry, all that kind of all that very rich visual, physical theatre that exists in East and Southeast Asia.

I thought that’s part of our own cultural heritage. So we should embrace it and see how we can sometimes for theatric, you know, when it’s theatrically appropriate. It’s not appropriate for every show when it is appropriate, especially because I was trying to create a visual, physical theatre that was different rather than just, oh, here’s another Western physical theatre show, which Complicite and loads of other companies were doing.

So what can we do that yes, draws on that Western physical theatre tradition, but also has something new, something that’s from our own mother culture. So I wanted to integrate the two sides, the duality of my own background, but also other East and Southeast Asian performers backgrounds. So that’s why a lot of the early work of Yellow Earth was very, new writing was always important, as I was saying, with, you know, yeah, Yellow Ink and Typhoon play reading festival, but also the physical theatre aspect was incredibly important in the early years of our work, especially with Tom Wu as our movement director. So a lot of the work, a lot of the style of the company was that combination of myself and Tom, me often writing and directing, Tom, providing the choreographic elements.

And Tom was with us for the first six years, and then he had to move on because he got married, and then the kind of physical theatre I started doing was working with more contemporary dance choreographers.

But again, from an East or Southeast Asian background. So, you know, I continued to explore the physical and using ESEA artists to collaborate with, but it included the background from contemporary dance. There was a piece that we did called 58, about the 58 Chinese refugees who died in the back of a lorry at Dover. They suffocated to death. It was written by Philippe, and I directed it from an idea that I had. I wanted to explore that subject. 

But anyway, as the company evolved, new writing became more and more important. Towards the end of my tenure. I mean, Yellow Ink, it produced some results. So one play that came out was a piece by Benjamin Yeoh called Yellow Gentleman. It was looking at three generations of Malaysian Chinese men, because it wasn’t particularly a kind of physical theatre piece. It was, you know, it was just a text based piece. So we’d already planned, you know, every three years, we’d already planned what we were going to be doing.

And obviously, Yellow Earth at the time didn’t have the resources to suddenly produce another show. We were really squeezed already to do all these other things on top of what we were, the one thing we were funded to do, we managed to do all these other things. So when a piece of new writing emerges that is actually good enough for us to produce, we’d already planned the next year, because you always have to tour book at least two years in advance.

And yet Yellow Gentlemen was a piece I thought should be done. And I thought, well, how else can we increase resources for our sector? So I said to Ben, look, we don’t have the resources to produce another show other than what we currently got planned. However, I want you to get this off the ground rather than always relying on Yellow Earth, why don’t you find a freelance producer, which he did through the Young Vic that producers. When you apply for grants for the arts, Yellow Earth, our general manager, will supervise and give you any, you know, advice, feedback, and how to improve your application. And we’ll also support the marketing of the show because we’ve got a lot of years of experience of marketing ESEA shows.

So that’s exactly what Ben did. He found a fantastic producer. We supported their application and then they independently got their own grants. So we’d sown that seed and the director he found was Bronwyn Lim, who was a fantastic ESEA actress that I’d cast a few times already. And she’d also taken part in Yellow Stages. So she had also started developing her directorial skills.

So this was a fantastic marriage of a Yellow Ink writer with a Yellow Stages director. It was exactly what this seeding we were doing, and it produced a great show, Yellow Gentlemen, which was on at The Oval and did, you know, was very well received. 

As I said, coming towards the end of my tenure because I’d grown the company and then we went from fringe to the main to kind of more middle scale mainstream touring where we were in venues for either half a week or a whole week, you know, so the company’s work got bigger and bigger.

And at a certain point, I asked the board whether they wanted us to stay on the small scale fringe circuit, doing lots of new writing, lots of new artists, or whether they wanted to grow the company on a bigger scale. And the board’s directive was very much that they wanted the company to go mainstream. So in order to do that without the resources, because even though I kept lobbying the Arts Council, it was not possible to increase the revenue funding.

We had three lots of it, you know, because if you grant it three years and you have to apply again, three years, we applied again, three years. So we had three lots of it under my tenure, and I lobbied each time for an uplift, but we just got very minimal uplift each time. So I felt that we were hitting the bamboo ceiling.

And yet my ambition to grow the work was growing. And so the only way we could do bigger work was international co-productions. That was the way. Rather than British co-productions, which should have been the natural thing, we were a British company. But actually I found it much easier to go to the Hong Kong Arts Festival and pitch them a co-production of The Nightingale for 2005.

I pitched that to them in 2003 or 4, I can’t remember. And because 2005 was the bicentenary of Hans Christian Andersen, so around the world, everybody was doing Hans Christian Andersen productions. So I pitched an adaptation of The Nightingale and they said, yes. So 2005 was our first international co-production, and it was half the cast from the UK, half the cast from Hong Kong, and we made the show in Hong Kong and we sold out in City Hall for two weeks.

And then we came back and toured the UK, and The Nightingale was the show that reached the largest audience Yellow Earth has ever had. It reached a total of about 17,000 people. Because it was so successful. We revived it again and again and again. We did, I think, a three week run, at Polka Theatre. We did a two week run in the cold rain in Northern Ireland.

We toured across the UK. So that show actually got us the most audience ever. So we kept reviving it. That was 2005 and then 2006, I did an international co-production of King Lear with the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre. Because of that UK-China collaboration, the RSC was interested. In 2006, the RSC did the Complete Works Festival, a whole year of every Shakespearean play, and their production of King Lear was the Chinese bilingual one.

English and management and again half the cast were from the UK, half the cast were from Shanghai. And that’s the first time we got commercial sponsorship from a supermarket in Chinatown. You know, I’ve been knocking on their door all these years. Please, will you support something East or Southeast Asia and it’s been really difficult to get commercial sponsorship, but finally doing something that was going to be on in China that enabled us, one of the large supermarkets in Chinatown, to say, yes, they’ll sponsor us because it also had the cachet of being at the RSC in Stratford, all those things.

It was a win-win for everybody. So throughout running Yellow Earth for the first 13 years, not only to to to not have to be a writer and director, I mean, I trained as a writer, through various, Polka and other writing schemes, and then I trained as a director, officially through this Arts Council bursary. But I also had to be a jobbing entrepreneur.

I had to be a producer part time, even though we had a full time general manager. But I had to be entrepreneurial and seize those opportunities, see those opportunities, think, what do I want to do artistically? But then how can I find the partners to enable me to do it? Like if I hadn’t found Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center who wanted to show their work at the RSC, I would have never been able to do a bilingual production of King Lear.

And as a result of that show, Rose Bruford College, where I trained as an actor, when they invited me to give a talk after, hearing about this futuristic dystopian King Lear set in China in the near future, where Lear, instead of being the king of England, is the head of a global business empire. Like Lee Ka Shing or, you know, like Jack Ma.

So when Cordelia says nothing, it’s not just the usual pride that she has. And Lear has, it’s also about linguistic problems. Goneril and Regan had been kept in the family firm, so they were perfectly fluent in both languages. But Cordelia had been sent off to British boarding school, and so she struggled to communicate in mother tongue. You can take a classic like King Lear, written from a Judeo-Christian point of view, and you can reinterpret it from a Taoist, Buddhist, Confucian perspective, and suddenly the play takes on a completely different resonance.

And of course, sometimes we also did light hearted things. You know, we did a fantastic comedy from Vietnam called The Butcher’s Skin. You know, I got permission from the family in Vietnam to adapt it a little bit, you know, but again, it was about a very aggressive butcher who had died and had been accidentally been reincarnated in the body of a very gentle gardener.

And the struggle between yin and yang and between violence and unkindness and gentleness. So again, I was, even though it was a comedy, it was still exploring what are the roots of violence?

Even though I was brought up as a Christian in the UK, this understanding of eastern spirituality and Western spirituality. It’s kind of given me, a kind of, you know, what are the ways forward. And we still have these problems with the two wars going on in Ukraine and in Palestine.

How can these, you know, hard hearts have their Damascene moment? How can they become enlightened so that they change their behavior and try to help all of us coexist beyond racism, beyond hatred, beyond othering? That’s kind of why I set up Yellow Earth without consciously knowing it at the beginning. At the beginning, it was just finding a voice. Finding a voice, because we were so culturally invisible, we need to express ourselves, and we need to be sensitive about politics, about, you know, racism, about, homophobia, sexism, all the all these kinds of terrible things that oppress other people, including us, but particularly racism. But actually, what I really fundamentally wanted to explore was a much bigger thing. And it cuts across every race, it cuts across every class, and it’s about certain people trying to control others.

And how do we liberate ourselves, how do we find freedom? I mean, me talking so much is also quite oppressive now. I recognise that I tend to over talk and overexplain and actually, you know, I am but a kind of modest little speck of dust. Sometimes I brag and I’m a bit arrogant, but actually what I’ve done is a speck of dust, and I’ve thrown a pebble in the pond with the support of my colleagues who have also thrown their pebbles in the pond. And we sent these ripples out. 

And Kumiko has done a fantastic job in terms of empowering a far wider group of artists than I was able to during my tenure because, as I say, we did the investment schemes, but there weren’t enough artists at the time for this kind of quality work to come through.

At the end of my year, I said to Philippe, look, we’re not getting enough plays coming through, so how about rather than focusing on so many writers, how about we just select three and we develop them? So one was Simon’s, Simon Wu’s Wolf in the House. One was Kazuko Hohki who did some fantastic Japanese piece. And one was Andy Cheung’s Keeping Up With The Wongs.

And Keeping Up With The Wongs was a fantastic comedy. And when I left Yellow Earth, it was really well received in the very last Typhoon festival I was involved in. And when I left, I thought, well, I want to take Keeping Up With The Wongs and I want to direct it, in a freelance capacity.

I pitched it to every single venue that Yellow Earth had toured to. and the response was, because it was set in a takeaway background, these white people were deciding on our behalf that characters from a takeaway background were tropes, even though that’s my own family background. My family worked in, had two fish and chip shop Chinese takeaways. That’s the world I understand and know, and it’s a reality for British Chinese of my generation.

And that is, that was the institutional racism of the UK, in 2008. After 13 years of successfully developing, Yellow Earth from ‘95 until 2008, in a freelance capacity, suddenly there were very few opportunities and it kind of doesn’t make sense because every time we toured a show, we got three star reviews, four star reviews from the National broadsheets, as well as from Time Out and other sort of more mainstream reviewers.

Suddenly, in a freelance capacity without a company behind me, I knocked on every single door. I couldn’t get a single one of them to open. So that was how institutionally racist the UK still was in 2008. With an East Asian company revenue funded by the Arts Council, you can bring work. They are obliged to programme a certain number of diverse works as part of their programming.

They’ve ticked the box, but in a freelance capacity when all that experience should automatically lead to continued working in the British repertory system, it wasn’t possible. So the only other theatre job I’ve directed since leaving the other work in 2008 was in 2017. I was approached by a company called On the Wire, and they asked me to direct a show called From Shore to Shore, which got a four star review in The Guardian.

And, we toured it very successfully in 2017 across the UK to nine cities, and then we revived in 2019 to 5 major cities working in partnership with regional reps. It really attracted a very substantial high percentage of members of the Chinese community, many of whom had never been to the theatre, ever, because we set it in a Chinese restaurant, the producer was very keen to make the work much more accessible and site specific, and it was set in Chinese restaurants, performed in Chinese restaurants and in partnership with regional reps, and it was the first time ever that we worked in partnership with Chinese Community Center. So some audiences were 100% Chinese, and it was the first time they’d ever been to the theatre or had a theatrical experience. And many of them said, it’s the first time I’ve ever heard a story about their own lives.  And so they said, it’s the first time ever we’ve seen our lives reflected back to us. So that was as recent as 2019, which is crazy. You know, Kumiko has done a great job. I’m not saying she hasn’t empowered the East and Southeast Asian sector. She definitely has. But she’s working with venues.

And do those venues do enough outreach to the ESEA community to reach people who don’t normally go to the theatre I wonder. It still needs that education outreach, but still needs to be done. And that’s why, as I say,  during my tenure, the investment in outreaching to, you know, British Chinese schools, British Japanese schools, you know, community centres, ESEA community centres liaising with, you know, was a Filipino organisation that we liaise with especially when we did Play To Win because that’s a British Filipino story.

So we tried to cover as many East and Southeast Asian stories as we possibly could, and tried to be as diverse as possible. So even though the company was Yellow Earth it wasn’t rooted in just being Chinese. The name of the company came from a film by Chen Kai Ge, who was one of the fifth wave of fantastic, political filmmakers coming out to China. But I just thought Earth is a holistic term and it captures all people and yellow. I thought, well, there’s black face, there’s brown face, there’s yellow face. Yellow, in China at least it’s a positive term. It’s the yellow Emperor, 皇帝, it’s the yellow river. It’s the name of where the Han Chinese originated, which is Yellow Earth. So it’s not a negative connotation. And I thought in the same way that, you know, black is used as a term that describes black British, African Americans, Caribbean people, Caribbean British. Black as a catchall for all the people from an African or Caribbean background in the UK, and Brown is not used as often but this was also a catchall for South Asians. So we needed a catchall for East and Southeast Asians. And if we say East and Southeast Asians, it’s a bit long winded, which is why at the very beginning we used to just say East Asian because it is East and South Asia is India. Pakistan, Bangladesh and East of there is obviously East and Southeast Asia.

And rather than saying East and Southeast Asia, we used to just say East Asia because that’s east of South Asia, right. And that should include Southeast Asia. But it’s much simpler to say East Asia rather than East and Southeast Asia. And rather than saying any of those things East Asia or East and Southeast Asia, I just thought yellow should be and could be a catch-all like black, you know, which used to be perhaps derogatory, but has been reclaimed by the black community and is a positive term, you know, in the same way that queer used to be, a negative term has been reclaimed by the LGBTQI community and is now a positive term.

So I think the same as yellow, it’s being used in the West negatively with yellow belly, yellow peril, blah blah blah. But actually, you know, we can reclaim it as a positive term, like black, like queer. So I thought Yellow Earth, it felt like  a fantastic name as a potentially positive way for our community to unite together. And Earth is holistic. So it also includes environmental ideas, ecological ideas. There was a lot in that company name, and I’m really glad it’s been rebranded as New Earth Theatre. The Earth is still there. The New is there. So that it’s not, you know, the origins came from something Chinese. I’m Chinese, so, you know, that’s natural, right? Kumiko happened to be Japanese Eurasian. So, you know, she didn’t identify so much with that name and that’s fine. You know, and certain people who were shouting online against the word yellow. So to pacify those people and to kind of say to the wider community, this company is for everybody, New Earth is perfectly appropriate. But even under Yellow Earth, it was always for everybody.

It was always, as I say, if you look at all the work that was done, it was so, it was consistently ESEA and diverse. And we always worked with other people, not just from a Chinese background.

That’s why I was very always open to possibilities. And also I didn’t want us to be straight, you know, ghettoized into only doing East and Southeast Asian stories.

So that’s why in 1999, I picked, Blue Remembered Hills. Dennis Potter, archetypally British, very, very British playwright. And I thought, well, which Dennis Potter play should we do? And if you look at the older community and the younger community, the young kids in school are far more diverse than the older community. So as a result. I thought Blue Remembered Hills was perfect.

There are seven characters to it who are aged seven. I wanted it to be cast, majority East Asian, but also black, white, South Asian. And that’s exactly what we did. And I invited a guest, physical theatre director David Glass. I’d seen his work, you know, I was interested in physical theatre. I admired his work. And I said to David, when you cast it because the characters are seven years old, could you cast it from an East Asian perspective, a yin yang.

So beneath, beyond the superficial of what gender we are, male or female, but look a bit deeper, in terms of our patterns. And then. So we ended up casting Kwong as Audrey, a girl, and he ended up casting Tina Gambe, a black actress who went on to Coronation Street, ends up casting her as Donald Duck, the boy who was bullied.

So I’m that, that casting idea came from me, from an East Asian perspective, of the yin and yang. And I also said to him, you’ve got to cast the actors who are right. Don’t feel you have to cast Yellow Earth founding members, you know. So we saw a lot of East and Southeast Asian actors who have physical theatre skills.

And I said the most important issue, cast majority East Asian and the rest diverse. I mean, he ended up casting four of us from Yellow Earth, So Kwong, Kumiko, Tom and myself, and he ended up casting, Amit Lahav who is a white,white Jewish actor who ended up forming Gecko, he ended up casting Christopher Simpson, who’s a mixed race actor who looks South Asian. He ends up playing lots of South Asian roles in White Teeth and Brick Lane, but actually he isn’t South Asian, but he looks it. You know, that was a very wonderful show that Yellow Earth did. And it got great reviews. But I remember Jane Edwards from Time Out saying, what a fantastic production from Yellow Earth, but what an unusual choice for the company.

And I thought, why is it unusual? We’re British, we did a West Country accent as required by the characters as best we could, some of us better than others. And that’s fine because that takes, you know, if you naturally sound Malaysian, then a Malaysian learning a West Country accent will sound in a different way from somebody like me who speaks RP, who can do quite a passable West Country accent.

And that’s fine. That shows the diversity of East Asian voices, but we all did West Country accents as best we could, and we showed contemporary Britain. And I think that was the very first time Blue Remembered Hills has ever been cast in such a diverse way. Every other production prior to that was all white or all white, and one token black or all white and one token South Asian.

You know, that’s how mainstream casting is in the UK. And suddenly, you know, we claimed our British heritage because this is what we spent three years at drama school to do, right? Was to do these kinds of plays, not just East Asian work. And yet the casting of it was progressive, far more progressive than any other white company was doing, or black company or South Asian company.

You know, black companies were just doing black work, South Asian, just doing South Asian work. But here I was employing a white and white famous director, a physical theatre director, and saying cast it to the majority East Asian because that’s our company. But the rest I want you to cast it diversely because that’s the reality of the UK and that’s what we ended up with. And that show was incredibly progressive in 1999. 

So work that Yellow Earth has done has been instrumental. 

And I also hope that all those who are now big stars and you know, have the megabucks and the resources. I hope they help New Earth Theatre with its fundraising so that they support the next generation coming up, because that’s the raison d’etre of the company. Even when we had very few resources at the beginning, I made sure that we did the best that we could to support the wider development of our sector.

And the company has continued to do so. It’s always been with a generosity of spirit. It’s always been about trying to not only help ourselves, but also help the younger generation. Helping other artists and so that we collectively find a voice, find a presence, have an impact on mainstream culture, change British Eurocentric culture and ensure that from now on we have a place at the table.

We don’t need to be anybody’s assistant. We can do it ourselves. And, make sure that the work is recognised, that it’s as valid a contribution as any other.