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Where Are You From? is an original monologue piece written and performed by Choy-Ping Clarke-Ng, featuring voice recordings of her father, Chi-Wai Ng, and directed by CN Smith, both Trinity students. The piece was part of the Scene & Heard Theatre Festival in the Smock Alley Theatre. The production concerned Ping’s status as the daughter of a Hong Kong father and Irish mother; Ping speaks English but not Cantonese, the dominant language of Hong Kong. The performance addressed some of the difficulties involved in answering the question “where are you from?” — a question that grows more complex in our increasingly globalised Ireland. This is asked not only because Ping may be considered to be “from” two different places, but because people tend to project an identity label onto those who look different – in Ping’s case, those who look Asian.

As the audience filtered into Smock Alley’s main theatre space, they encountered Ping playing with children’s teddies. The intimate, personal atmosphere was aided by the ambient lighting design choices of Ferdy Emmet.

It was this striving for intimacy that most coloured the performance. Ping re-enacted a series of dates with “John”, whose fixation on her Asian heritage caused their fledgling relationship to fail quickly and quite hilariously. Interspliced among the “dates” were extracts from an interview with Ping’s father and a basic (though enlightening) series of presentations by Ping on Hong Kong. We can certainly glean a good degree of meaning from this narrative: the problems in the relationship arose from “John’s” inability to see a more complex individual personality behind Ping’s Asian heritage; he sees her only as a hentai character, at one stage he even asks her to roleplay.

Frustratingly, the audio quality of her father’s interview material left much to be desired. If this production is restaged, it would benefit from the re-recording of that interview on higher grade equipment. Despite this, Martha Knight’s sound design did provide great impetus and allowed Ping to move from fourth wall-breaking presentation to dancing in a club to quiet conversation convincingly and with apparent ease.

If this play were “about” something, it seemed to be about the difficulties facing a person of mixed heritage in a country that is startlingly homogenous in its whiteness and in which our image of Asian people – or indeed that of anyone who is from another country – is muddled and “othered” often to the point of caricature. The piece highlighted these difficulties with authority and even with grace and the audience was left to consider the question “Where are you from?” in a new light.

However, given that the performance was structured around interactions with the disastrously clueless “John” character, I would encourage the writers to redraft the script to make him less of a caricature – it is too easy for the audience to distance itself from a character who is so exaggeratedly awful. The performance certainly made audience members reconsider the ways in which they categorise the identity of others, but with the strawman “John” seeming so overtly unbelievably racist, they were somewhat left off the hook.

This production had real value. It provided an opportunity for the talented Choy-Ping to showcase her obvious performing ability and its content was both thoughtful and thought-provoking.