Teahouse goes out of its way to show that plays written and performed by people of colour shouldn’t have to deserve to be seen: when done right, they are valuable works of art in and of themselves, and should be appreciated as such. But the fact is that in Cambridge and in Cambridge theatre, BME people are constantly fighting for control over their own narratives and experiences. The reviews that ignore Teahouse’s contexts in a misguided attempt to distance the art from the political are doing it a disservice; in their own way, they are casting a shadow on students’ and the ADC’s attempts to promote BME participation in Cambridge theatre.

One of our main qualms with the reviews that came out last week is that two out of three appear to hold Teahouse to a higher standard than most other plays. They refer so specifically to minute aspects of the performance that it is almost as if there is nothing to Teahouse aside from “stilted” lines, a loose ensemble, and an assortment of props used to varying effectiveness. It is almost as if the onus on Teahouse to be more than just a gimmicky production, designed to demonstrate ADC’s genuine efforts at promoting BME participation, ended up unfairly alienating it as something to be scrutinized solely for its flaws.

Something we took particular issue with was the repeated use of the word “stilted” with regard to specific actors’ speech. While it is a valid criticism to say that certain parts of the play were ‘hard to understand’ in terms of volume, for example, to say that someone sounds “stilted” is to say that they sound stiff, self-conscious, or even unnatural.

It is hard to miss the racialized subtext in this. It is true that many of the actors in Teahouse have distinct East Asian accents. But gauging from the laughter that pervaded the theatre throughout the last two performances, it is difficult to see how any of the actors could have been incomprehensible. Perhaps “stilted” was an unfortunate example of poor word choice. But intent, in this case, is not what matters: it is these reviews’ effect on East Asian and other BME students who want to break into the Cambridge theatre scene, who read these comments and subsequently decide that there is no point auditioning because no one will understand them anyway, that matters. It is the fact that many international and BME students feel uncomfortable speaking in supervisions or are constantly criticized for sounding ‘strange’ or ‘foreign’ in debates and discussions, that matters. It is the reality that many of us have spent years trying to correct our own accents to make them sound more white, or who have even gone so far as to changing our names so to better assimilate into the Cambridge community, that matters.

Ultimately, what is most hurtful is not the criticisms themselves – it is the fact that little attention was paid to the play’s contextual significance. That Teahouse, a masterpiece of Chinese literature, is being performed for the first time in English is historically symbolic because it marks a confluence of two longstanding literary traditions. That it is being performed in Cambridge, an elitist bastion of ‘the English canon’, by a cast of East Asian students, is important because it asserts that not only does literary merit beyond the white canon exist, but that such content can be consumed on its own terms, through the voices to whom that heritage belongs. The implication that the play is somehow not deserving of its preeminence, or that its merit was obscured by a bad translation, demonstrates a keen sense of literary ethnocentrism.

Much has already been made of the fact that Teahouse is being performed with an all East Asian cast, and is being produced on stage with the consistent participation of East Asian students. This is obviously significant in terms of increasing East Asian representation in the theatre, a field underrepresented by BME people in the world as a whole (which makes all three reviews’ confusion of mixed-race actors’ pictures and spelling mistakes of the cast’s names all the worse).

But in the Cambridge context, Teahouse is also exemplary of how ‘sharing culture’ can and should look: white members of the crew, in helping to actualize the producers’ vision of the show, were consistently open to stepping back and accepting their lack of understanding with grace, constantly deferring to students more familiar with Chinese culture in its production. In this way, Teahouse redeems (to some extent) some of the instances of cultural appropriation that plagued Cambridge last year, and its more general orientalist tendencies.

Reviews of performances don’t always have to bring their contexts into consideration, but when a show bears as much significance as Teahouse does, not engaging with its politics obscures the point. When Teahouse and its all East Asian cast stepped onto that traditionally white stage, we were not just putting on another play – we were taking up space, and visibly asserting the fact that we exist. And we’re not going anywhere.