Rice

by Michele Lee

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 21 October 2021

Matthew Xia (artistic director of the Actors Touring Company) directs Zainab Hasan as Nisha and Sarah Lam as Yvette in a production designed by Hyemi Shin of Michele Lee's intriguing play Rice, a co-production by the Orange Tree Theatre and the Actors Touring Copany.

Nisha is an ambitious executive in an Australian company hoping to take over the management of India's distribution of rice (the 'public distribution system' or PDS). Yvette is an older Hmong woman who is a cleaner in the Melbourne office where Nisha works. Their initial encounters are extremely abrasive, but gradually a friendship develops, buffeted though it is by each woman's personal and business problems. During the course of the play we see the pressures confronting these two women through family expectation - Yvette has always been denigrated by her family, and has a particularly unsympathetic daughter, while Nisha struggles to make her mark in the masculine world of big business, taking risks which rebound against her and dealing with condescending assumptions about her connections to India (she is presumably Australian-born). Intriguingly, it is not only the men in her business who are ruthless: her liaison with a feamle official in an Indian government department is fraught with power plays and proves quite poisonous.

In an aseptic white set - white floor, white office desk and attachments, a white sunken space which acts as a sluice for water used in cleaning - the story of the business project is played out, but vertiginously the two actors take on other roles to show what happens, and the scene moves seamlessly from Nisha's office to other spaces in Melbourne and various sites in India. We also see Yvette's awkward struggle to protect her daughter from prosecution for a principled assault on the CEO of a polluting company. 

At times the transformations of character take place at great speed, but with carefully managed inflections of accent and characteristic stances and movements we are almost always clear about whom we are seeing and where we are. The accents are perhaps a little overdone at times (the Eastern European manager of the cleaning contractors is rather too much of a caricature, and the Australian accents are valiant but clearly not native), but the overall effect successfully opens out the different cut-throat worlds in which these two women have to navigate their lives.

As a corrective to the predominantly male-dominated interpretations of the business world Rice is an important piece of work; with no men actually on stage we see more clearly Nisha's frustrations and sense the almost impersonal oppression a woman can so often feel with powerful men calling the shots, often acting behind her back while being patronising to her face. Likewise, Yvette, though used to a lifetime of men in her family defining her place and her character, here has a chance to exhibit her resilience and her anger. Zainab Hasan and Sarah Lam show a dazzling technical skill in bringing this remarkable text to life.