Actor Mei Mac: ‘We are pointing at stereotypes and going: isn’t this ridiculous?’

In a rehearsal room in Manchester, the actor Mei Mac is recalling an audition she had some years ago.

“A casting director asked me if I could use an Asian accent,” says Mac, who was recently nominated for an Olivier award for her outstanding performance as Mei in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s My Neighbour Totoro. “I was so taken aback — Asia is such a huge continent. I said, ‘Do you mean a Cantonese accent or a Bengali accent?’ And they said, ‘What’s your native accent?’ I said, ‘Birmingham.’”

She laughs about it now, but it’s precisely that sort of problem that her new project sets out to tackle. Mac plays the lead in Kimber Lee’s untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play, a blazingly satirical drama about the prejudice and casual stereotyping that so many British east Asian and south-east Asian (BESEA) actors have encountered. Winner of the inaugural Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting, International Award, it has its premiere (directed by Roy Alexander Weise) at the Manchester International Festival this month, before heading to London’s Young Vic in September.

Lee’s play speeds through a century of drama, beginning in 1906 and repeating the same scene over and over: handsome American soldier sleeps with beautiful local woman, abandons her, returns to take their child, she kills herself. Though the title clearly echoes the 1989 musical Miss Saigon, the parody also scoops up references to Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly, the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical South Pacific and television series M*A*S*H in passing.

That’s why representation matters. You can’t be what you can’t see’

The playwright, who was born in South Korea and is now based in New York, has said she was moved to write the drama after watching a 2017 production of Miss Saigon. It’s clearly fuelled by rage, but the weapons it deploys are exuberant theatricality and withering satire.

“This play is incredibly powerful and spicy and funny,” says Mac, whose character Kim keeps finding herself stuck in yet another narrative of exploitation and self-sacrifice. “The story is of Kim trying to break through a century of objectification, misogyny and racism — through those bamboo ceilings. But it uses humour as a tool to do so. It’s completely unapologetic.”

She adds that while Miss Saigon might be the spur, the play’s remit is much broader. “We are pointing at stereotypes and going, ‘Isn’t this ridiculous?’,” Mac says. “It is not about singular shows or singular productions or individuals. We have to look at society and go, ‘How is it that we are in a world where these narratives can even exist?’”

Strikingly, the play’s premiere will coincide with a revival of Miss Saigon at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, which prompted BESEA company New Earth to withdraw a show at the same venue and Sheffield Theatres to publish its reasons for staging it. The situation has raised again the question of whether controversial texts should be revived or consigned to history. For some, they are too inherently problematic to solve; for others, it’s important to stage them and interrogate them. Mac takes a nuanced view.

“I’m not interested in attacking the Sheffield production of Miss Saigon — I know a lot of people who are working on it,” she says. “I think the show itself perpetuates harm. I would never ever want someone to feel like they couldn’t do something . . . But the people who make it have to be the ones who are most affected.” It is the systems and structures that produce these works that need to be addressed, she suggests: the new play’s repetitive structure aims to show how stereotypes are perpetuated and embedded.

There’s something really powerful about seeing a character who’s experienced a century of oppression finding her resilience’

Mac, 30, grew up in Birmingham, the daughter of working-class parents from Hong Kong, and had not considered working in theatre until she encountered the touring company Yellow Earth (now New Earth). “I thought, ‘Wow, if they can do that, then maybe I can do that.’” It’s why representation matters, she says: “You can’t be what you can’t see.”

She made her way through fringe and repertory theatre, and in 2022 received widespread praise for her funny, truthful portrayal of four-year-old Mei in Totoro, Phelim McDermott’s stage adaptation of the Studio Ghibli film. Her performance was partly inspired by Iris-Mia, the small daughter of a colleague on the show, whom she describes as “powerful, sassy, very quick-witted and not afraid of anything”.

But her early career often brought her face to face with stereotypes and assumptions: “The number of times I was called in to read a sex worker. I would absolutely do a show in which a sex worker was complicated and nuanced; I have no problem playing a sex worker. But most of the time I was simply there to be a sexy object. That is also how people view east Asian women.

“I think things have changed a lot. [But] we still have a hell of a way to go. Even at the Oliviers, I was the first ever east Asian actor to be nominated for best actress in a play.”

During the pandemic, Mac co-founded Rising Waves, a mentoring scheme to support BESEA artists, sustain diversity and halt a mid-career talent exodus as artists struggle to maintain a living. “It’s also why we see such a drain of working-class artists,” she says. “The programme was about pairing emerging artists with established artists: the aim was to get those early career artists firmly into their mid-career, supported through a scheme of practical skill sharing.”

Scarcity can create a sense of competition, she says: the scheme aimed to foster a sense of mutual support. That positivity is important for Mac. It’s also one of the qualities in untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play that appeals to her. Over the course of the drama, her character’s awareness gradually increases and she begins to fight back against the narrative in which she’s trapped.

“There’s something really powerful about seeing a character who has experienced a century of oppression finding her resilience,” she says. “After the fourth cycle of the same old shit, you’d forgive her for giving up. But she doesn’t. My really dear friend Don [Le], who works in human rights, says that in the east and south-east Asian community we talk a lot about intergenerational trauma. But what we forget to talk about is the other side of the coin: intergenerational resilience.

“Art can mirror life, and life can mirror art, and sometimes you have an opportunity to change what that looks like through art. You have to show something different.”

‘untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play’ runs at Royal Exchange theatre, Manchester, June 24-July 22, royalexchange.co.uk, then at the Young Vic, London, September 18-November 4, youngvic.org

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