Casting Fu Manchu by Eelyn Lee

Reviewed by: Casting Fu Manchu by Eelyn Lee Tobi Poster-Su CASTING FU MANCHU. By Eelyn Lee. Chinese Arts Now Digital Commission, UK. Streamed, December 1, 2020. Dr. Fu Manchu, the archetypal supervillain invented by English author Sax Rohmer in the 1910s and featured in countless Hollywood portrayals from the 1920s to the 2000s, has been described by scholars such as Ruth Mayer as the embodiment of Yellow Peril, an ideological construction of East Asia that William F. Wu regards as so pervasive within Western culture as to fundamentally shape both public perception and political policy. Perhaps fittingly, Fu Manchu has not been portrayed in any major film production by a Chinese or East Asian performer. Instead, the character has been portrayed by white men engaging in makeup-assisted racial mimicry (a practice explored in David Henry Hwang’s 2007 play Yellow Face). This fact formed the backdrop for Eelyn Lee’s digital short, Casting Fu Manchu, for which Lee invited East and Southeast Asian performers to submit audition self-tapes of sides taken directly from classical Hollywood films featuring the character. These self-tapes, which featured prominently within the performance itself, created an opportunity for performers to subvert and reappropriate a character whose legacy can be seen as directly connected to the current resurgence in anti-Chinese sentiment. Commissioned by Chinese Arts Now, a UK organization that typically supports live theatre, music, and dance, but responded to the pandemic with a series of digital commissions, Casting Fu Manchu took the form of an edited digital performance that reflected Lee’s dual backgrounds in devised theatre and filmmaking. The work, which was streamed over Zoom, opened with a descent into subterranean catacombs as an anonymous voiceover detailed fears of violence and harassment amid the rise of COVID-19–based Sinophobia. This was intercut with extracts from classic horror movies, drawing [End Page 247] clear parallels between the presentation of inhuman monsters such as Dracula and Frankenstein and that of Fu Manchu. There were also teasing glimpses of an altogether less straightforward vision of horror: Lee herself, masked and stalking through woodland. Click for larger view View full resolution Eelyn Lee in Casting Fu Manchu. (Photo: Eelyn Lee.) The format of the remainder of the piece was both straightforward and effective. Scenes from 1930s to ’60s Fu Manchu movies, in which Fu Manchu is played by actors including Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee, were screened and then intercut with self-tape performances of the same texts by Southeast and East Asian diasporic actors. These readings were interwoven with the actors’ reflections on their interpretation of the character, and more broadly, their experience as Asian diasporic individuals. The lo-fi aesthetic of these self-shot auditions and interviews contrasted with the high budgets afforded to the white actors engaging in racial mimicry. The home self-tape is an audition form that predates COVID-19, but there was something particularly charged in the vision Lee presented of isolated performers working from home to present a character rooted in the narratives of Yellow Peril that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought bubbling to the surface. The repetition and refiguring of these scenes brought to mind the shifting though irrepressible nature of both the character and anti-Asian prejudice itself. The movie clips were audio-described, which served a double function: rendering the work more accessible, and also drawing sharp attention to the mechanics of the representation of East Asia. Of course, we could see that the actor playing Fu Manchu “appears to be a white man, with theatrical makeup,” whereas the nonspeaking roles were played by actual East Asians. We may also have known that his gown was one “usually worn by East Asian women,” but there was something striking in the declaration of these facts. Throughout the piece, we returned to Lee’s masked, stalking figure. This unnamed, unexplained character acted as an otherworldly foil to the contemporary reinterpretations of Fu Manchu, many of which humanized the character. Lee’s nameless figure was elegant, scary, and perhaps even “exotic,” all qualities that Fu Manchu was perhaps originally intended to embody, but in a manner that did not fit within recognizably orientalist iconography. The

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• ‘Taping into the void’

  Kirstin Smith•Studies in Theatre and Performance•2025

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