Golden Blood is now playing at Arts Centre Melbourne as part of Melbourne Theatre Company's 2024 season. Read on for our critic's review of the recent Sydney season.
Girl (played by Merlynn Tong, who is also the playwright) is 14. She dreams of moving to Australia. She wants to be a veterinarian, and to help all the marsupials she’s read about. The plush koala she clings to is a salve and a symbol of her ambitions.
Boy (Charles Wu, Miss Peony) is 21. He dreams of wealth – vast wealth. He wants to be a gangster. Maybe he already is one. He wants to attain the respect he’s seen his fellow criminals command. His father’s parang (a large knife, not unlike a machete) is a salve and a symbol of his ambitions.
To be clear, Girl and Boy are siblings. Their alcoholic mother’s death has brought them back together, Boy having left the family home years ago for reasons we’ll later learn. Boy promises to protect Girl. In his way, he does – but being dirt poor in Singapore’s criminal demimonde is a tough row to hoe.
Bringing with it a strong sense of self, place, and culture... it’s a remarkable work.
Golden Blood comes to Melbourne Theatre Company after a Sydney Theatre Company season and an acclaimed indie premiere season with Griffin Theatre (the company behind the winner of Best Play in the inaugural Time Out Sydney Arts & Culture Awards) in 2022, bringing with it a strong sense of self, place, and culture.
It’s a remarkable work. Over the course of its brisk 90 minutes, we follow Boy and Girl across several years; time jumps are demarcated by flashes of red digital numerals depicting the siblings’ ages on designer Michael Hankin’s sparse, utilitarian stage. While the wider world is communicated through Tong’s sharp, frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious dialogue, the play is a two-hander. And why wouldn’t it be? The dynamic between Girl and Boy, and their shared past, is all that really matters here. The trouble is, however, that each of them has a very different understanding of that past.
Tong and Wu’s strong, agile performances carry the day. We see Tong’s Girl change from a naïve, somewhat sheltered tween to a wild teen, to a woman grasping her position in the world and how she relates to both it and the brother who has suddenly come back into her life. By contrast, Wu’s Boy is in a state of arrested development; for much of the running time, he’s a cocky youth pantomiming masculinity and success, a glad-hander and a fast talker who believes he can fake it until he makes it – and if he doesn’t make it, he’ll just keep faking it. His moment of self-realisation, when it finally arrives, is abrupt, but hard earned.
It might sound self-serious, but Golden Blood pulses with life. Rapid quips and brisk scene transitions take us across the span of years at breakneck pace. The pulsing score designed and composed by Rainbow Chan (an innovative artist whose reputation precedes her – you can check out her visual art practice in the MCA’s 33rd edition of Primavera), combined with Fausto Brusamolino’s bold lighting design, immerses the audience in the hedonism of Singapore’s nightclubs with nary a change in set dressing. A switch to the minimalistic by Brusamolino (a stark bar of light set across a character’s eyes on an otherwise dark stage) also serves to indicate when the play is veering into more metaphysical territory. Maybe it's magical realism, maybe it's an expression of intergenerational trauma, maybe both.
What really impresses is the way Golden Blood is able to deal with such heavy themes without tripping over itself or getting bogged down. Deft direction by Tessa Leong ensures that neither we nor the characters are left to stew in our own juices or descend into morbidity – the world moves too quickly, and life is too short for that. Even when Boy and Girl are confronting long-ignored truths about themselves and their departed mother, the work crackles with energy.
It’s readily apparent that Merlynn Tong (who based the play partly on her own experiences) is an exciting new talent and, given that Sydney Theatre Company has already committed to mounting her upcoming work Congratulations, Get Rich! at the tail end of its 2025 season, she has much more to say. We should count ourselves lucky.
Golden Blood is playing at Arts Centre Melbourne until November 30 and tickets are available over here.