Lecture series
Vortragsreihe: Theater International
In The Last Days of Limehouse, Singaporean playwright Jeremy Tiang documents the final days of London’s first Chinatown in 1958 and the reverberations of its redevelopment in the following years.
Exploring questions of cultural identity, belonging, memory, and resistance, the play addresses the intricacies of urban planning from the perspectives of those involved and asks its audience to reconsider the complexity of gentrification and preserving cultural heritage. This paper investigates the play’s uses of intermediality, temporality, and dramatic devices on the one hand and its characters and their genealogy of memory on the other hand. Exploring how the contemporary space of the play’s original setting captures the unsettling dynamics of changing cityscapes through redevelopment, I postulate that Tiang aims at archiving the history of London’s Chinatown in the Limehouse district through theatre, thereby giving voice to the vibrant community of British Chinese who call London their home today.