Writer: Lab Ky Mo
Directors: Jillian Wallis and Lab Ky Mo
For two nights at the Greenwich Theatre, a trafficked Vietnamese boy is locked in the studio to tend some marijuana plants under a grow light and consume various flavours of pot noodle. The noodles are brought to him by another Vietnamese boy, although this one works for the traffickers. Lab Ky Mo sets up a rich and relevant premise to examine migration and exploitation, and the global reach of Liverpool FC.
There are two other characters in the piece; the trafficking uncle, and the sister of the imprisoned boy in the process of entering the UK and communicating with her mobile phone, but the centre of the play, and its power, is in the shifting relationship between the two young men. They grew up in the same village in Vietnam, they have both travelled to England by different routes, but they are both lonely and isolated, and gain some kind of fellowship from their situations – the dependency of the gardener, the crippling weight of responsibility on his minder. Their relationship is well-wrought and funny, and makes telling points about the position of immigrants in a hostile nation. Stockholm Syndrome mediated by pot noodle and pot plants.
The more serious points, the tragedy and the terror, are less well developed, and not helped by the Studio’s decision to make two of the five rows of seats unraked, and with a viciously compromised view of the actors. Packing people in for the play’s two-night run makes some commercial sense, but to give a quarter of the audience such a limited experience is not good management of resources. Better raked seats or fewer of them is the harsh choice.
Lab Ky Mo has an acute insider’s ear, an ability to develop humour out of confrontation, and an excellent setting for unusually nuanced exploration of a hot topic. The direction makes very little effort to accommodate the action to the limitations of the space, and the attempt to make some planters and a few curtains into a naturalistic set is always doomed to failure. It is a worthy effort, but sticky doors, flimsy sets, and mistimed sound cues undermine the best efforts of cast and writer.
There is a burning necessity for presentation of the migrant experience from migrant communities, and the company deserves praise for providing those insights, and for doing it with nuance and humour. If the design were better or simpler, the experience would be improved, but still, it provides insight and emotional links that are valuable.
Reviewed on 22 June 2025