The Orphan of Zhao: A Review by Zoë Green

4.5 Stars

Prior to The Orphan of Zhao, Director Chester Chen hosted a panel to introduce the play and contextualise its 2500-year history to the audience. He was clear about his intention: this was not to be a BME production or a narrowly ‘Chinese’ show. He wanted everyone – regardless of background – to participate in a story whose themes of loyalty, sacrifice, and responsibility belong to all of us. The cast’s mixed cultural backgrounds reflected exactly that ambition. Next, he sent us to the bar to try the ‘Drunken Emperor’ cocktail, which I would highly recommend.

Having seen Chen direct the 2025 Pantomime, I was curious to see how he would handle something of this gravity. The answer: with real assurance. You could tell this show mattered to him, and that energy was palpable from the opening scene. I will admit, watching on opening night brought a certain nervous energy to the cast – but over the course of the evening they found their feet, and by the second act the interactions felt genuinely organic.

The RSC’s adaptation by James Fenton makes a play that is over two millennia old feel surprisingly immediate and accessible. The RSC adaptation was written to be accessible for an English audience: a successful way of bridging the cultures and allowing the message to resonate in our own society. At its heart is the question of how many people must suffer for the ‘greater good’? Three hundred souls are vested in a single child, and the weight of that is felt throughout the narrative.

One of the play’s primary emotional generators is the relationship between Cheng Ying (Chester Chen) and his wife (Elena Zheng). She believes the orphan is a curse – a child of destruction – while Cheng feels bound by obligation to uphold a vanished clan’s lineage. It is a compelling, painful dynamic burdened by the tension of personal grief versus righteous duty. As Elena Zheng herself noted in the pre-show chat, you know something is going wrong when none of the female characters have names. Her portrayal of Wife was heartbreaking –particularly in the moments where we watch her strength begin to crack.

Barney Sayburn’s Tu’an Gu is a standout: genuinely unsettling but with enough dark comedy to make him watchable. Later, seeing him bludgeon a baby doll on stage with no ceremony whatsoever – while those who chose suicide were afforded a kind of grace – cemented the play’s moral framework for me.

The production’s most striking theatrical choice is Death personified – Rosie Nicol in a white cloak, dancing characters to their ends. Pain and terror are made beautiful; the mental battle of suicide is visualised in a way that is rather stunning. It is one of those experimental choices that earns its place entirely. Juliana McIntyre’s ethereal vocals as the Ballad Singer added another layer – the sound design was echoey and atmospheric in a way that gave the ADC stage an otherworldly quality.

Daniel Hanlon’s makeup as the elderly Gongsun Chujiu is remarkable – a convincing transformation that does real work for the character. Gongsun is a calming presence in the narrative; death holds no terror for him, and that placidity is oddly reassuring in a play that otherwise refuses to offer comfort. A special mention must go to the tech team for bringing a limbless puppet dog to life with admirable dedication.

Annie Hu’s costume design is smart and purposeful, using colour to map power dynamics across the play. The staging effectively elevated the Emperor and Tu’an Gu physically, making their authority legible in the theatrical space. One minor caveat: the music in these scenes was occasionally loud enough to drown out dialogue.

The white screen sequence, in which shadow work and silhouetted conflict are narrated by the Orphan, is one of the most visually elegant passages of the night. Each new character is also given a moment to address the audience directly – useful both for tracking the large cast and for deepening our investment in their individual fates.

Krish Misra is excellent as the grown orphan – a medical scholar who has spent his whole life shared harmoniously between two fathers, entirely unaware of the conspiracy he was born into. When the truth comes out, the unravelling of his identity is staged with real intimacy: he is not just discovering a history that he was unaware of, he is discovering that he is a mystery to himself. The cyclical structure of the play, with the ballad singer returning and Death appearing again, gives it an effective sense of inevitability.

This is not a fast play. It is slow and intricate, more interested in accumulating moral weight than building to a single cathartic moment. For an audience member engaging critically with it, pen in hand, it is deeply rewarding. For a general audience, it may be a slightly harder watch. But its questions – about loyalty and allegiance, who suffers for other people’s principles – feel anything but ancient. In our current political climate, The Orphan of Zhao has more to say than might first appear. Pick up a programme, try the cocktail, and let yourself truly dwell on it.

Edited by Polly Bigham