A play that offends everyone is Queensland Theatre’s latest treat

Having this play about corporate greed and racism set in Singapore is a clever way of giving us a new take on a familiar subject.

Nicole Milinkovic and Mayu Iwasaki in White Pearl

It’s the warnings that often recommend a play. The warnings for Queensland Theatre’s latest offering, White Pearl, a co-production with Sydney Theatre Company and others, go like this: “This play contains strong language, adult themes, sexual references and smoke effects. White Pearl dissects aspects of race and culture, and contains content that may be confronting to some audience members.”

You freaking sickos! You want to see it now, right? And so you should, because it is very entertaining and, delivered over 90 minutes in one act, it’s a short, sharp, highly entertaining night in the Bille Brown Theatre, expertly directed by Priscilla Jackman who, we hear, hails from Shorncliffe.

I was pleased about the length, because the last two plays I saw at Bille Brown Theatre were a tad over three hours, and I was spat out on to the street afterwards gagging for a cuppa and desperate to get home to my dressing gown.

This felt much more relaxed, and is a great contemporary number by playwright Anchuli Felicia King. And because it’s about racism in Singapore and not Australia, the audience doesn’t feel quite as guilty as it might otherwise, but still have a lot to think about.

Cheryl Ho is hilarious as Sunny Lee in White Pearl.

It’s brave doing any kind of play about racism, but this is a clever way of doing it. It’s set in a cosmetic company where a number of different Asian nationalities come together. Clearday cosmetics has a product called White Pearl which is supposed to help whiten skin, and an ad is prepared for the company but not properly signed off on when it gets out on to social media and causes a sensation for all the wrong reasons, including blatant racism.

This leaves company CEO Priya Singh, played with class and hysteria by Vaishnavi Suryaprakash, scrambling to find out who stuffed up and who should be sacked.

Her offsider is sassy Singaporean Sunny Lee played by Cheryl Ho, who speaks Singaporean English perfectly with attendant the attendant “la” on the end of sentences. Ho is the funniest of everyone and has some killer lines. Token South Korean (not North Korean! as she is constantly pointing out) is Cairns-raised actor Deborah An. There’s Ruki from Japan (Mayu Iwasaki), Xiao Chen from China (Lin Yin), Built Suttikul from Thailand (Nicole Milinkovic) and then there’s the token white male, the pride of Bundaberg ... our own Matthew Pearce, who is supposed to be an unsavoury French bloke called Marcel Benoit.

Histrionics rule in the office at Clearday in the play White Pearl

What Marcel and Built get up to in the toilet cubicles on stage is nobody’s business except everybody’s, because we can see what’s going on.

That’s a racy scene, and there is some racy language and some very funny interactions which seem less threatening to us because they are happening between Asians in Asia.

Still, the play does ask serious questions about what sort of world it is where people would apply a cream in an attempt to get whiter than they are.

The playwright has a Thai background, Singapore is a very multicultural city state and if, like me, you have visited there regularly, you will find the whole scenario entirely believable.

It’s satire, and satire is a very good way to look at issues such as toxic corporate culture, casual racism and the complexity of pan-Asian relations.

In other words, it’s very good... la!

White Pearl is on at the Bille Brown Theatre, South Brisbane, until July 10