Rendering 5. Theatre.

            The article “Paper Dolls, Tricycle Theatre” was published by Jane Shilling in The Telegraph on March 7, 2013. It discussed Philip Himberg's play about a group of five Filipino men who emigrated from Manila to Tel Aviv is lacking in focus and tension.

            It’s important to point that in 2006, the Israeli director Tomer Heymann presented his documentary, Paper Dolls, at the LA Film Festival. In the audience was Philip Himberg, artistic director of the Theatre Program at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute. Himberg was so struck by the innate theatricality of Heymann’s film about a group of five gay Filipino men who worked in Tel Aviv as carers for elderly Jewish men, and in their spare time performed as a group of singing drag artists, the Paper Dolls, that he decided to turn it into a play.

            Speaking of the situation, it’s necessary to point that directed by Indhu Rubasingham in her inaugural season as artistic director of the Tricycle Theatre, the drama begins with the sound of a jet plane interrupting a prayerful chorus of Hasidim. A bemused Israeli immigration official interviews Cheska, Sally), Zhan  and brothers Chiqui and Jorgio.

            In addition, you can see why Himberg was entranced by the Paper Dolls’ story: its themes are so multifarious and vivid – family, religion, sexuality, love, duty, what it means to be an outsider, the way that we express identity through costume – that they present a dramatist with almost too much material.

            As a result, this is precisely Himberg’s problem. He tries to include everything, and in the process, loses focus and tension. The play’s structure is perplexing – Cheska’s dramatic arrival suggests that she is a central character, but Sally’s relationship with Chaim and his daughter, the fretful dynamic between brothers Chiqui and Giorgio, and Yossi’s troubled relationship with his sexuality (and his powerful Jewish mother) all clamour for attention.

            As for me, Paper Dolls is an extraordinary true story exploring an unlikely collision of cultures and the universal desire to find ‘home’.