Slay the Dragon is a work in development, with opening night’s show only the second time they’ve run it. Listing the accomplishments of stars and creators Jane Yonge and Nathan Joe would take half the review, but along with theatre company A Slightly Isolated Dog they bring a slew of talent and experience to the table. Anyone familiar with company knows their focus is on creating connections and communities with live theatre that includes the audience.

Starting off like PowerPoint on Yonge and Joe’s family trees, the show feels like a uni presentation, but funnier. Both performers are born and raised in New Zealand, descended from Chinese immigrants. While in the beginning we are introduced to both, this is Jane’s journey, her personal story dealing with the grief of losing her mother. [More] 

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The casual way this show begins and the simple way it evolves proves to be a subtle means of immersing us in a theme that is as subjective for the performers, or should I say presenters, as it is for us. Yet it resonates well beyond the personal into timeless and universal dimensions of human experience.  

Initially Jane Yonge just chats with the audience about coming down from Auckland, how privileged we all are on a global scale to be able to do this, how agile artists have become in the past year … And she mentions she thought her move to Auckland, for a job, would lead to her visiting her mother’s grave more often.

Nathan Joe picks up the theme by telling us how the death of his grandfather affected him, how strange his funeral in Lockdown was, that he moved back to Christchurch … It turns out they have something in common regarding the visiting of graves. And Grief is declared as the show’s central theme.

While we are promised there will be no audience participation, we are asked for a show of hands on a range of questions about, for example, languages, filial relationships and Chinese food. As for fear of the dark and encounters with ghosts … A welter of increasingly comical Trigger Warnings jolts us back to objectivity.

The Family Trees of Nathan and Jane are wondrous to behold, not least for the romanticised and downright deluded head shots (AV created by the Director, Leo Gene Peters), accompanied by excellent sound effects (compiled by Chris Marshall, who also operates the light and sound). A Complete History of China follows, from millennia of Dynasties through Mao’s Cultural Revolution to its Current Capitalist Communism. It is the notion of Filial Piety that sends Jane on a journey to China ….

Despite having told us the show is in development and neither she nor Nathan are actors, the way Jane recreates her experience of meeting and staying with old childhood friend Samantha in regional China, and attempting to venture forth to the city – abetted by Nathan’s voiced role-playing – draws us in as powerfully as any performance can.  

This is where the Grief theme blends with Identity Politics and Intersectionality, articulating the classic ‘search for self’ amid a sense of loss in a refreshingly unheroic way. Our emotional involvement in Jane’s ‘journey’ is cleverly disrupted to prompt objectivity while touch-points are offered that may connect us to our own experiences of grief – at familial and/or cultural levels.

The playful ‘poor theatre’ staging, involving desks on wheels and paper shopping bags with surprising contents, draws on A Slightly Isolated Dog’s signature style (without, of course, the cod French accents and campery they have brought to their retelling of classic tales). The rhythm and flow of the action is expertly calibrated to maintain our subjective and objective engagement.

The turn-of-the-millennium Chinese hit film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is wittily referenced in Jane’s fear-facing fantasy. A retelling of the ancient story of Ja-yi and her recurring, and increasingly disturbing, encounters with an old woman who has lost her daughter, is compelling. The dream-logic introduction of Covid Tests and Zoom Meetings blends her experience with present day sensibilities. And I am still trying to decode its allegorical significance.

Humour returns when Jane ventures forth at last to discover China – until she spies her Mother amid the milling mass of people and, despite Nathan’s blunt reiterations of the reality, thrills at the prospect of exploring China with her.

Jane returns to New Zealand to find her father has made a certain modification to the family home. Nathan shows us a family-gifted and therefore treasured glass mug, emblazoned with a character from European fiction: is it irrelevant or a pertinent example of alienation? Thus the substantive action comes to an undramatic ending that is as inconclusive as the show’s title: Slay the Dragon or Save the Dragon or Neither.

Nathan has appraised Jane of their cultural rituals at the graves of loved ones and now we are invited to use some semblance of them to privately honour our own loved ones. Some in the audience are deeply moved, others quietly contemplative, and many accept the offer. I find myself more inclined to dwell on the meaning of the show’s title in the light of what has been shared and consider the value of simply letting the ‘dragon’ be, as one integral part of our multi-faceted, or intersectional, ways of being.  

Either way, Slay the Dragon or Save the Dragon or Neither is an ingeniously involving experience than is bound to engage you at some level(s).

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