Vera Chok
Her new online play is a personal piece that fuses food and performance.
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Interview: Vera Chok
The first twenty minutes of my interview with Vera Chok is spent talking about food. Specifically, it’s spent talking about congee – a rice dish that is common in Malaysia, and across South-East Asia, but that I have neither had nor heard of.
“I want to call it porridge, but in Britain porridge means oats,” says Chok. “Congee is like soupy rice. You know when you are sick and you want chicken soup? If you’re Chinese, you have congee. It’s frothy and warming and easy to eat. It’s very homely and comforting and nourishing. And you can put whatever you want on it – sesame seeds, seaweed, pickled vegetables, bits of onion, whatever.”
There is a point to this conversation. Food plays a central part in Chok’s upcoming online play Rice!, a co-production between Clapham’s Omnibus Theatre and Malaysia-based Wayang Kitchen, a new theatre company specialising in fusing food and performance. From February 20th, ticket-holders will receive a box of ingredients in the post and take part in an online cookery class before they watch the show via Zoom.
“Food – its flavour and its warmth – works as a particularly good metaphor in the show, because the characters talk about home and hunger a lot,” says Chok. “It’s nice to be able to share that with an audience. And it’s nice to be able to bring people together with food, even if it is only online.”
Rice! follows a Chinese-Malaysian woman – Connie Cheng – on her journey from Malaysia to the UK, and uses different actors – Amanda Ang and Michelle Wen Lee – to portray her at different stages in her life.
“It’s nice to be able to bring people together with food, even if it is only online…”
“Connie is rebellious,” says Chok. “She wants to be a modern woman. She’s a lounge singer and she’s sexy, none of which is really acceptable, so she leaves for the UK. Then we see her older, in the UK, and we ask questions of her. Is she happier? What has she achieved? What is her relationship to Malaysia, and what is her relationship to China?”
It is something of an autobiographical piece. Chok was born in Malaysia in 1977 and spent the first seventeen years of her life there before she moved to the UK. The questions she asks of Connie – “all that stuff about legacy and family and foreignness and longing” – are questions she asks of herself.
“I definitely identify with being a headstrong young woman in Malaysia, wanting to leave,” she says. “Rice! isn’t a one-woman show about me, but yes, a lot of the things in it are really, really personal. Initially, I was asked to perform in it, too, but I wanted to have some distance from it. Plus it’s just better to have more Chinese-Malaysian women involved than less.”
Chok is based in London. She has a dog – an Australian labradoodle called Ubi – and she chooses her words carefully. Her career – although she doesn’t like the word, and says she finds it “limiting” – has gone in lots of different directions. She started making theatre at Oxford University, but only after she started creating her own shows because she wasn’t getting roles in anyone else’s.
“I’ve always had to come at stuff from the outside, from a place of ignorance about how things are done,” she says. “But I was young and I had the arrogance of youth back then, so I just did it anyway.”
After graduating, Chok spent time in “loads of shitty jobs” and eventually started training to be an auditor in London. Next door to her college in King’s Cross, though, was the now defunct drama institution The Poor School. She enrolled on a summer course there, got the first real acting encouragement she had ever received, and within weeks had joined a full-time acting programme. She was 29.
“It is great to follow your curiosity, and to gather together people that stretch and excite you…”
Chok went on to train with Philippe Gaulier in Paris – “That’s where I discovered clowning and physical theatre and devising and cabaret” – and her subsequent CV has embraced everything from pantomime to performance art, from big-budget television shows – she has appeared in BBC2’s Collateral and Sky’s Cobra – to major theatrical productions – she was in Lucy Kirkwood’s Olivier Award-winning Chimerica at the Almeida and in the West End, and in Tom Stoppard’s The Hard Problem at the National Theatre.
That is just the acting side of things. She’s also produced cabaret nights. She’s made podcasts and performance art pieces. She’s founded several organisations, from The Brautigan Book Club – “Not a book club at all, more of an international creative community” – to Saltpeter, an independent company whose operatic show Tonsheisha she produced and starred in.
“Just as a human being, I think it is great to follow your curiosity, and to gather together people that stretch and excite you,” she says. “And it doesn’t make sense to me that you have to stick to one field. The other side of that, of course, is the lack of stability and financial security, and with that comes huge anxiety and depression.”
It was in 2013 that Chok started taking herself seriously as a writer, too – of both poetry and prose. She did an MA in creative writing, and came away with a love of post-modern American literature, the writer Richard Brautigan, and the space his writing creates for its reader’s imagination “to wiggle around in”.
“I think being alive is about expanding and growing, so I like writing that leaves a space for that,” she says. “Writing poetry is fun because you get to smash things together and make up new words that create those interesting spaces. And they can express things that I find really hard to express, even though English is my first language.”
Chok started writing essays, too – for herself, for the Guardian, and for Nikesh Shukla’s anthology The Good Immigrant, alongside Riz Ahmed, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Nish Kumar and Vinay Patel. Most of her high-profile work considers what she calls “the tensions between my Chinese ethnicity, my ex-colony Malaysian homeland, my British citizenship, and my “American Dream” aspirational immigrant outlook”.
“I’ve had to turn down roles because they are just a slap in the face…”
Within that, she has written extensively about representation, the stereotyping and homogenisation of Asian characters on stage and screen, and how those dangerous depictions – particularly the hypersexualisation of Asian women and the desexualisation of Asian men – feed into real life, including her own.
“It’s definitely affected my career,” she says. “I’ve had to turn down roles because they are just a slap in the face. I’ve had to take roles I didn’t want to take because I needed the money. It’s hard, constantly being aware of your own identity.”
“I want people to know how much it costs to talk about your own marginalisation,” she adds. “Repeatedly talking about racism is not fun, and often not helpful. I’m fed-up of seeing myself the way other people see me. I want to work with people who just enjoy the way my crazy brain and my silly body work.”
In recent years, Chok has got into improv. Together with fellow Gaulier graduate and best friend Charles Adrian – who Chok first worked with at Oxford in 1999 – she developed a series of events at the Omnibus Theatre called Vera and Adrian Improvise Things in which the duo experimented with improv, accompanied by special guests.
“I used to be more of a traditional actor, and I was a bit of a snob about improv, especially comedy improv” she says. “But then I discovered that it actually has an amazing philosophy and approach to life. You really listen to people. You build worlds together. You can build really complicated, incredible shows together. It’s very nourishing and life-affirming.”
Even more recently – as well as writing Rice!, creating an 18-hour online ASMR audio piece for Forest Fringe, and preparing to perform in Northern Stage and the Actors Touring Company online series Dear Tomorrow – Chok has been embracing improv online, something that she finds helps with her mental health.
“Over the last year, through the online platform The Improv Place, I have been able to meet improv performers from all over the world, most of whom don’t have English as their first language,” she adds. “We talk about diversity and inclusion, and how those things mean different things in different countries. It really has made my world bigger.”
“The most helpful thing someone could do for me is…”
I would love, love, love to get a role in a TV series - something like The Good Place or Brooklyn Nine-nine. Although I’ve done telly, I’ve never been a series regular. I think that would be nourishing for my soul and give me stability and status - and then I could bring more people up with me.
Or someone could give me a house. It all boils down to financial security, really.
I want people to think more about the energy they are consuming - their electricity, leaving their car engine running, whether they are composting. Argh!
“If you want to get an idea of what I do…”
Check out Chelsea Handler on Instagram. See how she uses her platform as a white, blonde, beautiful, successful entertainer to enact social change by exposing how ridiculous she is and how much she is learning.
Also, Mindy Kaling, who writes a lot of stuff that exposes how ridiculous she is, and how ridiculous the industry is.
Watch Sex Chat with Vera Chok, or Vera and Adrian Work From Home. They’re both on YouTube.
Bits and bobs, shouts and murmurs…
Alice Boyd - last issue’s interviewee - is involved in Land Skeins - a collection of four binaural audio dramas made by emerging artists no more superheroes.
Good Grief, the new show from Ugly Bucket (remember Grace Gallagher from the first issue), is streaming from Liverpool’s Unity Theatre next weekend. Give it a watch because it’ll be great.
Manipulate Festival - Edinburgh’s annual festival of visual theatre and puppetry - is streaming online from this evening. There’s some great stuff coming up over the next week, and there’s an interview I did with artistic director Dawn Taylor in The Stage here.
Islander is a beautiful new musical set in the Hebrides that was first on in the Paines Plough Roundabout at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe. A version of it was on Radio 4 last week, and you can still listen to it online and think about happier times.
Exeunt have done a piece on the things we never thought we’d miss about going to the theatre - and it’s funny and a bit sad. Mine: the smell of theatre programmes.
I enjoyed NYT critic Jesse Green’s quote-littered article on the myriad ways the media have compared Trump to Shakespeare characters over the last four years - and which comparisons have been accurate and which haven’t.
The Theatres Trust has released its annual list of theatre buildings under threat from demolition, development, loss of funding or lack of maintenance. There are some beautiful, beautiful buildings on it.
It’s good-bye from me…
Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoyed. The next issue - the fourth! - will be along, same time, same place, in exactly 14 days time.
In the meantime, feel free to get in touch - just reply to this email, or you can find me @FergusMorgan on Twitter. I am off to walk the doggo, then I am going to spend all weekend doing my tax return. Joy.
To cheer me up, why not…
Fergus x