Performance: Blood Links

Herald Theatre

Review: Susan Budd


William Yang guides us through a voyage round his family in a sophisticated version of the slide show that blighted the childhood of so many.

His images are not, however, of uncles and aunties, slightly out of focus and missing essential limbs while beaming through the many wonders of the world.

Instead there are extraordinarily beautiful landscapes and fascinating family portraits.

Stephen Rae's music perfectly complements the images, blending with the hypnotic drone of Yang's voice to form a mesmerising soundscape.

Blood Links begins with a wedding portrait of startlingly beautiful Wilma and Les and traces the labyrinthian connections of the family descending from four siblings, before returning to an older wedding portrait of one, Yang's Aunt Bessie, that serves to demonstrate the early breakdown of old Chinese traditions, with its pregnant bride and husband who carries the stain of Irish blood.

As Yang traces the discovery of a family that until his mother's death had been indelibly stamped with her interpretation of their characters and lives, he encounters personal problems of identity.

"I came out as a Chinese," he says. But as an assimilated Australian, he is divided from the land of his ancestors by lack of a common language. Tellingly, the images of his travel in China showing the Great Wall are delivered in silence.

Yang's monologue is built loosely round these themes, rambling down byways that, while often threatening to lose the audience, always return to the main highway. What remains in the mind are collections of images: a sequence of vivid pictures of Chinese rooms, shrines and buildings flash past to a rollcall of Australian place names, the corrugated- iron kitchen of an old uncle that is an historical and cultural artefact, the beauty and diversity of members of a family who have married into a multitude of races.

Yang's deft descriptions are often hilarious: of the blokish cousin who claims that in your life there is one great dog, of his sister's blunt interrogation of his sexuality.

There is pathos in the inevitable, sad ageing of many, but joy lies in belonging to this extraordinary mass of humanity.