Review: Bound by the Wind (Arch 555 at Silly Towers)

Review by Sam Waite

⭐️⭐️⭐️

The appeal of Choose Your Own Adventure books is obvious, giving each reader the opportunity to adapt the story to their own tastes, or at least to the choices they feel most compelled to makes. Netflix have made forays into the same structure for films (spoiler: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt can't end with murderous revenge, no matter how hard you click) but where the genre truly lives on in video games utilising a branching dialogue system, where the player’s preference for a choice of words or tone affect the ongoing narrative. In Bound by the Wind, Xinyue Xing asks what might happen if we tried to control our own stories this same way, long after our “mistakes” have been made.

Hundreds of years ago, Rouran assassin Enkhtuyaa has entered the tent of legendary General Mulan, meaning to eliminate him. Countering the assault and holding a blade to the girl’s throat, Mulan chooses mercy and tries to compel her on her way, and their back-and-forth soon reveals the secret the General assumed the would-be killer knew: Hua Mulan is a woman, disguised as a man to keep her father from a war he wouldn't survive. When a third woman, watching carefully with a controller in hand, seems dissatisfied with the conversation’s outcome, the warriors are pulled back to the moment of revelation, and Mulan becomes more and more aware of the manipulations afoot.

Mounting a two-show run as part of the Lambeth Fringe, it's unsurprising that Xing’s roles behind the scenes are numerous. As well as writer and director, she acted as music director and combat director/choreographer. Thankfully, the latter of these tasks is supported by performer KC Chan as fight captain, and between the two they have crafted some dynamic, fluid fight sequences which allowed us to see Mulan’s skill. Opening mid-combat, Xing and Chan’s work began the piece with a strong physical presence, ensuring that we were immediately engaged even as we picked up the backstory through the following scenes.

KC Chan and Kexin Song’s performances, as Mulan and Enkhtuyaa respectively, were well matched by virtue of their stark contrast. Song was earnest to a fault, Enkhtuyaa carrying a quality of youthfulness and blind dedication, particularly in the first half of the hour-long performance. Meanwhile, Chan was more grounded in humanity and in battle-earned weariness – when the first repetition of Mulan’s revelation occurred, it made perfect sense that she is the one aware of the shift. In keeping with the video game theming, introduced before the play began by Xing and Yutong Xia’s 8-bit soundscape, Enkhtuyaa not only behaved as an NPC (non-player character) might, but Song’s believable single-mindedness lent itself nicely to the conceit.

A third character had, of course, been sat on the outskirts of the play throughout the first two thirds, before finally making herself fully known. Credited as “Mulan Deity,” this is a role I won’t go too deeply into beyond the hints already given, owing to my sincere hope that at least some components of Bound by the Wind has a future life. As this Deity, Shiwei Chen made the most of her limited stage-time, creating an immediate sense of power and fury, a compelling blend of Chan’s war-torn humanity and Song’s single-mindedness. Chen’s arrival onstage also allowed for more depth from both co-stars, Song’s Enkhtuyaa able to soften at the edges and become a more fully-realised young woman, and Chan’s Hua Mulan given an outlet for the continuous analyses at the edges of her dialogue.

Admittedly, all three performers had their weaker moments, particularly where the script becomes laboured in trying to both present and justify its concepts. The moments immediately following Deity’s entrance stood out as slightly stilted, the characters tasked with explaining the situation to one another and the audience at the same time, and some anachronisms do creep in – Enkhtuyaa would absolutely question what a “video game” is, but would her language, anywhere from the 4th to the 6th century, have a word for “video”? While these moments did make it harder to get fully immersed in the performance, there is still a solid sense of pace that keeps things moving along nicely, and at the show’s final Brixton performance I didn’t find myself too rushed to understand or the show too stop-and-start in putting across its ideas.

A delightful realisation when browsing the credits was that, aside from lighting designer Con Divers, the entire cast and crew were of Asian descent. Aside from Marlon Clark, the graphic designer behind the show’s intriguing poster, the team are also entirely women, or at least assigned female at birth, something that shines through in Xing and co’s approach to a story which explores not only womanhood as an idea, but personhood when having to live as a woman in a time where options for life paths were so much more limited. The crew being made up of Asian women is also notable in the costumes, courtesy of Jieming Lan, which carefully balanced enough stylisation to be believable as video game character designs, but not caricaturish or overly reliant on Western media’s images of Chinese historical garb.

Returning momentarily to the effective, well-managed fight choreography, I was impressed at a small touch within the performance, one which many would miss but which could deepen the work for those in the know. Chan, I was later told, when holding Mulan’s blade to her opponent’s throat, rotated the prop sword so that the side dictated as “blunt” was nearest Song’s neck – for anyone more familiar with stage combat, this shows an early hint to something the rest of us would find out minutes later, that Mulan had no intentions to kill this Rouran assassin. As well as being a fun visual flair, this helps to deepen Xing’s script, bringing ideas to life before they are fully explained within the text.

A reliance on projections overhead to establish setting shows that the writing needs some sharpening, and that the conceit is a touch too cinematic to fully come across on stage. The Deity character, the strongest and most well-defined on paper, also suffers as a result of being literally sidelined for too much of the play, her presence too easy to forget once the action between Mulan and Enkhtuyaa has begun. Bound by the Wind has countless strong ideas in play, but this is one of many examples of the work seeming better suited to a cinematic or multimedia presentation, and I would love to see these ideas given this room to breath and develop outside of the constraints of the stage.

Despite the aforementioned stumbles, Xing has crafted a compelling and often fascinating world, one where reality and programming blur, and all we can be certain of is these women themselves. It’s a powerful thought, and the team have brought a great deal of energy and obvious passion to the work, which reaffirms just how essential this kind of storytelling is. Having been staged as part of the Lambeth Fringe only days before this year’s much-enlarged RepresentAsian fundraiser, Bound by the Wind is one of many unsung but essential examples of the beauty that can be found when marginalised communities are allowed to tell their own stories, with their own voices, and with their own perspectives.

While the show, as it stands, is imperfect and in need of some reshaping before its next outing, this was a truly engaging hour of theatre, and one which reminded me of the importance of fringe theatre, varied voices within the arts, and bringing something thoughtful and unique to the table. It’s in need of honing, but Bound by the Wind has plenty of sharp ideas, and lands more swings than it misses.

Bound by the Wind played at Arch 555 at Silly Towers on October 10th and October 11th

For updates on the show’s development and future productions follow the production at https://www.instagram.com/bound_by_the_wind_theatre/