Writer and Director: Yuner Chen
Love, sex, death, grief, friendship, fascism, migration, memory, identity, cross-cultural relationships, and the history of the Nanjing Massacre. Such a deluge of big themes would risk drowning even a full-length, big-stage piece of theatre; this 50-minute three-handed fringe show with a penchant for minimalist dialogue is almost entirely swept away on a torrent of half-realised ideas. Yuner Chen’s ambitious Chestnuts includes a dizzying mix of pithy aphorisms (“guilt is what you did, shame is what you are”), banal questions (“maybe it really is all my fault?”) and Chinese folklore (the dead will follow you if you don’t finish your tofu soup), but it rarely coalesces into drama.
The actors are energetic and committed, but erratic dialogue leaves them trailing off into awkwardness. Mia Amore plays Polly, whose ex-girlfriend Niki left her and then died. Joseph Grimes is her friend Teddy, whose boyfriend is now marrying a woman. In the first scene, the two of them arrive in Shanghai for Niki’s funeral. Changjiang Guo’s evocative, and occasionally intrusive, soundtrack creates busy airports, train journeys, restaurants, crowded Chinese street scenes.
The overlapping sounds and voices in the first scene make it feel as if the audience have wandered into some abstruse art installation. The surreal effect is enhanced by stygian lighting, designed by Yiling Liu, which is not always illuminating, and Emeline Beroud’s slightly prop-heavy set. Red candles, incense sticks, soup bowls and white mourning flowers conjure a sense of ritual, while suitcases and a versatile airplane trolley wheel on the travel theme.
Beroud’s costumes are striking and effective, with a headscarf for Polly, snappy jacket for Teddy, and strange long overcoat for the character of John Rabe, a 1930s German businessman whose morally ambiguous life story haunts Teddy after his break-up. Rabe is played by Jon Day, who also becomes a waiter, airplane steward, water-slurping therapist and wedding celebrant.
Chestnuts has moments when it could become an interesting drama, but it sinks under its cargo of concepts. The title relates to a chestnut pudding recipe that becomes a metaphor for childhood and other things. The idea that similar-looking horse chestnuts are bitter and poisonous also takes on figurative dimensions. There’s a postmodern cocktail of scenes in different media: podcasts, documentaries, diary entries, monologues. Polly and Teddy sing the line “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”, and it makes you wish the play had more singing instead of baffling dialogues. There are good elements here, but they don’t cohere into compelling theatre.
Reviewed on 25 July 2026 and then at Edinburgh Fringe
