Working on Forgotten

Photo: Jack Sain

For the last month and a bit I have been working on Moongate Productions and Yellow Earth Theatre’s collaboration Forgotten written by Daniel York Loh. This is a new piece of writing exploring the lives of being a part of the Chinese Labour Corps in World War I. It is such an important story that Daniel has brought to life with director, Kim Pearce and it has been an incredible honour to be able to work on this play with so many other incredibly talented people. My role in the production team was as costume supervisor which was a great challenge to be given. It is the first professional period show I’ve worked on and on top of sticking to a specific time period the show also requires a knowledge of Chinese culture, particularly Chinese opera, which is not something I had much of a knowledge base on prior to the project. It has been great to learn more about Chinese culture and about the efforts Chinese labourers made in helping the Allied forces in the war and I think it’s a story that everyone needs to know more about as the contribution of the Chinese labourers to the war was immense and many of them, despite being promised that they would not be in any danger as they would be far from the front line, lost their lives. So I was incredibly excited to start work on this project when I was first told about it by designer, Emma Bailey. To complete the design team I was also working with associate designer, Natalie Johnson.

The project of course started with a lot of research. From the moment Emma told me about Forgotten I began to research the Chinese Labour Corps. I had never learned about their contribution in history lessons about the First World War and it was fascinating to discover a whole section of history that seemed to have been erased. From here when Emma showed me the initial designs our work began at sourcing the items. The story moves from village life in rural early 20th Century China to the front line in France and finally to post-war Paris, so it was always going to be challenging to find items for these three very different time periods and geographic locations in 2018 Britain. Emma had been able to find a few of the key items such as jackets for the CLC and shoes that matched the research images from online shops in China, it was imperative to order these as early as possible for them to arrive on time. From here we collated the list of items left and I focused my efforts on charity and vintage shops, places such as Camden Lock Market and for the slightly simpler or more common items some online shopping, this mostly came in the form of Etsy as they had more specific and vintage items. On top of searching in shops, we hired from the National Theatre Costume store, mostly for the specific war paraphernalia like British and German uniforms along with a few other items.

Probably the biggest challenge was headwear and the things needed for the Chinese Opera elements in the play. The characters found in the Shandong village are amateur opera performers so it was important for them to have small elements of opera costume for their performances. Obviously it would have been fantastic to order these items from China to get authentic headdresses and hats, but unfortunately with time and budget constraints this just was not possible. However, it did mean I could put my hands to a new skill of millinery. Now, I do not claim to be a Milner or know the first thing about hat making but this project called for it so I took to the task. For most of the opera hats I began with a base hat and I embellished and added to it. These were mostly fancy dress hats that I then adapted. For example, Second Moon’s Miraculous Traveller opera hat actually began its life as a police officer’s cap that I cut the peak off of as well as the badges and other paraphernalia and then added silk ribbon and felt. This was a similar process with Big Dog’s opera hat and Headman Zhang’s hat. Eunuch Lin’s opera hat was similar but instead of adapting a fancy dress hat I covered a fascinator-style hat in fabric and then added the tassels and paper flowers. With Old Six’s opera hat I was not able to achieve the shape that was required for his Wu Song warrior hat with a hat that I could find elsewhere, so I grabbed some felt and tried my hand at constructing the shape myself, which actually worked really well and I was incredibly happy with the result.

Another key aspect of working on the costumes for Forgotten was breaking down and distressing costumes. It was important, in particular for the village costumes, to look worn and a little dirty and dusty. I had done a small amount of breaking down and distressing before but never to the level that was needed on this project so it was great to learn more about distressing and face a new challenge. Most of the things I distressed only required a cheese grater and some Dirty Down spray, or black spray paint but something that brought a challenge in particular were vests which every character wore under most of their costumes. These were only visible with a few of the characters but Emma and I wanted them all to be distressed in case a small bit of one slipped out underneath. I initially just used a mixture of Nicotine Yellow and Mid Brown Dirty Down spray on the vests, which gave a great effect but unfortunately when the Assistant Stage Manager, Nemo Martin, and I did laundry after the tech and dress rehearsals the Dirty Down spray came out of the clothes. With a show that evening and having just run out of the Mid Brown spray we were incredibly worried about what we were going to do about the vests. I went out that morning and bought just an ordinary brown spray paint, but with how aggressively the spray came out and it not being quite the right colour it really did not give the right effect. Luckily, at the Theatre Royal Plymouth we were sharing the theatre with the National Theatre’s tour of Macbeth. So Nemo and I took a trip up to the wardrobe department of Macbeth who were so kind and gave us some great advice on re doing the vests in a short amount of time. They lent us some potassium permanganate which turned the bright white vests into the perfect aged yellow just by dipping the vests into a bucket with the powder mixed with some water. With a little extra black spray paint, sprayed extremely gently they were perfect again for the show!

It’s been a great show to work on and I have faced a number of challenges in creating the look of the show but I think it’s turned out well and I cannot wait for a whole new audience to see the show as it opens this week at the Arcola Theatre until the 17th November. So if you’re in the area do pop along and give it a watch, it’s such an important story that I think more of the world needs to see.