Mei Mac: ‘It is society’s disease to oversexualise and dehumanise Asian women’

The Olivier-nominated star of ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ tells Annabel Nugent about challenging stereotypes in the ‘untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play’ and performing Shakespeare for King Charles

Mei Mac: ‘Humour helps us navigate a world that’s difficult to exist in’ (Ian Lim)

This is not an attack on Miss Saigon,” says Mei Mac, the star of a play called, um, untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play. Kimber Lee’s Bruntwood prize-winning drama, which opened in Manchester this month, is a scathingly funny implosion of the 1989 musical in its title – and every stereotype of East Asian women it pedals, not least their overt hypersexualistion. “We’re not actually saying f*** you Miss Saigon,” Mac, 30, insists over video call. “That’s not the point. The point is to say f*** the world for thinking that East Asian women are like this – but obviously, that’s a less catchy title.” 

A punchy play with a political message may seem like a departure to those who saw Mac last year in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s critically acclaimed production of My Neighbour Totoro. As the four-year-old lead, Mac gave life to Studio Ghibli’s much-adored 1988 animated film, embodying a childlike wonder that truthfully belied her years. Untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play is a less family-friendly affair.  

In the play, a co-production between the Royal Exchange, Manchester International Festival and the Young Vic, the stereotypes in Miss Saigon are puffed up into cartoonish shapes, which pull focus to their sheer ridiculousness. Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s 1989 musical, inspired by Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, tells the story of Kim, a Vietnamese sex worker in Saigon who falls in love and becomes pregnant with a white male American GI. He abandons her, returning years later to claim his son and ferry him back to the US. Left behind, Kim kills herself.