Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
Scenes from a Repatriation - cover

Scenes from a Repatriation

Joel Tan

Publisher: Nick Hern Books

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

'All of human history? It's basically people taking things from each other.'
A thousand-year-old statue of the Bodhisattva Guanyin lives in the British Museum. When it emerges that the statue was stolen from its original home, the museum attempts to deflect both the public response and controversial repatriation claims from the Chinese government.
As statesmen scheme and grease their palms, beneath the statue, witches dance, a cleaner prays, and spirits weep.
Joel Tan's daring, shape-shifting play unfolds the statue's journey from China to Britain and back again, stirring up age-old ghosts and asking who can claim cultural artefacts – and why?
Scenes from a Repatriation was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 2025, directed by experimental theatre-makers emma + pj.
Available since: 05/08/2025.
Print length: 128 pages.

Other books that might interest you

  • The Beauty of the Husband - A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos - cover

    The Beauty of the Husband - A...

    Anne Carson

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    The Beauty Of The Husband is an essay on Keats's idea that beauty is truth, and is also the story of a marriage. It is told in twenty-nine tangos. A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end.This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voice–twenty-nine "tangos" of narrative verse that take us vividly through erotic, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a long-time marriage that falls apart. Only award-winning poet Anne Carson could create a work that takes on the oldest of lyrical subjects–love–and make it this powerful, this fresh, this devastating.
    Show book
  • Dybbuk Americana - cover

    Dybbuk Americana

    Joshua Gottlieb-Miller

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Inventive poetry explores Jewish identity in America"How can I teach a prayer / I only know how to recite?" "America, whose death / didn't you come from?" These are some of the questions that poet Joshua Gottlieb-Miller wrestles with in his beautiful, gripping new collection. By turns experimental and documentary, Dybbuk Americana draws out the questions around Jewish identity in the United States, and what it means to pass on Jewish identity to one's child. This hybrid text draws on art, mysticism, and history, taking the dybbuk, a figure from Jewish folklore, as its central metaphor. A dybbuk is a restless spirit who inhabits another's body, and as a possessing spirit the dybbuk is often treated as a demonic force, but it can be read as merely trying to climb the ladder of the afterlife. In other words, a kind of striver. Enacting the idea of competing selves in one body, Dybbuk Americana plays with form via a series of text boxes that create a multi-channel effect on the page. The body of the poem can be read with surrounding and intercutting text boxes to generate multiple interpretations. This innovative poetic technique maintains a dialogue with Jewish literary lineages: Talmudic commentary and interpretation of the oral law, as well as the fragmented nature of geniza, a place where Jews store sacred documents when they fall out of use. Dybbuk Americana weaves together the father-son arc within a larger socio-political commentary and historical narrative. Poems move deftly between the ironic and the mystic, from aphoristic questioning and inventive narratives, to interview, oral history, and archival materials. In these lines, "the angels./ They get as close as they can." Witty, curious, warm, and searching, Dybbuk Americana signals a fresh voice in Jewish-American poetry.
    Show book
  • The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark - cover

    The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of...

    William Shakespeare

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, often shortened to Hamlet, is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1602. Set in Denmark, the play depicts Prince Hamlet and his revenge against his uncle, Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet's father in order to seize his throne and marry Hamlet's mother.
    Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play and is considered among the most powerful and influential works of world literature, with a story capable of "seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others".It was one of Shakespeare's most popular works during his lifetime and still ranks among his most performed, topping the performance list of the Royal Shakespeare Company and its predecessors in Stratford-upon-Avon since 1879. It has inspired many other writers—from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Charles Dickens to James Joyce and Iris Murdoch—and has been described as "the world's most filmed story after Cinderella". 
    Among the most significant works William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Orpheus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, The Tempest, Venus and Adonis, Antony and Cleopatra, Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale and many more.
    Show book
  • Personal Values - cover

    Personal Values

    Chloë Lawrence-Taylor

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    'You clung on to everything. Her things.'
    Veda and Bea haven't spoken since their dad's funeral; not since Bea scratched something obscene into the bonnet of Veda's cherished convertible. But one wet Tuesday morning, Veda shows up out of the blue on Bea's doorstep, determined to break down the walls built by so many things left unsaid.
    But before they can do that, there's the small matter of the physical walls Bea has surrounded herself with – walls made of newspapers, suitcases, cutlery, commodes, keyboards and hundreds, likely thousands, of bags-for-life...
    Chloë Lawrence-Taylor's play Personal Values is a perceptive, poignant and witty look at sisterhood and grief. It was first performed at Hampstead Theatre, London, in 2025, directed by Lucy Morrison.
    Show book
  • Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea - cover

    Twenty Thousand Leagues under...

    Jules Verne

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" by Jules Verne is a classic science fiction novel written in the late 19th century. The story revolves around the mysterious appearances of a massive sea creature, which generates widespread sensation and scientific debate regarding its existence.  
    The narrative focuses on Professor Pierre Aronnax, his servant Conseil, and Canadian whaler Ned Land as they embark on a journey to confront this enigmatic creature, which turns out to be far more than anyone anticipated. The novel opens by detailing the excitement surrounding sightings of a colossal sea creature reported by various ships across the oceans.  
    Professor Aronnax, who has just returned from a scientific expedition, becomes engrossed in the heated debate over the creature's existence. He decides to join the U.S. expedition aboard the frigate Abraham Lincoln, along with his companions Conseil and Ned Land, as they pursue the supposed monster. Tension builds as they prepare for their confrontation, creating a sense of suspense and wonder about what lies beneath the ocean's depths.
    Show book
  • Now You Care - cover

    Now You Care

    Anonymous

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Nominated for a Griffin Poetry Prize
       
    In Now You Care, her fifth collection of poetry, Di Brandt voices a passionate argument against environmental degradation and a plea for psychic transformation in our violent times. Tuned in to the toxic fallout of over-industrialization and war, these poems face the dark side of our postmodern climate with a language that doesn't give in. They tremble and shake,they rage against despair, they speak against death and wrestle with the fateful spirits of Armageddon to loosen their choke-hold on humanity. Perhaps we won't figure it out and the horizon is already on fire, and our best love will never be more than an approximation of regret, but grass still grows between the cement blocks of the sidewalk to 'grin of the wild.'
    Show book