Romeo Lau talks about their show at this year’s Voila! Theatre Festival, Blondie Blue Eyes.
“Combining elements of slapstick, movement and drag artistry, BLONDIE BLUE EYES follows the turmoil of titular character BLONDIE, who so desperately desires to be the epitome of the White ideal that she herself becomes a caricature of it.
With concepts like gentrification, whitewashing and representation being tossed a big zeitgeist tumble dryer, this is an experimental satire play surrounding the literal erasure of culture in the pursuit of perfection.”
Where: Canal Cafe Theatre
When: 4, 9-10 Nov
Ticket link: https://www.voilafestival.co.uk/events/blondie-blue-eyes/
Your show Blondie Blue Eyes is taking place at Voila this year. What can you tell us about it and about the team behind it?
Blondie Blue Eyes is a chaotic, experimental two-hander play with elements of drag, clowning, slapstick and movement, following our titular character Blondie (you read that right: first name Blondie, middle name Blue, last name Eyes) — an Asian girl who wants to be white so badly that she becomes a ‘perfect’ caricature of a white woman.
Throughout the course of the play, she suffers through a cyclical hell loop in an oddly meta reality show/fringe show/vlog hybrid, controlled by a mysterious Narrator who always pushes her back into her conquest for ‘perfection’.
One of the very first inspirations for this show was the case of Oli London, a British influencer who was largely controversial for wanting to “become Korean” a few years back. I then correlated this stimulus with the Asian beauty standard I experienced growing up and realised that a lot of what was considered ‘beautiful’ were derivatives of the white coloniser’s characteristics – pale skin, a high, thin nose bridge, double eyelids, long curly eyelashes and many more.
To some extent these beliefs are deeply ingrained in the wider Asian diaspora, which got me thinking: what if I flipped the case of a “transracial” white man who wanted to become Korean on its head?
Blondie was born during the Tommy Robinson white supremacist riots in late 2025, fuelled by fear and anger at the white people in my life who were more than happy to stay comfortable in their own homes. In its earliest form, Blondie was a 10-minute-long assignment that I thought I’d just submit to my university, until I realised I had so much more to say (as you do while existing in a society that is tumbling downhill towards fascism).
In about April 2026, I reached out to a few of my friends for our very first workshop, specifically looking to work with trans+ ESEA creatives on the very first full-length version of Blondie. I wanted to work with queer and trans+ creatives, as the concept of the play – the performance of femininity (specifically white femininity) is very much deeply rooted in my own transness as a feminine-presenting nonbinary person.
From this, our original team became current co-directors Yiu-Ching Mahoney and Basil Wan (also our movement director), sound designer Vincci Chung, and our lighting designer Rey Wong.
This was also the first appearance of the Narrator role, now played by Yijia Gong, who is also a drag queen by the name of Tofu Gaga. Yijia joined the team after we were confirmed for Voila Festival, as well as our producer Valerie Mo (founder of our theatre company whim! theatre), production designer Mio Jue, props maker Eleanor Simpson and production assistants Morgan Tucker and Sam Berridge.
Your venue is Canal Cafe Theatre. What appeals about that space and how has it informed the development of the show for this festival?
In its core, Blondie is a drag show inspired by my experience in the queer nightlife scene, and I was really drawn to Canal Café’s cabaret-style seating. The element of the raised stage is always quite interesting to me, especially when doing a show that has audience interaction throughout.
Blondie depends heavily on the bravery of audience members to break the barrier between the stage and their comfort in their seats.
I really wanted to challenge the concept of the “innocent bystander” and the complicity of an audience in a show, and the feeling of being far removed from concepts such as white privilege and racism. There are two separate endings to the show, depending on whether the audience musters up the courage to become an active bystander and intervene to stop Blondie’s suffering.
Either way, an important point is driven home: inaction is in itself an action, in which social change will not begin unless all of us do what we can to challenge a centuries-old system brought about by colonialism.
Can you sell the show to a potential audience in one sentence?
Asian person does white woman drag.
The show is very much around whitewashing and white drag, and presented in four languages. Why have you taken this approach to highlight racism against Asians?
While researching Asian beauty standards, I went on a deep dive into how severely entrenched East Asian styles (such as K-beauty and Xiaohongshu makeup) were in Eurocentric beauty standards, which led to the idea of using makeup and the art of drag to create a larger-than-life character.
I am also a drag artist by the name of Princelet, mainly focusing on masculine ‘king’ drag, so I wanted to combine two art forms that I love in a performance of not only whiteness but also femininity. In this, I also found it a great way to criticise how there is a tendency of the racialised Asian diaspora to whitewash themselves in an attempt to seem palatable to a society entrenched in coloniality.
One big shock for me since moving to the UK from Hong Kong was the complete monolith that non-Asian people seem to group all of Asia (the whole continent!) under, often experiencing very much unsolicited (and often incorrect) guesses as to where I was from.
Even in the theatre industry, ESEA actors are often cross-cast in roles that aren’t representative of their own ethnicities! As a polyglot who has learned 5 languages (English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean), I realised that one way I could convey this was through portmanteaus of different phrases, where an English-speaking audience would still be able to understand the nuance of statements that were in foreign languages to them.
And what’s next for the show?
After Voila Festival, we are going to be performing at Camden People’s Theatre as part of their programme for SPRINT Festival! I’m super excited for this showing as well, as CPT has been one of my dream venues for Blondie.
Hopefully moving forward, we’ll also be able to take this show to the Edinburgh Fringe – where I spent my summer directing another show earlier this year and experienced firsthand how hard it was to be a young creative of colour at the festival (as well as one of the only East Asian reviewers attending).
I’m sure there are a lot more predominantly white audiences who will need to hear from Blondie – it’s scary looking further into the future but my Cantonese parents did not raise a quitter!