London Theater Journal: Hard-Boiled in 'Chimerica' LONDON - It's hard to run away from home these days. I crossed the Atlantic on Sunday and on Monday found myself back in America. Or "Chimerica," to be exact, a morally muddled but cleanly delineated intersection of the American and Chinese empires, which is also the name as well as the setting of Lucy Kirkwood's hit play at the Almeida Theater. Part of this long but sprightly drama takes place in Beijing, but much of it is set in good old New York, New York, and concerns people who work for a newspaper that sounds a lot like the one that employs me. Hey, isn't that the logo on The New York Times Building that flashes before our eyes in the second act? Still, if much of "Chimerica," the most talked-about new play of the season, feels familiar to me, it isn't from having lived in New York and been a part of its leading broadsheet. In its lingo, its customs, its rhythms of life, "Chimerica" reminds me of no place I've spent time except the movies. I mean, in particular, smooth but suspenseful flicks that paper over improbabilities and plot short cuts with peppy pacing and unnaturally snappy dialogue. And though I may have aspired to live my life in that style from time to time, reality has always defeated such ambitions. For the record, "Chimerica," a co-production of the Almeida Theater and Headlong, has totally won over the critics here. I haven't read a discouraging word about it, unless you count the quick e-mail from an American friend who saw it earlier this month and wrote to me under the subject heading "Danger! Danger! Every publication that grades shows by the star system has awarded "Chimerica" the full complement of five, and would probably have dipped further into the constellation had the ratings scale allowed. Small wonder that the production is transferring to the West End (to the Harold Pinter Theater) in August. I can understand the enthusiasm, to a degree. In terms of its scope and theme, "Chimerica" is the worthiest new mainstream play to come along in ages. It devotes more than three hours of stage time to portraying the casualties of the culture clash between a rising and a waning superpower. That would be China and the United States; the title is borrowed from Niall Ferguson's "Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World." Ms. Kirkwood's fleet-footed script, directed by Lyndsey Turner, considers the elusive nature of heroism, the short-sightedness of the best intentions, the changing role of news photography and the parallel inequities of two ostensibly very different governments. What with the recent spate of accusations and counteraccusations between the Chinese and American governments regarding the surveillance of their citizens, this last topic has obviously acquired even more relevance since Ms. Kirkwood began writing "Chimerica," a process she says took six years. What's more, these ingredients have been folded into a story that moves faster than a speeding episode of "Homeland." And it's a mystery, to boot, about a photojournalist's search for the never-identified subject of his most celebrated picture: a long shot of a young protester facing down a tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989. You've surely seen some version of the real photographs that inspired this play. At the intermission, I heard a silver-haired, horn-rimmed type in a blazer saying excitedly to a friend: "It's everything. It's superb entertainment, and it ticks off all the boxes. While I was heartened by his enthusiasm, which was evidently felt by much of the audience, I couldn't share it. That's because for all the sophistication of its subject matter, "Chimerica" often feels irritatingly callow. The way its newspaper people and politicians talk and behave has a shiny, synthetic hollowness, which I don't think is meant entirely to signal the hollowness of their souls. Sample dialogue: "You ever consider buying a new shirt, you know, one that's not made of hair? Try the Gap. And: "Sweetheart, I've resented far better women than you." The first example is said to, and the second said by, our equivocal hero, Joe Schofield (Stephen Campbell Moore), a middle-aged photographer searching for something to believe in and/or a means of rekindling his career. These quests converge when he decides to find out what happened to the figure called the Tank Man, whom the young Joe photographed from his hotel window in Beijing more than two decades earlier. Despite the skepticism and resistance of his gruff, wise-cracking editor (Trevor Cooper), Joe pursues the story, with a gruff, wise-cracking reporter (Sean Gilder). These two resort to credibility-taxing stratagems that seem more appropriate to gung-ho high-school journalism students than hard-bitten newsmen. Then there is Joe's long-time friend, Zhang Lin (Benedict Wong), an English-language teacher in Beijing, who May Be More Than He Seems, which we learn as he remembers his idealistic self - and the woman he loved (Elizabeth Chan) - from 1989. Back in the present, Joe begins a combative Hepburn-Tracy kind of romance with Tessa Kendrick (Claudie Blakley), a British marketing consultant whose specialty is teaching Western businesses how to sell to China. Tessa thinks that people can be divided into simple categories, but will be proved very wrong. Some of the acting here verges on cartoonishness, but in the central roles, Mr. Moore, Mr. Wong and Ms. Blakley bring affecting precision to their characters" confusion. Over all, despite following a switchback trail between two continents and two decades, "Chimerica" manages to be a model of clarity and efficiency. This is partly thanks to Es Devlin's ingenious set, a revolving cube that travels neatly through time and space. That device also echoes the play's implicit premise that to place people, and a people, into preconceived boxes is dangerous. And therein lies the paradox - and for me, the problem - of "Chimerica." It has a healthy respect for the ambiguity of all its characters" motives. Yet it portrays morally gray areas in the black-and-white broad strokes of popular, pot-boiling narratives. Perhaps this is the recipe for a successful topical play. But the disconnect between style and substance here made me itchy. And part of me kept hoping that Joe's gruff, wise-cracking editor would step out of character and yell, "Get me rewrite." An earlier version of this post misstated the name of the character who plays Joe's old friend, an English-language teacher in Beijing. That character is Zhang Lin, played by Benedict Wong, not the character Zhang Wei, played by David K.S. Tse.