The title refers to the security system the CCP set up to control its citizenry even while it opened its markets to the world, a chief element of which was an internet firewall built in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics. King has based her play on a legal case several Chinese nationals mounted against a US tech company that they claimed aided China’s crackdown on political dissidents. In Golden Shield, the Chinese government employs the brilliantly named Onus to help improve ‘efficiency’ around the network, even though both agents know the ramifications this will have on personal freedoms and political discourse. The case is a tricky one, turning on a legal technicality and dependent on a single bullet point in a meeting between Deputy Minister Gao Shengwei (Gabrielle Chan) and Onus executives Marshall McClaren (Josh McConville) and Larry Murdoch (Nicholas Bell). It is a meeting where both parties clearly hope the onus will fall on the other.

Yuchen Wang, Gabrielle Chan, Josh McConville, and Nicholas Bell in Golden Shield (photograph by Jeff Busby)

Julie Chen (Fiona Choi) is the lawyer who intends to prosecute the case, but her Mandarin isn’t up to scratch. She hires her younger sister Eva Chen (Jing-Xuan Chan) to act as her translator, even though she knows that familial tensions may threaten the outcome. The sisters haven’t been close since their abusive mother died; Eva deeply resents Julie’s abandonment of her to study in the United States, and King cleverly suggests that the differences in their language proficiencies have profound emotional resonances too. Julie is the more rigid, obstinate thinker, a perfect legal attack dog but not wholly responsive to cultural nuance. Eva is a savvy drifter, arrested rather than freed by her globetrotting lifestyle. Choi and Chan brilliantly navigate the fissures and fixations of these siblings, never letting the characters’ metaphorical implications intrude on the psychological verisimilitude.

Director Sarah Goodes elicits fine performances from the entire cast, as they navigate a large and intimidating playing space and some demanding technical requirements (the brilliant set, designed by sisters Esther Marie and Rebecca Hayes, recalls one of those hideously brutalist corporate foyers, all grey concrete and hidden cameras). McConville is superb as the crassly egotistical Marshall, a man convinced that his moral turpitude suits the age that he and his Silicon Valley mates have come to dominate, and Sophie Ross brings such a clear demarcation between her dual roles of an astute legal eagle and a human-rights advocate that it’s hard to reconcile they’re being played by the same actor. Gabrielle Chan is poised and noble as Mei Huang, the wife of Julie’s sole plaintiff; but it is Yi Jin as that plaintiff, Li Dao, who makes the greatest impression of the night.

Dao, an academic, is softly spoken but resolute in his moral and political convictions; he’s precisely the kind of galvanising figure of resistance the CCP have in mind when designing their firewall. But he proves a wary and reticent plaintiff, one who will need to be cajoled and – in an act of mistranslation that will have devastating consequences – lied to, if he’s going to help the sisters win their case. Jin is astonishing, his every gesture contained but potent, a convincingly great man caught between larger, if lesser, forces.

Yuchen Wang, Sophie Ross, Josh McConville, Yi Jin, Nicholas Bell, and Fiona Choi in Golden Shield (photograph by Jeff Busby)

The scenes between the professor and his wife are performed entirely in Mandarin, translated for us by a character King uses to tie all her thematic strands together, one she simply calls The Translator (Yuchen Wang). This character doesn’t just translate the Mandarin, though; he constantly steps out of the action (in a way, he’s never really in it) to give us context, or subtext, as well as some insight into the difficulties and problematic nature of translation itself. Wang is perfect in the role, sanguine and attentive but also increasingly disturbed by the discovery of things beyond translation, by the intractability of miscommunication. The final moments, where the translator realises that not only are there things that can’t be interpreted but that people may not even want to understand each other, is an existential crisis he implores us to share.

And it’s here that King’s true thesis becomes clear: whether we are talking about nations or sisters, about fundamental differences in ideology or the minutiae of individual relationships, our ability to communicate is only ever predicated on a shared language. Her vision of a world where the only true international bridge is the bridge of corporate law, of money and money’s influence, is an entirely recognisable one, but King provokes us into wishing for more. Golden Shield is a powerful argument for a new mechanism in dealing with the perceived battle between East and West, that of the translator who can navigate and interpret opposing world views. Anthony Burgess called translation ‘degrees of loss’, but maybe it’s our only hope? Certainly, this extraordinary, vital play points the way forward.

Golden Shield is written by Anchuli Felicia King and directed by Sarah Goodes. It is showing at the Sumner Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company, from 12 August to 14 September 2019. Performance attended: August 16.