Angela Chan

Angela is a 17-year-old student from Hong Kong.  A violin prodigy, she has been treated by her conservative family as a  ‘Ming vase, mute, polished, ornamental,’ expected to shut up and play and win competitions while looking gorgeous.   She applies for a scholarship at the Performing Arts High School in America to pursue greater artistic freedom, convinced that there is more to being a musician than simply being a ‘performing monkey.’   She did meet an inspiring music teacher who treated her as an artist and not simply a performer.  He also raped her.   When we meet Angela, she is an outcast, cut off by her family, and rejected by the wider community who questions her veracity.   She is traumatised, and unable to play the violin.   She is desperate to gain admission into Eliot, believing that acceptance by Eliot would wipe out the stigma of rape.  Angela’s task in the play is to rebuild her shattered inner world.   Her process of healing is achieved through her intense engagement with Bach, especially the ‘Have Mercy Upon Me’ aria from St. Matthew’s Passion. 

Mercy Jones 

 

Mercy is 30, Black and British.  She is from a working-class family in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, and by dint of hard work and talent got admitted into Oxford to read music.   

Mercy felt like a fish out of water in the overwhelmingly white and enormously privileged world of Oxford until she encountered Ben Cohen, then a visiting professor from the US.   Ben later recruits her to be the diversity expert at Eliot University.   Mercy is initially ecstatic about America, seeing the States as a multicultural paradise after Britain.  In many ways, her life parallels Angela’s.  Like Angela, she felt constricted at home and her journey through the play is one of disillusion with the American Dream.  Mercy takes up Angela’s case since she sees it as a battle against the white patriarchy.  A battle against a world where white male privilege can cover up everything.  

Birch Coffin 

Acting Dean of Admissions at Eliot University.  Birch is a ‘Boston Brahmin,’ i.e. a member of one of the leading families in Boston, and initially appears as the guardian of the status quo.   Birch has worked at Eliot University for 30 years.  Her father was the President of Eliot University.  She herself did not go to Eliot because Eliot did not admit women in her time, and her father fought hard for Eliot to remain all-male.  Her father also thwarted her dreams of becoming a priest because he did not approve of female clergy.   Despite her ancestry, her experience and her competence, Birch’s career has hit the proverbial glass ceiling, and her resentment of Ben Cohen is not just because he represents change, but also because he has been promoted over her. 

Ben Cohen

Associate Professor of music and diversity expert at Eliot University.  Ben used to be a music professor at Juilliard.   He was a visiting professor at Oxford where he taught Mercy.  He managed to increase diversity at Juilliard exponentially before taking up his post at Eliot.  Despite his much-vaunted liberalism and his championing of people of colour, he treats attractive women as sexual objects.