Chimerica, Almeida, London.

How much do you really know about China? You may have looked at the labels on the clothes in your cupboard and found the majority of them are made there. You may have looked at a map and realised China is much larger than you thought it was, in fact, wow, isn't bigger than America?
You may know about their huge population or their one child policy and the newborn baby recently stuffed down a waste pipe, in order  to avoid the recriminations weighed on unwed single mothers or you may have a vague idea about the Chinese governments prohibitions on freedom of speech and access to information. Whatever you do know, Lucy Kirkwood's roller coaster ride through Chinese American relations makes you realise, you really ought to know more.

Es Devlin's designs adeptly serve the cinematic quality of the script, adapting her Jay Z and Kanye cubes and projections to serve quick jumps through space; spinning swiftly from drunken sex on election night in New York to torture at the hands of the Chinese Police and back again to New York in time for the sober, morning recriminations. Providing the same dizzying feeling as the globalised lives of the central protagonists, navigating their lives in a globalised space, their relationship beginning, appropriately enough, on a plane somewhere in between China and the USA. Good intentions, cultural confusion and misguided personal agendas weave in and out of Kirkwood's play, highlighting the dangers of over simplified assumptions about our friends overseas, and the potential dangers that lie ahead if we fail to adapt to the Brave New World in front of us. The moral dilemmas posed about the possible cost of this adaptation are represented by the stories of Joe, the (fictional) American photojournalist, who caught the legendary image of 'The Tankman' in Tianaman Square and his search to track him down,Tessa , an English marketing profiler and Zhang Lin, Joe's Chinese friend, trapped in his Beijing flat, by the ghost of his dead wife, who keeps emerging from the fridge surrounded by smog, or 'fog' as the Chinese Police amend him.

All of the cast, including the ensemble, who play several parts throughout, are excellent and director Lyndsey Turner does well to prevent each scene, which largely take place in limited playing space, from becoming repetitive or dull, a risk in a play which runs at over three hours. Yet, with the cinematic scope and ambitious themes tackled, the creative team would have been hard pushed to run the play any shorter and the images, characters and story will still be running around my head for a long time to come. Especially the notion that I really, really ought to know much more about China.