Precious Cargo review – Vietnam’s ‘operation babylift’ orphans look back

The accents on the voiceovers say it all. We hear southern English, Australian, American and Hebridean. One thing links them: these are the grownup voices of the orphans who were flown out of South Vietnam as part of “operation babylift” at the end of the Vietnam war in 1975. Placed with families of various cultures around the world, they grew up with no experience of the country they had left behind.

One of them was Barton C Williams who was raised in the sun-and-surf traditions of Adelaide. Living in a majority white country, he suffered racist abuse – he performs a whole song full of insults – but knows no Vietnamese nor how to cook South Asian food. In 2021, his work as an actor took him to the set of Silent Roar, a film about a grieving surfer, on location on the Isle of Lewis. There, he met Andy Yearley, the “island’s best music teacher,” and part of the same Vietnamese diaspora.

Precious Cargo is, in part, the product of their meeting, a monologue performed by Williams about identity, belonging and finding yourself cast adrift on the tide of history. It is fascinating stuff, in the manner of Who Do You Think You Are?, staged by director Laura Cameron-Lewis for sruth-mara on Robbie Thomson’s set of cardboard boxes on to which she projects momentous images of children, war and sea.

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At the same time, it feels as though they have missed a trick. The meeting with Yearley is one anecdote among many in Williams’s autobiographical story and, although his music features on the soundtrack, he is not an equal partner in the collaboration. We are told about their contrasting experiences on opposite sides of the world – as well as those of several other orphans – but how much more interesting it would have been to see them rub up against each other directly.

• At Summerhall, Edinburgh , until 26 August
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