A play in which two characters metaphorise the complex relationship between China and Australia does not sound very promising. We have seen this sort of thing before, not always happily – in the blue corner a lovably cantankerous professor representing ‘science’, in the red corner a cheery troglodyte who is ‘faith’ incarnate, and so on and on into the worst dinner party you have never been to; dichotomous, diaphanous, disastrous.

In Kryptonite’s red corner is the Chinese-Australian Lian (Ursula Mills), an undergraduate at a university in Sydney in 1989 when the tanks roll into Tiananmen Square, and a successful businessperson at a transnational mining company a decade and a half later. In the blue corner is Dylan (Tim Walter), an easy-going surfer when we meet him, a swashbuckling environmentalist as the years fall away, and finally, in a familiar mould, a mealy-mouthed and compromised senator.