Poohsticks (A Riverside R&D Sharing)

SHE has spent years avoiding Chinese New Year. This year, she finally brings her boyfriend home. He’s charming, funny, and ... British. 

The questions are predictable: her career, her appearance, and whether she knows how to keep a man. Caught between a mother demanding grandchildren and a partner urging her to “be the bigger person,” she finds herself increasingly alone and at odds with the person meant to understand her.

When the festive noise fades, what remains is not relief, but a gap that no words can resolve and a suspicion that they are fundamentally incompatible. 

So they reach for the only language they have left - play. Games, tests, kinks...each one more intimate, more absurd, more exposing. But beneath the laughter and sensuous touch runs a quieter dread: what if love isn’t enough to survive the difference between them?

Blending stylised movement and fairytale storytelling, POOHSTICKS is a surreal, playful and liberating bilingual exploration of love, identity, and the parts of ourselves that refuse to grow up. The piece speaks to the loneliness of the increasingly globalised yet divisive contemporary world, ultimately asking what it means to truly encounter another person and to allow that encounter to change us.