The past, as L.P. Hartley famously observed, is a foreign country. It’s also one that is best seen from a distance. This is something that playwright Stan Lai knows well, even if his characters don’t.
‘Secret Love In Peach Blossom Land’ brings together two plays within a play, the over-earnest ‘Secret Love’ and the farcical ‘Peach Blossom Land’. The former is a tale of lost love set in the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War while the latter is a classical text that tells the story of a cuckolded fisherman in ancient China. When he is goaded by his deceptive landlord and wife into venturing to a dangerous part of the river, he is caught in rapids and barely survives, eventually finding himself in a Shangri-La that is locked off from the outside world.
The casts of the two meta-plays are booked into the same theatre for rehearsals and we see their attempts to finish the respective works play out in the larger tragicomedy.
“It’s not the way I recall it,” the forlorn director of ‘Secret Love’ exclaims as the action opens in his autobiographical play. Nothing, it turns out, can recreate the feelings and images that he keeps in his mind, a source of constant exasperation.
The action relies heavily on physical theatre and at times barely needs translating. That’s fortunate, as the play is plagued by a rash of production problems – everything that can go wrong does, including, at one point, the surtitles.
The hyperactive main character, played superbly by Tang Tsun-sheng, is capable of commanding the stage on his own and often does as he ventures towards his paradise. But this is a utopia only because nobody there can remember the outside world, while he is plagued by memories of his former life. Despite his former unhappiness, he eventually succumbs to the temptation to return.
Both plays speak to the futility of going back, and the power of longing and memory that makes that idea so tempting. And the syncretic product of these two vastly different plays speaks to the importance of moving forward, of creating something new.
This is not easy – the collision and conflict play out in real time before an unexpected synthesis as the productions co-exist onstage. And then, finally, both plays are allowed to end on their own terms. There is no happily ever after, just a deeply satisfied audience.
