The Village.
Written and directed by Stan Lai. Stan Lai and Performance Workshop in collaboration with Wang Weizhong. Festival Theatre. Adelaide Festival Centre. OzAsia Festival. October 25 – 26 2019.
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
Stan Lai returns to OzAsia with another epic
memory play that tells the story of three families, exiled as refugees to
Taiwan after the failure of Chiang Kai Shek’s conflict with Mai Ze Dong’s
Chinese Communist Party. This sweeping drama, encompassing more than fifty
years in the lives of the Zhao, Zhu and Zhou families and three generations who
lived, were e born and were raised in the Military dependents’ Village in
provincial Chianyi in Taiwan
Lai approaches the stories based on real people’s
lives with a searing commitment to the essential humanity of his characters. What
emerges is an overpowering humanity, a dynamic and heart rending and heart-warming
tale of struggle and survival, love and painful devotion, disappointment and
disillusion.
In this production each character embodies the
universal truth of human endeavor, forged in the roles that society and gender
expectation demand of them. Expecting only to remain for a few years, the
families find themselves welded to a community that melds into the Taiwanese way
of life, dreaming of escape but bound to an overriding commitment to family. For three hours traffic on the stage the Zhao,
Zhu and Zhou families live out their loves between the younger generations,
their rivalries with the neighbor ,their secret loves and forsaken dreams, their
private sacrifices and painful longings.
Throughout the production on Austin Wang’s
framework set design and in Lizen Michael Chien’s evocative lighting, Grandma
Lu moves slowly and statuesquely across the stage, harkening it seems to the
ghostly spirits of the ancestors and a world they have left behind. The
eventual return to the homeland is awkward, fragmented by a forced separation
that has rent the families in both countries asunder. It is the human tragedy
of politics, war, conflict and human greed and ambition. We cry at their plight
and laugh at the irony of their everyday lives, like attempting to install a flush
toilet. There is such simple truth in every performance. Lai directs it for
heightened reality, where passion overflows and actors breathe the fire of
commitment in telling the story of the displaced refugees.
Unfortunately, the production was in Mandarin,
and English speakers relied on surtitles to follow the dialogue. The surtitles should
have been placed above the actors on the Festival Theatre stage, but for some
reason they were placed on large screens on either side, as they might be at a
rock concert. Consequently I didn’t know where to concentrate my focus, - on
the script so that I would understand who each character was, their place in
the saga and what they were saying. Or should I focus on the action and
interpret meaning from the heightened realism of their performances and the
passion of their voice and gesture. Neither solution was satisfactory and as a
result I was left to be content with the laughter of the Mandarin speakers in
the audience.
This vast drama that has been touring for two
years deserved better. Stan Lai’s previous production at OzAsia, another tender
and moving love story, Secret Love in Peach Bloosom land which I
reviewed a couple of years ago had no such split focus to detract and I
remember it as a wonderful depiction of human nature and the moving depiction
of Lai’s emerging theme of forced separation and denial of true love. It emerges
again in The Village and reminds us all of he impact of forces beyond our control and the
devastating fracturing of innocent human lives. At a time when the world is engulfed
in conflict The Village is a poignant
reminder of the value of family and compassion.
