The life of Alice James is reconsidered in Susan Sontag’s fantasy portrait. By Edmund Lee

If you’ve never heard of Susan Sontag and Alice James, the only immediately comprehensible aspect of Alice in Bed would be its title. Apparently, Alice does really stay in bed for much of Sontag’s play, staged this fortnight in a Cantonese production by Theatre Space and Hong Kong Repertory Theatre. A deceptively eloquent piece of theatre – albeit one that’s decidedly obscure in content when compared, perhaps unfairly, with the breathtakingly lucid ideas in Sontag’s much-revered critical essays – Alice in Bed is the famed cultural critic’s hallucinatory re-imagination of the life of Alice James (1848-92), the sickly, younger sister of Henry the writer and William the psychologist.

And it’s safe to say that the play, written in 1992, doesn’t make for easy viewing. “If you don’t [make an effort to] think about it,” says director Dominic Cheung, who also translated the play for the production, “the play will merely be a case of ‘That’s it!’ the moment you finish watching.” Drawing from the 19th-century diarist’s history of depression, Sontag blends into her story the fact and fiction that surrounds Alice, a tragic figure who, while blessed with literary gifts that matched her brother’s, remained hovering in relative anonymity. As the play progresses, Alice’s story goes from biographical to the wildly fantastical.

Consistent with the traditions of Theatre Space and HKRep, the production is an almost word-for-word Cantonese adaptation of the original. Among the minor fine-tunings noticeable from the full rehearsal that we attended, Cheung has decided against moving around the set and opted to realise Alice’s bedroom from the same angle in every scene; also, the director has included, on top of Alice’s young and middle-aged incarnations in the original script, a third Alice, who represents her spirit after death. While the play is largely known for its feminist sensibilities, Cheung sees a more intriguing issue raised in the scenario.

“If Alice James had understood herself earlier, she probably wouldn’t have wasted her talent like that. Which is why, in my production, it’s the dead Alice character [seen on the fringe of the action] who’s reflecting on her miserable life,” the director says. “Everybody has a responsibility to himself. Take the examples of Emily Dickinson and Margaret Fuller, who are Alice’s contemporaries. Why did they have their legacies to leave behind, while Alice – talented as she is – didn’t?”

In fact, Dickinson and Fuller even appear as characters in a key scene of Sontag’s play, taking part in a surreal tea party whose guests also include two other representative angry women from theatre: Kundry from Wagner’s Parsifal, and Myrtha the Queen of the Wilis from Giselle. The seemingly impenetrable fever dream would be better appreciated if Sontag’s life experience – she had been in cancer treatment intermittently since the 1970s, until her death in 2004 – is taken into context. With the power of imagination, Alice in Bed allows both its creator and protagonist to transcend a reality of anguish and pain, a la Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

To illustrate that point, Cheung recites part of the Dickinson character’s dialogue: “‘I stayed home and wrote. My brother fornicated. I was in a room with blue trim. I could see an orchard from my window. He came in, he had a goatee. Death.’ When I read this, I realised that Sontag was putting everything about her life – her surrounding conditions, her illness, and the place of women in the society – into the script. I think she has seen through it all and risen above [the idea of] death, confirming that, yes, life is capricious, but we should face it calmly regardless.”

Alice in Bed is performed in Cantonese at Sheung Wan Civic Centre’s HKRep Blackbox Theatre from Wednesday 28 to November 9.