• Stage Home
• What's On
• Features
• 
• 
• Bookmark this site

Celebrated theatre director Edward Lam looks to inject some food for thought into the battle-of-the-sexes tradition. By Edmund Lee

Even if the title of Edward Lam’s new Putonghua play, Man and Woman, War and Peace, is just a way of saying ‘battle of the sexes’ with two more words, there’s no real risk that the impassioned observer of Hong Kong’s gender politics will be recycling the clichés. “On the surface, the story [of this new play] looks simple enough: it’s a bit like The Ugly Truth of today,” says the cultural critic and theatre director over the phone from Taiwan, where his team is rehearsing for the work, to be premiered in Hong Kong this fortnight before going on an Asian tour with stops in Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai, and Singapore. Instead, Lam is looking to borrow the drained formula of Hollywood screwball comedies to investigate the problems facing the two genders today.

“Nowadays, many plays and TV dramas about gender politics are only dealing with the most superficial aspects,” Lam observes. “I’d personally consider them a form of exploitation: they have absolutely no intention to investigate any deeper into the gender roles. Instead of limiting ourselves to providing entertainment in theatre, we’re looking to achieve something that the average movie, play or Broadway show fails to do. The screwball comedies of the past tended to enlarge the contradictions between males and females – in the way that the women are too feminine, and the men too masculine. These stories place their focus on the power struggle and the fight for territories between the two sexes; but today, I think it’s no longer like that.”

In Lam’s opinion, the masculine genes in women and the feminine genes in men are manifesting themselves to the extent that they’ve blurred the distinction between the two genders. Instead of the perspective of either, his play proposes that an androgynous perspective is the way forward – something that may not be immediately apparent in the setting: Cantopop star Denise Ho and Taiwanese actor David Wang (who also featured in Lam’s Design for Living earlier in the year) play the hosts of two competing TV talk shows that specialise in solving their audiences’ relationship problems. Overseen by a slightly schizophrenic producer, Ho and Wang exert their own philosophies in their programmes, while hating each others’ guts like an acrimoniously divorced couple. Then along comes Taiwanese pop idol Ariel Lin’s character, an infiltrator whom Wang plants into Ho’s camp. Chaos ensues.

Lam says of his casting: “As we’re dealing with the topic of men and women, people would naturally think that we should cast a Lin Chiling or a Carina Lau [for the female part, now played by Ho]. But in my opinion, that’s not modern. If we had put out actors with such blatantly conventional gender characteristics, it’s only a form of nostalgia. Denise Ho represents a kind of woman of the future, while Ariel Lin is the future version of a traditional female archetype. Wang is very masculine on the surface, but also has his ultra-sensitive side. So from my standpoint, these three actors represent an androgynous angle to consider the war and peace between the genders.”

As in any self-respecting screwball comedy, appearance can be deceiving. And so is the case for Lin’s character, a seemingly unfaithful marriage-breaker who progressively proves her angelic qualities; or there’s Wang’s character, who gives an initial impression as a macho playboy but ends up revealing himself to be, in Lam’s words, “a woman”. “By that,” the director explains, “I’m referring to the traditional view that men are less sensitive, and are thus less prone to suspicion and jealousy. But if you look back at the story of Othello, the wife is more like a man than him, who’s in turn more like the jealous wife. I think, for too long a time, much of men’s psychology has been left unexplored. Every person has to go through some realisation of his own, like in The Little Prince. Many of us are not sure when we’re finally willing to grow up. It’s totally different to be a kinder-at-heart, or to refuse to grow up. In the former scenario, you maintain your innocence, whereas in the latter case, you become naïve and start to evade responsibilities. ”

Which brings us back to one of the show’s promotional taglines: ‘Men are turning back into boys; women are turning into men’. Where exactly, I venture to ask Lam, did that idea come from? “Just look around you,” he says briskly, laughing. “This doesn’t call for more explanation, does it?” My question, put under the critic’s cynical dissection, has left me sounding like the naïve of the naïve – otherwise known as men here. Lam proceeds to take away the cushioned comfort of his story’s supposed temporal distance (it is vaguely written in the promotional flyers that the setting is ‘next century’). “To tell the truth,” says Lam, “we were only pretending that the story is set in the future, so that the audience can look at reality from a distance. It’s all about the present.”

Man and Woman, War and Peace is at Kwai Tsing Theatre Auditorium from Fri 13 to Mon 16, in Putonghua with Chinese surtitles.