When Fredric Mao said at our Saturday lunch meeting that The Legend of the Purple Hairpin essentially begins with a one-night stand, I thought he meant it as a joke. The ever-smiling theatre maestro was sharing his views on Tong Tik-sang’s 1956 Cantonese opera classic, which has long been revered for its impassioned portrait of true love and commitment, and which inspired and partly constituted Mao’s new music theatre work, The Liaisons, to be premiered locally this fortnight before another three scheduled performances at the Shanghai World Expo in the coming September.

 

Set in the Tang Dynasty, the original Purple Hairpin tells of the star-crossed love story between beautiful song girl Fok Siu-yuk and talented scholar Lee Yik, who fall in love at first sight, get married and consummate the relationship – all on the very same night – before being separated for three years by a wicked minister, who forces Lee to marry his daughter. “If you look at it from a modern angle,” says Mao, “the story presents us with the perfect sample on the ideal of love.”

 

As it turns out, he wasn’t kidding about the one-night-stand bit. The Liaisons – Mao’s first production since he completed his term as the artistic director of the Hong Kong Repertory Theatre in 2008 – opens to the famous sung passage from Tong’s opera, which sees Fok and Lee become husband and wife. Performed by Cantonese opera stars Amy Wu (Mao’s wife) and Lam Kam-tong, the sequence instantly channels the romantic mood of a bygone era – which is cruelly extinguished in the very next scene. “So it began with a one-night stand!” a character mockingly remarks on Purple Hairpin. And then, characters of both genders, all facing the audience, lunge into an open dialogue about love and, perhaps more importantly, the making of it.

 

“At least Fok Siu-yuk has the courage and determination to live up to her marriage vow. She suffers a lot, but she also understands what it means to love a person,” says Mao, who was also inspired by The Art of Loving, the book by German social psychologist Erich Fromm, in creating The Liaisons. “When I recently rediscovered this book – which, by the way, didn’t leave much impression on me when I first read it as a youngster – I was completely fascinated. Its ideas aren’t exactly new, but they’re what we often overlook. People nowadays are treating love as luxuries, as commodities for exchange. However, the book reminds us that if you understand what true love means, you’ll be able to have a very strong will of life. I think it’s very much worthwhile creating a new work to reinstate this [belief] in a contemporary setting.”

 

Indeed, that excitement has seen Mao spend one-and-a-half years solely on the creation of his complicated new work, which alternates its action between three key components. The first is comprised of the extracts from Purple Hairpin, here performed by Wu and Lam in traditional Tang costumes, but without the usual body movements characteristic of the art form. The second part is a contemporary variation of Purple Hairpin, which takes place between a pair of young professionals (played by Josie Ho, making her stage debut, and veteran actor Tse Kwan-ho), and was co-written by Mao with Felix Chong and Alan Mak of Infernal Affairs fame (Mak, incidentally, is a former student of Mao’s when the latter served as the head of acting department at Academy of Performing Arts). The last part, also the most structurally intriguing of the three, consists of a host of self-reflexive narrators (“just like the Greek chorus”), who provide a running commentary on modern relationships and occasionally burst into music numbers.

 

“[The Liaisons] is not a musical,” Mao explains, “even though we’re using music to liven up some moments. By that arrangement, I’m actually intending to echo the sung passages, or ‘the singing emotions’, in Cantonese opera. That’s why we’re calling this a ‘crossover music theatre’. Since I’m focusing on how to make it a consistent whole, I sometimes find the songs that [music director] Leon [Ko] wrote ‘too beautiful’. I want the work to be more intellectual, and not purely emotional. The story is about contemporary views on relationships, and the songs are intended as a commentary on that.”

 

As it turns out, Mao seems to feel much more comfortable chatting about questions of modern love raised in his work than the conception process itself. In fact, he appears more than a little embarrassed when I inquire about that. “Just a few days ago, my assistant director was suggesting that I write that out for the audience, but I said no,” he says with an uneasy grin. “Although I did use theories to help my actors’ comprehension, in front of the readers, I’d much rather leave the theoretical stuff alone. It’s like I’m intentionally flaunting my knowledge!” He laughs, this time heartily.

 

Out of courtesy, Mao then gives me a lucid account of his work, which touches upon the philosophies of Constantin Stanislavski, Mei Lanfang, and Bertolt Brecht. When he finishes, the respected educator again urges me to divert the readers’ attention back to the very basics. “I just want them to watch and enjoy the drama, which, hopefully, innovates with its storytelling strategy,” he says. “To me, that’s what watching dramas is all about.” That simple ideal – like the one held by the valiant pair in Purple Hairpin – may just be all it takes for Mao to stand tall, decade after decade, in our theatre scene.

 

The Liaisons is performed at APA’s Lyric Theatre from Thu 4 to Tue 9, in Cantonese with English surtitles. Tickets: www.urbtix.hk, 2734 9009.