Theatre director Edward Lam wants everyone to be "a little less unfree" | 100 People With Ideas

"I realized how much certain things bind people's freedom, so I felt I should use my work to remind everyone: stop being so unfree!"

Most people have at least one girlfriend who is an Edward Lam fan, and the line of his they agree with most is this one: "watching my plays isn't something you do with your eyes alone."

This veteran of the theatre looks barely older than he did at 18. That year, he and some friends founded an avant-garde troupe in Hong Kong called Zuni Icosahedron, where he was artistic coordinator and helped create more than a dozen productions. Nine years later he left to study in Britain, and there he started a company called Edward Lam Dance Theatre. He brought it back to Hong Kong, and next year it turns 20.

In those 20 years, Edward Lam Dance Theatre has made 52 works — prolific, and fast.

The plays are like Jonathan Lee's love songs at the height of their popularity: strongly urban, and with a flavour of their own. Lee once said in a public talk that he could clearly sense a female market with money to spend taking shape, that the biggest problem in these women's lives was love, and that they wanted songs to echo it back to them.

Lam's theatre does something similar. He found his audience, then raised it.

In 1994, White Rose and Red Rose, which Lam adapted from an Eileen Chang novel, won a Golden Horse Award in Taiwan, and his name spread there naturally. Later, when Hongniang's Fantasy World: In the West Chamber, Jia Baoyu and The Family That Dreads Marriage were staged on the mainland, they brought him considerable acclaim there too.

"Every one of my plays can be staged in all three places," Lam said by phone to QDaily, meaning his work has a real market.

His latest production, Dream of the Red Chamber, ran 5 performances in Taipei, and more than half the tickets went within an hour of going on sale. Five more performances were added — over 7,000 tickets — and those sold out in three days. In Hong Kong the play ran 4 performances; when it was restaged six months later, the box office was still something to be proud of. After that it went to Singapore.

Lately Lam has been flying all over mainland China to promote the new play.

It is the finale of a large project he launched in 2006, when he set out to "destroy" all Four Great Classical Novels of China. He spent nine years taking an axe to them.

The results were unmistakably Edward Lam. His Water Margin turned the sworn brotherhood of the 108 outlaws into nine male actors competing with one another, each pushing the others into a corner nobody could climb out of. Journey to the West turned four pilgrims fetching the sutras and killing demons into four people with tangled ties and clashing temperaments, thrashing about in the soap-opera mess of daily life. And in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, every hero and fighting man was replaced by a slender woman.

People had long wondered how the project would end — the more so because Lam had already staged a play called Jia Baoyu, drawn from the story of Dream of the Red Chamber, in which Denise Ho, the Hong Kong actress and singer who publicly came out, played Baoyu. The characters were cross-cast, as in Lam's Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but for Dream of the Red Chamber "women playing men" is nothing new. The 1945, 1962 and 1989 screen adaptations all did it.

In the play Dream of the Red Chamber, Lam meant to deal more directly with the question of gender that has occupied him for years. He reversed the sex of the female characters, so that the story now turns on Wang Xifeng and thirteen men of Jinling, and the grudges, entanglements and desires among them.

Through that, Lam hopes audiences — men or women — will face the "feminine" side of themselves. "Society's whole understanding (of the gender question) has tilted badly to one side," Lam said, and he is plainly worried about it.

From that starting point he went on to discuss countless other things with us (talking, as you would guess, costs him no effort at all): where does modern anxiety come from? Where is it taking us? Why do people hate chicken soup for the soul — and then swallow entertainment, which is pure bouillon powder? Why does everyone have less and less time, and why is everyone in such a hurry — and yet still fall in love and have children? What is real, and what is the future? Is tomorrow already the future? Then what is ten years from now? Is it just impermanence?

Q = QDaily

L = Edward Lam

Why Are Women Becoming More Masculine?

Q: The new play Dream of the Red Chamber reverses gender again. That reversal seems to have become a kind of signature in your work.

L:

Each reversal actually means something different. Take Dream of the Red Chamber: judging by the book alone, in all of Chinese history very few male authors have understood and pitied women as much as this one did. So plenty of people say, "Pfft, it's just an old love story, trivial stuff that doesn't matter." There's even a saying that men don't read Dream of the Red Chamber. So nobody had ever tried having men cross-dress to play it — men won't even watch it, so how would they ever perform it?

Even if a man played Baoyu, people would laugh at the actor's sexuality and his manner — they'd think he was too luang (dated, affected), too effeminate.

So putting more than a dozen male actors on stage isn't as simple as flipping the sexes. It's that in this era, the understanding (of the gender question) has already tilted badly to one side. I hoped that watching them perform, male members of the audience would ask themselves: am I also suppressing myself right now, suppressing the "yin" part inside my own body? And women too — the more society advances, the heavier the duties and the pressure, the more the "womanly" part of a woman is worn away.

Q: In your view, what is the fundamental difference between women and men?

L:

That she can become a mother. So a woman's bodily functions, and the mission nature hands her, often demand more patience, more tolerance, more gentleness. Without them she couldn't carry another life inside her body, and once that life comes out she still has to look after it for a long time.

Q: But even so, the "womanly" part of a woman is being worn away?

L:

Women have a great strength: they can let male ways of thinking enter their consciousness, so they are also alienated into a male mode. Men look at things functionally, and now women look at things functionally too. Take having a child. We plan it, we choose the sex, we want it born the fastest way possible, so we can get back to our own careers and affairs. All of that is male thinking — everyone valuing efficiency, function, results.

We are living inside a male-dominated culture. Public media and self-published media, for instance, are very masculine things. They use a network to put everyone on the same "interest" channel at once, each taking what he wants, and that is very "functional."

Come back to art. When you look at it functionally, you will always resist more than you accept, because you want the work to hand you what you want as fast as possible. But if it works like selling goods, then it's commerce, not art. Art works on you gradually, or strikes like lightning, but either way it has to pass through the complicated interior of a person, level by level, before it can light a spark — and the spark may go out, and may need lighting many times and still not catch. It isn't as simple as pressing a button.

Theatre isn't my biggest interest. I think time is.

Q: How does the new play Dream of the Red Chamber differ from the earlier Jia Baoyu?

L:

Jia Baoyu is about how modern people see distance and closeness. Baoyu can see that their happiness is not in the present; their happiness lies in walking through sorrow and coming back to the place where they first met. But Lin Daiyu says: we've already met here, so why not be happy here first? Baoyu says no — if we're happy now, the price is that there will be no happiness later.

A lot of the time we really do give up a whole forest for one tree. It is also a particularly Chinese sense of time, this saying that you should never take the loss in front of you.

But our sense of time very often comes from our parents, and from society at large. Very few people ever invent their own watch; very few have the courage to carry a sense of time that other people don't understand. So peer pressure does serious damage to growing up. It is a mutual hostage-taking: I'm doing this now, so you have to do it too; I'm falling in love, so you have to; I'm getting married, so you have to.

So Jia Baoyu is a play about the anxiety of growing up, about how to face family, love and friendship. Dream of the Red Chamber is not. The first is about love and sincerity, a close-up of one person, set in the Grand View Garden and the Court of Infatuation, and about the fate of women. The second is about crime and punishment, one person seen from many angles, set in the Rong Mansion and the Bureau of No Name, and about how men repent an original sin.

Jia Baoyu was written for modern people who lack courage. Dream of the Red Chamber was written for modern people who only know how to fantasize.

Q: When it comes to modern people, you sound pessimistic.

L:

I think that whatever we do, we can't break the limits of time. We always face infinite things with finite time, and that is where my pessimism comes from.

Modern people are running themselves ragged, spending the present as hard as they can. What interests me more is why people have less and less time. Why is time getting flatter and flatter? What is the future? In the way people talk now, the future is only tomorrow, not ten years from now. So what is ten years from now? Is it just impermanence? No, not that either.

In the end I don't think theatre is my biggest interest. I think time is. I want to know how time seals a person shut inside a life. Does a person have the power to break that limit?

So I won't do theatre for theatre's sake, and I won't order myself to put on a Waiting for Godot just so people think I've caught up with the masters of the day.

Entertainment Is Bouillon Powder; the Chicken Soup Is in Art

Q: Many people go to a play looking for a way out, then come away feeling there was no answer. That feeling is uncomfortable. Have you thought about giving the audience some "answers"?

L:

Let's leave answers aside and talk about the way out. Why do we need one? Yes, watching a play, we do want to form a relationship with it — but is that way out the only relationship possible? That's worth examining. Take an analogy: do we go to school to find answers? How many answers do we have to get each day for the day not to count as wasted? Or work — are we looking for answers there too? Or do we find, most of the time, that at work it's other people demanding answers from us? Falling in love, finding a partner — is that also looking for an answer?

Those are basically the main parts of a life. Being unhappy, feeling lost — it all comes down to "looking for answers." If you keep hoping to get something from someone else to make yourself feel better, then honestly our lives need only one thing, and that is comfort. If a person lives like that, how wide can his world be? He can barely get off the stool he's sitting on, let alone take a step.

But a "comfortable" person can't live in a world of one. Sooner or later he notices other people changing — climbing higher, going further — and from his comfortable seat he envies them, and his mind goes out of balance. Why out of balance? Because he is a very passive person, and yet he envies the active ones.

This sounds a lot like chicken soup for the soul. But at the very least I myself have realized how much these things bind people's freedom, so I felt I should use my work to remind everyone: stop being so unfree!

Q: What do you make of chicken soup for the soul?

L:

A lot of the time I think chicken soup for the soul exists so that people don't have to think, and then when somebody does think something through and says it, everyone calls that chicken soup for the soul too. Plenty of people say: hey, lots of people have already said what you're saying. But they never ask why people said it before. Because there is something true in it.

Q: What is the difference between art and entertainment?

L:

Basically this is how I see it. All entertainment walks over to you and me, says hi to you first. Art needs the audience to walk over to it. Not because art is prouder, but because art's weight requires the audience to walk into it, while entertainment weighs much less.

So I find it very funny that everyone says they refuse chicken soup for the soul, when entertainment is the most concentrated bouillon powder there is. What could be more bouillon powder than entertainment? Why do you swallow the powder and resist the soup?

Many people assume that what you can't understand is art and what you can understand is entertainment. It isn't like that. On the contrary, standing before art we feel small — and don't you feel small standing before life? Life is full of things you can't control. Standing before entertainment you feel you have power, because entertainment is serving you, telling you over and over that hope is tomorrow.

The chicken soup is in art. Art says: understand yourself first, ask yourself first whether the dream in your heart really comes from your heart. And that's when people get annoyed and say, "why do you want me to think?"

Because the biggest difference between art and entertainment is that art goes after the truth. So what is truth? Everyone waits until they're ready before they look in the mirror; otherwise they're afraid of seeing their real self. Whatever we run from is what's real: poverty, illness, death, separation, and ourselves.

The More Realistic a Play Is, the Falser It Feels to Me

Q: So you want to use the effects of the stage to strengthen that sense of the real.

L: Yes, exactly, and that sentence means a lot to me. But what I do runs against what most people do. Most people watching a play believe they are after the real, so they want what's on stage to be true. Yet with a lot of traditional theatre, the more real it is, the falser it feels to me. All they're doing is copying things: the set needs a bookshelf, so put a bookshelf on it; this character speaks, so he should sound like life. They need "simulated reality" to tell the audience that all of it is true.

That's one part of the course theatre has taken, but I don't think it can stand for theatre as a whole. Theatre has to keep moving forward, and today's people aren't the audience of a dozen years ago. Take Stanislavski (author of An Actor Prepares). What he wrote about came out of an age with no internet and no virtual world. The reality he described had absolute meaning in that age. But in this one we live inside a "virtual world," and the reality of this moment may well have changed in kind.

So theatre has in fact always been a laboratory.

Q: Then do you care less about what the audience says, about their feedback?

L:

The great meaning of an audience's response is that audiences aren't dead objects. Someone watching today feels this; watching again three years later he may feel exactly the same, or something else may happen, one response turning into another. So to me the audience is like microorganisms under a microscope. It's as if you were in a laboratory now, putting a lot of bacteria into a vacuum chamber and letting them grow. Time is very often a laboratory like that.

Edward Lam Dance Theatre has made 52 works. If my plays had no value because people "can't understand" them, it wouldn't have survived 25 years. These 25 years have been a hard existence for these plays, but they have never lacked an audience, and new members keep joining while old ones keep leaving. So the audience is fluid; the audience's response is only air.

And I try to make both myself and the audience more active. If I make what you want to see and hand it over, aren't we both being passive? With neither of us active, it's like a game of mahjong where you and I are each holding two white dragon tiles — nobody can ever win a hand.

Labels Are Fine for Telling Men's and Women's Toilets Apart; Reading a Life With Them Is a Disaster

Q: People call Edward Lam Dance Theatre an "avant-garde troupe," out ahead of everyone. What do you make of that? How do you define avant-garde?

L:

I don't like these words, but people use them a lot, mostly for convenience. I see more and more "symbols," so everyone becomes a symbol and the world slowly loses its content. See a pipe and you think of a man, see a rose and you think of a woman. Using labels like that to tell the men's toilet from the women's is fine, but using them to read a life — see a pipe and assume ease, see a rose and assume tragedy — is a disaster. You might as well stay in kindergarten forever. Why bother growing up?

Things really have changed too fast. Two or three years ago we wouldn't have dismissed something so easily; now two or three lines of internet slang are enough to label a person. The other day, while we were working on Water Margin, I played a game with everyone and asked how many labels for men had appeared in recent years: "straight-man cancer," "phoenix man" — in the past two years an actual catalogue has appeared. People will ask, "hey, is he a phoenix man?" "No." "Then he must have straight-man cancer!"

Everything is made to order already. So, to answer your earlier question, avant-garde or not doesn't matter in the least.

Audiences Who Enter My Theatrical World Never Find It Dry

Q: On the market side, you've said theatre will always be a minority art no matter what. Do you think theatre can keep growing? With your own productions, do you think much about the commercial side?

L:

I think every one of my plays has a commercial element. Because of what I myself want, my plays are first of all beautiful, and beauty by itself can draw people. There are many kinds of beauty, of course: the beauty everyone agrees on, the beauty you see for the first time, even an unsettling beauty — the kind that pulls you in while some part of you resists.

I think my plays have a bit of every kind, so audiences who enter my theatrical world never find it dry. They also carry a lot of feeling, and collective memory, plus design, script, the arrangement of the stage — all of it with some intelligence and wit in it, and all of it is what the audience feels during a performance as wonder, beauty and emotion. Those are the parts that make up a play's commercial side.

That beauty also touches the audience and sets them thinking, and that is where the art is. So when I make a production, both art and commerce are in it, just in different proportions.

But when you say market, I don't think any market can be discussed in the abstract. Shenzhen, Guangzhou, northern China, southern China — these markets are all very different. Broadly, if what you mean is the Chinese-speaking market, then it's the three places: the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In my case, every one of my plays can be staged in all three. Dream of the Red Chamber ran 5 performances in Taipei and 4 in Hong Kong, then went to Singapore, and now it's here on the mainland, where it has been selling well the whole time.

Put that way, there is a group of people who want to know what I'm doing, and they haven't disappeared because my work is avant-garde or hard to follow. People used to say audiences only watched Edward Lam for the stars, and that they'd turn out for the stars even if they had no interest in me. But after Jia Baoyu we put on The Family That Dreads Marriage and Heirs of the Butterfly Lovers, which had no stars in them, and people came anyway.

So this market has to be created. It's a market that makes demands of its audience. Audiences know that watching my plays isn't something you do with your eyes alone, and that you can't just hold out an open palm and have an answer dropped into it.

Q: What new plans do you have?

L:

I'm preparing a new play, Sherlock Holmes. As I said, I see a lot of people treating symbols as answers, so I want to tell the story of a detective who uses symbols, and ask whether a case really is that easy to crack. Because if we keep treating symbols as answers, being a detective gets easy too — you no longer need clues. Whatever trace is left at the scene, you can call it evidence.

I really want to make a comedy of it: when everyone thinks this way, will a new Sherlock Holmes ever appear?