Gao comments on another play that it "attempts to arrive at an explanation of some traditional themes such as the relationship between God and Satan, man and woman, good and evil, and salvation and suffering, and modern man's concerns for language and consciousness, as well as the relationship between the individual and the Other." Such a mixture of confidence and innocence simply leaves one lost for words. The play itself consists largely of urban slang exchanged between nocturnal vagrants.
The problem is not with the surreal mix of harangue, memory and dream in the plays. No one thinks any more that realism is the only option for drama. The problem lies with what the characters actually say. This is almost invariably colorless and unmemorable. Maybe it's the case that the translations (by Gilbert C.F. Fong) fail to do Gao justice. Generally, though, the impression is that the plays themselves are diagrammatic and angular. They have no fragrance, are bleached and without atmosphere, and make little attempt to please the senses or the imagination.
Live theater is certainly in need of rejuvenation, and the huge wealth of Asian theater traditions alone, China's included, suggests numerous possible sources of inspiration. But a move in the direction of an obscure intellectuality is exactly the reverse of where theater should be going. It needs to be more accessible to the ordinary man and woman, not less.
Nor is it a good sign that Gao appears, for the most part, to direct his own plays. Even the finest drama needs the outside sensibility of an independent director to create the alchemy out of which great performances spring. But perhaps other directors are frightened off by the intransigence of the material.
It may be that Gao is, in some way that has escaped this reviewer, an artist of genius. But the truth is that I found these plays virtually unreadable. I was not moved by them, and I did not find them intellectually stimulating. For the record, I felt the same about the author's novel Soul Mountain, at least in its English translation by Mabel Lee. Despite this, I sincerely welcome Gao to Taiwan, and hope other readers will have a better experience of these two works, and his other creations, than I have had.
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