'Lecher' bathes in a sea of sentimentality

Hugh Lee (李國修) and his Ping-Fong Acting Troupe (屏風表演班) are back with yet another installment of his special brand of sentimentality. The most recent effort, Legend of a Lecher (好色奇男子), sees Lee hard at work mining rich seams of Taiwan's history, although on this occasion, history takes a secondary role to that most perennial of all themes, love.

Legend follows much in the same vein as Lee's last production, Far Away from Home (西出陽關), and has many of the same strengths and weaknesses. Far Away used Taiwan's red-envelope cabarets as their backdrop and explored the themes of desire and loneliness. Legend uses a brief passionate affair between a kamikaze pilot and a prostitute in Taiwan's pleasure quarters as the basis of a story exploring the idea of memory, lost youth and, of course, love. Lechery hardly comes into it, and Lee seems to keep physical passions very much at arms length.

In Legend, Lee has returned to his favorite device of having a play within a play, counterpointing the comedy of an inept film crew shooting a story set in a brothel during the Japanese occupation period, with the melodrama of the story of how the young kamikaze pilot doesn't die and comes back 60 years later as the customer of a young hooker whose boyfriend is the nephew of his first love.

Lee once again comes to grips with Taiwan's current predicament and the history that created it in a commercially viable format. With each new show, he seems to say, "Do you remember how it once was?" In the case of Legend, the world of the "Moon Flower Garden" brothel is lovingly created, as are the conventions of the sexual morality of a bygone age.

With this historical distance, Lee manages to be reasonably convincing, but when the story is brought into the present, Lee's lack of dramatic register becomes more clearly apparent, and his scenes as the elderly airman remembering love and happiness of his youth are rather strained. There is so much earnestness that the subtle shadings and complex shadows of memory are lost.

That Lee has managed to maintain the production of original new shows is indeed encouraging. On this occasion Ping-Fong will be performing in the smaller space of the Metropolitan Hall, whose greater intimacy may benefit this show. There will be 15 shows in Taipei before moving south for the traditional islandwide tour.

The Legend of a Lecher opens tonight at the Metropolitan Hall and will run through May 2. Shows are at 7:30pm with 2:30pm matinees on Saturday and Sunday. Tickets for Taipei are NT$500 to NT$1,800. Tickets are available through www.artticket.com.tw.