Whereas Lam's earlier work focused on contemporary society, history is playing an increasingly important role in his current work and how it shapes Chinese culture.
There seems to be a parallel between sexual identity and Hong Kong. When I mentioned how people in Hong Kong must have experienced a crisis of identity back in the nineties before the British returned the territory to Hong Kong, Lam redirected my observation by pointing out how citizens of Hong Kong don't have a framework within which to think about themselves as individuals.
"When you grow up in a place like Hong Kong you just don't think identity could become something like a crisis. You are not brought up [with] any sort of education to tell you that you have to think about who you are, you have to question yourself and the relationship between you and history. We simply don't have that concept of "what is history," so if you don't have that concept, how would you have the concept of who you are? You've got to have the idea of the bigger environment and then you try to find your position." The absence of this kind of reflection of history — where we are intimately tied up with its unfolding — is what he hopes audiences in Taiwan will think about when watching What Is Man?
Lam has a commitment with the National Theater Concert Hall to direct the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. He chose The Water Margin (水滸傳) — the inspiration for What Is Man? — first because it serves as a foundation for the other three. "I would say all four of these books are built on one important, key issue: What Chinese are like, no matter man or woman."
According to Lam, the four most important desires for man in Chinese culture are wine, sex, money and fame, all of which are included in The Water Margin.
By using texts from history to investigate contemporary society, Lam feels that the theater will be able to speak to audiences in a way that is different from movies or the Internet.
"With media like the Internet, people are looking for something immediate so time is everything. Speed is everything. Theater is totally different. It requires patience. It requires depth. The influence of the theater nowadays is so limited because it is not a media thing. Anything that is not connected to making money — mainly media — will [have] less influence."
And though Lam is not overly optimistic about the ability of theater to reach a wide audience, he believes the stage still retains the kind of independence necessary to ask the difficult questions neglected by the popular media.
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