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Love is all about who you are, or not

'Next Hour' looks at female relationships put under stress. PHOTO: COURTESY OF NTCH

Next Hour (雙姝怨) by Mr Wing Theater Company (人力飛行劇團) is the final installment of New Idea Theater's (新點子劇展) Love Is ... (愛情說) series and ends its exploration of love.

Director Wang Muo-lin (王墨林) has taken his inspiration from American playwright Lillian Hellman's 1934 play The Children's Hour. Hellman's story recounts the destruction of two female teachers' lives after a disgruntled student spreads rumors about them having a lesbian affair. The original play shocked and horrified the theater-going public in the 1930s when lesbianism was a taboo topic.

Next Hour examines how identity could make or mar a life through exploring the relationship between two women against the backdrop of Japanese-controlled Shanghai and Taiwan during World War II. The first half looks at how two teachers in the foreign concessions in Shanghai deal with social ostracism after rumors of their relationship begin circulating.

The second half deals with political identity. It focuses on the lives of a Taiwan-born Japanese woman as the Japanese colonial government collapses and a Taiwanese woman facing a new kind of Chinese/Taiwanese identity.

The question of what makes us who we are stands very much at the forefront of this drama, which unlike Mo's earlier works, relies heavily on dialog.

Next Hour is full of ponderous stylization, which seems to require actors to move like automatons, talk like a pre-recorded phone message and spout obscure statements about life, love and the human condition. This does the promising material no favors, and the dilemma of women who must come to terms with an identity imposed on them by war, politics, geography and men is deprived of an emotional core. Statements such as, "Can the abstract idea of a fatherland be more important than love and this land we live in?" may be interesting as a topic for a debate, but when voiced by actors who look like they've escaped from doing an MV for Kraftwerk, the whole thing seems slightly ridiculous.

Performance notes:

What: Next Hour (雙姝怨) by Mr Wing Theater Company (人力飛行劇團)

When: Tonight and tomorrow 7:30pm; tomorrow and Sunday 2:30pm

Where: National Experimental Theater, Taipei

Tickets: NT$450, available through NTCH ticketing
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