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DRAMA: Prisoners of their own devices

FESTIVAL NOTES: WHAT: 14th Crown Arts Festival (第14屆皇冠藝術節) — The Island (島) WHEN: Today and tomorrow at 7:30pm and tomorrow and Sunday at 2:30pm WHERE: Crown Theater (皇冠藝文中心小劇場), 50, Ln 120, Dunhua N Rd, Taipei City (台北市敦化北路120巷50號) ADMISSION: NT$450 tickets, available through NTCH ticketing

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Taiwanese actors Fa (his stage name) and Shih Ming-shuai (施名帥) were recently jailed for 42 days for wanting to perform in a play. Well, kind of.

Their prison was in fact EX-Theater Asia’s (EX-亞洲劇團) rehearsal space and they voluntarily confined themselves there to prepare for the psychologically demanding roles of their characters in The Island (島), which opens tonight as part of The 14th Crown Arts Festival (第14屆皇冠藝術節) at Crown Theater (皇冠藝術中心小劇場).

“They were just released last Friday,” joked EX-Theater Asia’s administrative director Lin Pei Ann (林浿安) after a rehearsal on Sunday night.

Adapted from South African writer Athol Fugard’s 1972 play of the same name, The Island follows the lives of two men serving life sentences on South Africa’s notorious Robben Island — a symbol of apartheid South Africa (Nelson Mandela spent much of his 27 years behind bars on the island) — for political crimes.

Obvious parallels could be drawn between Robben Island and Taiwan’s Green Island, where thousands of political prisoners were isolated, tortured and in some cases killed during the White Terror. Director Chongtham Jayanta Meetei, however, said he does not want viewers to draw historical parallels between the work and Taiwan. Instead, he wants them to focus on the play’s physicality.

“The text contains hidden emotion that cannot be revealed by the text itself ... which is only brought out when communicated with the body,” he said.

Although it is natural to focus on the play’s somatic aspects — the original contains many miming scenes that illustrate the harsh labor conditions prisoners were forced to endure — avoiding the political overtones does a disservice to the work.

It also didn’t seem to help the actors understand the complex emotions facing prisoners serving a life sentence. Consequently, two important areas of the play suffer. The first — and Meetei admitted as much after the rehearsal — is pacing. In a work that relies on delicate pauses and emotional tension, the actors rushed through it as if it were a prison sentence that they couldn’t wait to finish.

Linked to this is the problem of controlling their passion. All too often, the emotional register of the actors resembled the exaggerated melodrama of a B-grade Taiwanese television soap opera. It’s as if they hadn’t internalized the predicament of their characters.

Of course, I only saw one rehearsal. But it seems that the 42 days the actors spent behind bars wasn’t enough to liberate the feelings of confinement that the play requires.

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