Last night’s theatrical excursion proved a surprise success. We went to see Peking Man, by Cao Yu, performed at KL Pac, knowing nothing about it other than it was supposed to be one of the great Mandarin works, and that it was performed in Mandarin but there might be English surtitles.
Fortunately there were, and it turned out to be one of the best, perhaps the best, performance we’ve seen whilst in Malaysia. It was the story of a scholarly family during the Japanese occupation that was struggling with the degeneration of its younger men, the paralytic selfishness of the older ones, and the women struggling and raging within this. The central performance, by an actress named May June Tan, was spectacularly good; she was cruel, angry, wicked, sad, and very sympathetic at the same time. The male lead played five different characters and pulled it off remarkably well. The surtitles were reasonably easy to follow (though I wish I could have edited some of them) – my heart sank at the very first one which was something like RAGE OF THE GOLDEN CHRYSANTHEMUM and I feared they would all be so, but luckily it was just the scene name. Some very good Chinese opera singing in the middle of it.
What a good couple of weekends it has been for spiritual nourishment.