River/Cloud

About the Performance

River/Cloud is the latest original new theatre work by Stan Lai and his theatre group Performance Workshop. Written by Stan Lai, widely acknowledged as the premiere playwright/director working in the Chinese language, called by Robert Brustein as "the major contemporary Asian playwright of his time, perhaps of all time," the play is based on characters from the 1986 Performance Workshop/Stan Lai play Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land. The former iconic work, which the New York Times has called "the most popular contemporary play in China," features perhaps the most famous pair of lovers in modern Taiwan theatre, Jiang Binliu and Yun Zhifan, but only tells the beginning and end of their love story. River/Cloud fills in all the details in between, recreating the tumultuous history of Taiwan from the 1950s to 1980s, where both of them were living in Taipei without knowledge of the other's existence. From the personal lives of these ordinary people, Lai presents a grand swath of modern history, performed by the acclaimed film actor Chang Chen (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and Taiwan's most acclaimed theatre actress Hsiao Ai, punctuated by stories and music from the legendary singer Kimbo Hu, whose presence seems to have little to do with the narrative, but in Stan Lai's delicate theatrical structure, becomes an integral part of the story. Daniel Ostling's set is like a box of memories that opens and shuts in 9 different slots, revealing bits and pieces of the fragmented lives of the main characters.

Professor Wang Jun-yan says: "River/Cloud again creates the grand scale of history that Stan Lai and Performance Workshop have been known for since their first play That Evening, We Performed Crosstalk (1985), and comes after a century of revelations from world history in A Dream Like a Dream (2005). This time the focus is on post-war Taiwan, crisscrossing the lives of ordinary people with the collective whole, common life with events that shock the world. This is enough to construct a vision to inspect the post-war narrative."

River/Cloud is unique in Taiwan theatre history for referring to the playwright/theatre group's own work to create a new work. It is a symbol of the maturity of the modern Taiwan theatre, which in turn has influenced the making of theatre in all Chinese speaking regions of the world.