SECRET LOVE IN PEACH BLOSSOM LAND by Peter Sau

“A play where no love triumphs”

Reviewer: Amanda Leong
Performance: 6 April 2019

Secret Love in Peach Blossom is a disorienting play. Written by Stan Lai, it has several layers of narrative. For one thing, there are two plays occurring simultaneously: Secret Love and Peach Blossom Land. For another – and on a more meta level – we are really watching the rehearsals of both plays, making this two-plays-within-a-play.

Secret Love is about a dying man who wishes to reconnect with his one true love. He was separated from her during the China-Taiwan split in 1949, and they never had the chance to live out their love story or even say goodbye. Motivated by his impending death, he puts up a newspaper advertisement searching for the girl, despite being married to a loyal, caregiving wife.

Peach Blossom Land, meanwhile, is a comedy set in the Qin dynasty that is centered on a hapless, drunkard husband. His dissatisfied wife is having an affair, which he is blissfully unaware of. One day, he happens to wander into a utopian land where the occupants – who ‘coincidentally’ look exactly like his wife and her lover – spend their days catching butterflies and not being frustrated.

These plays are forced into the same rehearsal space as the venue had accidentally double-booked. At first, the two theatre crews attempt to alternate their use of the space, but this doesn’t work out as there is never enough time for a full run. Eventually, they split the space into two and the rehearsals take place side by side. Throughout the whole ordeal, we see how the plays are constructed and deconstructed through the directors’ visions, as well as more physical aspects of theatre-making, such as the changing of props and how the overwhelmed tech crew keep up with everything.

With all the action happening onstage, I end up getting caught between feeling both intrigued and detached. The characters in the play, as well as the the plays-within-the-play, are well portrayed. However, the frequent disruption of the emotional arch of each play prevented me from feeling too invested in either Secret Love or Peach Blossom Land.

That said, I am surprisingly moved when the protagonists in each play get their brief happy endings, even though I tried to resist the sentiment. After all, by revealing to us how the two plays are created, isn’t Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land warning us against being manipulated by these very stories? And isn’t my catharsis ultimately a betrayal of the terms and conditions of my ‘audience membership’ that was set up at the start of the play, that this is a non-play about two plays, so I shouldn’t care too much about anything?

But perhaps this dilemma can also be applied to the state of the world we live in today. We are constantly exposed to so many perspectives on so many different issues that it makes it almost impossible for us to confidently take any one side as the truth.

And yet, isn’t it only human for us to make a stand despite it all?