http://www.huayifestival.com/secret_love.html

Secret Love In Peach Blossom Land
by Performance Workshop and Ming Hua Yuan Taiwanese Opera Company Taiwan

Arguably the most famous play in modern Chinese theatre. Exquisitely written and directed in 1986 by playwright Stan Lai, and adapted into an award-winning (Golden Horse 1992 and Berlin Film Festival 1993) movie starring famous Taiwanese actress Lin Ching-Hsia in 1991.

Two theatre groups are mistakenly booked into the same venue for rehearsal. One is rehearsing for Secret Love, a melodramatic contemporary play about an old man’s wish to see an old sweetheart lost to him forty years ago in 1940s Shanghai during the war. The other is rehearsing for Peach Blossom Land, a traditional Hokkien opera comedy based on the classic Chinese story in which a cuckolded fisherman stumbles upon a secret island paradise, lives there happily for awhile, and then leaves to fetch his wife so she can join him on the island utopia.

Amidst much squabbling, the two groups resign themselves to dividing up stage time so that both can rehearse in spite of the other’s presence. At points, the two productions merge in a comic clash of contrasting dialogue and styles. However, as tragic scenes of an old man yearning for a lost love and farcical episodes of a fisherman who, having departed the secret paradise, cannot find his way back there again knit together, a surprising and complex new dialogue emerges from the chaos. Beneath the tears and laughter throbs a bittersweet yearning.

This production has touched the heartstrings of audiences everywhere. 20 years after its debut, this classic theatrical work remains fresh and relevant today, poignant in all its layers of meaning.

Performed in Mandarin and Hokkien, with English and Chinese surtitles.

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