Review-Tuesdays with Morrie-Chung Ying Theatre
1-12-12
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By: Tom Hope
I’m a great believer in mulling over the Meaning of Life. A year ago, I fronted up a Hong Kong Philosophy Café evening portentously titled ‘The Meaning of Life – a must have?’ I regularly exhort those who seem interested to write theirs out for themselves. So who better to review a play which describes itself in the opening speeches as discussing exactly that?
Mitch Albom’s autobiographical book was first published in 1997, the year of Hong Kong’s handover, parallels with which this production’s translator Paul Chan makes much of in his programme note (‘… a play about a professor’s remarkable last lessons given before his reunification with the Creator’).
This adaption of an adaption (from book to play, from English to Cantonese) was first performed by Chung Ying 10 years later and this is its 10th re-run here. And it’s great to see a show with such pulling power (the Jockey Club auditorium holds over 1,000 and was full for last night’s opening, with most of the audience in their twenties – and most of them, at a guess, students.) It’s great too to witness an audience so won over by subject matter which could so easily alienate by its inherent seriousness.
For those who don’t know the story, check out here or the author’s own website. It’s a simple set-up: ex-uni-student-made-good-as-sports-journo Mitch learns of his former sociology professor’s impending death by wasting disease and after a one-off visit to pay his last respects finds himself agreeing to come back and talk every Tuesday ‘til the end’.
It’s a play about mortification – how Morrie is going to die, how Mitch’s Uncle Mike died, how Mitch is going to die, how we are all going to die one day. Which of course leads to a lot of reflections on the meaning of life and how to make the most of it while you still have it to make with.
What saves the play from sententiousness are the laugh lines peppered throughout, all the more potent for their context, most of them coming from the irreverently wise-mouthed Morrie. The set-up works especially well for a student audience ensconced in grade evaluations and other manifestations of the learning life which Morrie, as teacher, self-deprecatingly mocks.
That the laughs keep coming is testament to the Cantonese translation, deploying local idioms deftly whilst retaining the US setting, as much as to the original English script by dramatist Jeffrey Hatcher and Mitch Albom himself (flashed up as surtitles throughout).
The production values are restrained but effective: a two hander (Chan Kwok Pong as Mitch and Chung King Fai as Morrie playing with the fluency you’d expect on their tenth outing together), framed by an abstracted set and cyclorama with pared down sound and lighting to enhance flashbacks, monologues and other non-realistic devices through which the Tuesday dialogues are also framed.
The topics that get ticked off through the evening – materialism, family, forgiveness, love and so on – are the stuff of student deliberation the world over. And, as the play drums out repeatedly, we are all students of these life-staples for as long as we choose to be, and choose not to be at our peril.
So how, in the end, did this production grab a philosophical old (well, 50+) buffer like me? By the close, I was not moved to tears, which other critics seem to have been. As someone who had already read the book, it was a tart reminder of its best bits. As someone who has witnessed a grandfather and then a father die in similar circumstances, it chimed with my own sense of what matters most in facing up to life through death.
But I have to confess to a sense of detachment and displacement from the on-stage action so, by the end, I was more interested in the responses of the (almost entirely) Cantonese speaking audience than in the predictably uplifting valedictories of Morrie and Mitch – a response by which, as sociology ‘students’, the real-life Morrie and Mitch might also have been uplifted.
Tuesdays with Morrie is playing at Polytech University through December 6th. There are special ticket prices for Polytech students and staff. For more information please click here.
Comments
TimmyNor
Hi HI
27 September 2017