A partisan crowd greeted Joe Lui like a rock star as he stepped onto the stage at Theatre Works in St Kilda, wearing a brightly coloured Chinese robe and began to perform his deeply personal and candid one man production Letters Home.
Lui is an exile from his native Singapore, branded a criminal because of his refusal seven years ago to return home for compulsory national service. Lui is an artist who was a child star in Singapore where he co-hosted a daytime children’s television program. He came to Australia to study at university before establishing himself on the Perth scene with his largely experimental performance pieces. Here he shapes a show around several letters he wrote to his parents back home in Singapore in which he tries to justify his choices in life and maybe seek their approval or forgiveness.
Lui exposes his own personal life in a revealing and unflinchingly honest 75-minute monologue, supposedly addressed to his parents back home in Singapore. He tries to work through his confused feelings, and explore his troubled relationship with his parents who tried to raise him according to centuries of strict tradition and Chinese culture. The personal revelations are laced with some bits of Chinese folk lore that explain some of these strict traditions that honour the elderly and emphasise respect for the family. The young Lui rebelled against these strict traditions, which disappointed his parents, who also disapproved of his choices.
Lui also shapes his monologue with plenty of self-effacing humour that explores the pull of history and the past and the lure of a future as a performance artist, something that probably could not have happened in his native country. He talks about some of the courageous writers, authors like George Orwell, who have helped shaped his rebellious and questioning nature.
The staging is quite simple. In one corner is a stool on which Lui sits, bathed in a spotlight as he recounts some of the letters he wrote to his parents but never sent. At the rear of the stage is a book case containing some memorabilia and items from his life that have helped shaped him as a performance artist. And towards the centre of the stage is a small wooden table, with two empty chairs, meant to symbolise his absent parents. While he talks, Lui cuts up vegetables and cooks them in a hot pot. This is meant to symbolise a reunion dinner with his parents, a dinner that will probably never happen, which casts a rather melancholy pall over proceedings.
While most of Letters Home provides a fascinating insight into a foreign culture, at 75 minutes it does stretch the material a little. The final sceene, in which he talks about the insignificance of man in the greater universe, seems a little unnecessary.
BY GREG KING
