Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Jury's Comments for the Jury's Special Award Winner 

A young playwright instills novel ideas into a traditional form, resulting in a production that creates healthy influence on the forms and aesthetics of Peking opera and even all other traditional theaters. Three Persons and Two Lamps is an excellent production that, while firmly rooted in tradition, opens up new vista for the form. 

In a specific historic setting, the play treats such eternal themes as the loneliness of man and woman alike, their longing and yearning for someone who understands.  The play flows naturally with delicately touching description of the sexual desires of the maids in an imperial palace.

Comments on the Finalist

Three Persons and Two Lamps is an experimental foray by the National Guoguang Opera Company on its tenth anniversary.  This seemingly effortless play is actually a work of tremendous creative courage.  Employing the original script of Chao Hsueh-chun, a graduate student born in the sixties, this production abandons the social relationships of loyalty, chastity and integrity in favor of an individualism that is often absent in Beijing opera.  It emphasizes feelings and desires to deeply resonate with the modern human experience.   By presenting refreshingly original subject matter rather than staging a forceful revolt, the play is subtle rather than climatic.  On one level, it is a story about the lustful imagination of palace ladies; on a deeper level, it is concerned with the enormous power of loneliness.  The characters' psychological motives are clearly displayed and, through Director Li Xiao-ping's negotiation of the scenes as a single stream of consciousness, the emotional dilemmas of four women (plus Princess Mei) are exhibited throughout their everyday lives.   Extracted from classical literary anecdotes, this short piece breaks with traditional concepts of gender and lightly touches on the issue of free will, transforming itself into a lyrical work of contemporary Beijing opera.  (By Chian-ying LU)