Gravitas

I'm experiencing something of a haunting at the moment. This is a result of working with my drama guys on a piece by Kuo Pao Kun. Initially I wasn't at all sure I really 'got' the play in question, and even now I find it puzzling in some ways. But we're managing to bring to the material a kind of certainty as to what we think is going on which is usefully convincing in making us feel we're going somewhere.

The haunting comes in whenever I think of the one and only time I saw the playwright in the flesh, as it were, and I found myself particularly thinking of him when writing a kind of introduction to the show we'll be doing (which actually features two of his short plays.) The intro features a little bit about the man himself and I keep seeing him as he was when he was a guest speaker at a Literature Seminar organised by MOE here a couple of years before his death. (At least, I think that's when it was. I really can't place the exact year in my mind. I'm assuming this was around 2000.)

It's difficult to explain just how strong the sheer presence of the man was at that seminar. He's the one thing I actually remember from it. He exuded a sense of having genuinely lived somehow. He was, or seemed to be, extremely slow and considered in his speech as if each sentence was carefully weighed and weighted prior to delivery. He was slow and considered also in simple movement - entirely unhurried. Yet there was absolutely no sense of self-importance about the man.

His brief references to his years of imprisonment, related to comments about what might be seen as of lasting importance in life, were deeply telling somehow. I can remember thinking of him as being wise, and I rarely, if ever, think that of anyone. I also remember wondering if there was a kind of theatricality about all this. After all, the man was not simply a writer of plays but a theatrical practitioner. But I somehow knew that there wasn't; that this was real.

It's a privilege to be encountering him again, if only in his work.