ELDT On Screen: What Is Fantasy? 2016

To interpret the theme of fantasy in the classic Journey to the West from different perspectives, the director divides his play into four parts, which focus respectively on the four main characters in the novel.Chinese audiences familiar with the text all love Chu Ba Jieh (hedonist), all fear Sun Wu Kong (rebel), all fancy/hate Tang San Tsang (idealist), and all ignore Sha Wu Jing (pragmatist). Husbands and wives, teachers and students, candidates and jurors, guides and tourists, political parties, celebrities and commoners all derived from these four main characters. Together their stories are interwoven into a picture of life's hardships. As an analogy to the pilgrimage to obtain religious texts in the original novel, the play can be viewed as a book of spiritual enlightenment in the modern world.