While Ivanhoe Lam Chun-ho, doubtless, wants to stimulate our intellect and pull at the heartstrings, he also demands that we do more than simply observe. What he really wants is for us to experience — as his recent immersive show, split into parts titled Song from Far Away and Far Away from Song, proved.
Death, despair and the alienation associated with 21st-century urban life are the familiar themes underpinning the source material — Simon Stephens’ acclaimed 2015 play, Song from Far Away, about an emotionally adrift 34-year-old banker returning home to bury his brother. What little action that one-man monologue held has been stripped away in Lam’s artful, poignant retelling, which works overtime to posit the viewer — or rather experiencer — in the head and heart of its spiritually bankrupt protagonist. Spoiler alert: It’s not a fun place to be.
Staged from Jan 21-31 simultaneously in The Turns and The Lab — two different venues at the East Kowloon Cultural Centre (EKCC), where Lam is the first artist-in-residence — the multi-disciplinary concept may have been conceived, in part, to show off the new cultural destination’s facilities. A single ticket offers entry to both chapters — told from the perspectives of the “Big Brother” and his “Little Brother” — on different dates. The order in which they are experienced is apparently not of consequence.
Welcomed to The Turns, guests arrange themselves self-consciously at dining tables, on steps or against a long bar counter. The commencement of “a recording session for a requiem” is announced, and a digital clock begins an 80-minute countdown. The smart-dressed ushers, members of the chamber choir Noema, suddenly begin singing beautiful choral harmonies — drawn from David Lang’s song cycle, The Writings (2022) — before the Big Brother begins his story. Live projections showing earnest performers and dumbstruck audience members — not yet at one with each other, despite the evident intention to destroy the conceptual fourth wall — appear in the background.
The narrative is presented as a series of seven unsent letters documenting the week following the addressee’s death, and the older brother’s anguished journey from New York to Amsterdam to confront his past in the present. It’s a past that comprises parents, siblings, exes, and a city he can’t stand and hasn’t set foot in for 12 years. Audience members don’t just hear the words: Cantonese and English voices intrude directly into their ears via headsets. Sound effects — clinking drinks trolleys, vacuum cleaners, and jarring interludes from beatboxer Duncan Wong — are created live by the cast members, and hypnotically amplified into their eardrums. The gin and jasmine tea blend offered on entry — a one-off concoction in a can labeled for the show — works as intended. The spectators appear fatigued and disorientated, in a state that mirrors the show’s jet-lagged protagonist, writing from trains and airport bars, the liminal spaces in which he appears most at home — as long as there’s a steady supply of whiskey and cigarettes, anyway.
Meanwhile, the younger brother’s side of the story unfolds simultaneously in The Lab, where guests sprawl on deckchairs to embark on a 78-minute “deep sleep experimental journey”. While they doze in the dark, interrupted intermittently by garbled dialogue and industrial noises, the deceased younger brother is shown to discover fragments of his older brother’s letters in a sandbox. The contents of the letters are projected on a screen for the benefit of the audience. The chorus appears for a stirring finale, while voyeuristic images of the live audience in The Turns next door fill the screen. Is this moment about the final fraternal parting or a fleeting contact with the afterlife?
There are naturally no answers; nor the need for any such. As a piece of immersive experimental theater, it was powerful and haunting; as an introduction to EKCC, it was stylish and effective. Lam remains resident at the venue until March 2026, and this writer is along for the ride.
The writer is a freelance contributor to China Daily.
