Enlightenment 

(The Enlightenment of the Siddhartha Gautama Buddha and the Encounter with the Monkey King – Great Sage, Equal of Heaven)
Written by Joe Paradise Lui
Directed by Marcel Dorney
Elbow Room Productions
Perth Studio Underground

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

The late-70s Japanese TV series Monkey is one of my all-time favourite shows. The English-dubbed version was broadcast by the BBC when I was at Cambridge in the early 80s, and I became an instant fan. 

 

Growing up in Lower Flügelhorn I’d been glued to the TV screen after school watching the 60s Japanese historical action series Shintaro and the 70s American East-meets-Western series Kung Fu (both dubbed into German for Austrian TV). Then as a budding teenage cinephile I’d eagerly devoured Hong Kong 70s martial arts movies like Five Fingers of Death and Fist of Fury with German subtitles on weekend excursions to Vienna. 

 

As a nostalgic overseas student at Cambridge, I loved Monkey’s combination of fight scenes, slapstick comedy, Chinese folklore, Buddhist wisdom, and (in the BBC version) rapid-fire dialogue in ‘Asian’ accents by British actors – not to mention the head-banging theme song ‘Monkey Magic’ about the title character (‘the punkiest monkey that ever popped’), which I later covered back in Vienna with my prog rock band The Flying Squirrels. 

 

Later my interest in literature led me to the 16^th century Chinese novel Journey to the West on which Monkey was based – a novel which was in turn inspired by the pilgrimage to India of 7^th century Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzhang. Eventually my para-phenomenological researches took me on my own inner journey to the East after having visited India and Nepal with my parents as a 10-year old – see my blog post last year at http://humphreybower.blogspot.com/2022/01/

Perth-based Singaporean-Chinese-Australian theatre-maker Joe Paradise Lui has long been on his own personal, artistic, political and spiritual pilgrimage. A mainstay of the Perth independent and mainstage theatre scene, he's created his own post-dramatic contemporary performance works (many devised in collaboration with other local independent luminaries) for his company Renegade Productions; lent his freelance talents as a lighting and sound designer, director, composer, musician and actor to innumerable productions by other companies and fellow artists; and undoubtedly clocked in more shows at The Blue Room (allegedly two hundred and counting) than any other artist in history. 

 

Even by his own eclectic standards Enlightenment is an unusual addition to the Joe Lui oeuvre because it flexes his muscles as a playwright rather than a contemporary performance maker, and because he’s entrusted its first production to another director and company in a different city: namely, Melbourne-based director Marcel Dorney and his company Elbow Room (though Lui was seemingly unable to resist the temptation of designing the lighting and sound as well). The production premiered in Melbourne at Northcote Town Hall in early 2000 with the intention of transferring to Perth; but events took an unexpected turn with the onset of the pandemic and the closure of state borders; and it took almost two years for the show to hit the road for a cruelly brief four-night season at the Perth Studio Underground.

 

In fact Enlightenment reminds me of another anomalous work in the Lui canon: the confessional solo show Letters Home, which he wrote, directed, designed and performed at The Blue Room in 2015. That show reflected on the journey from his birthplace in the authoritarian city-state of Singapore to his self-imposed exile in Perth: first as an international student and then as a renegade artist, after deciding at the last minute not to go home on the completion of his studies. Despite our very different trajectories I related deeply to that show as a former international student at Cambridge and later self-imposed exile in Perth myself after the formation of the far-right Austrian coalition government in 2000 – an event which now seems to presage the global rise of right-wing populism over the last two decades.

 

Unlike Letters Home the genre of Enlightenment is not confessional. Instead it might be described as a mash-up of mythic/religious epic, social/political satire, erotic/crime thriller, romantic comedy and superhero movie: think Strindberg’s Road to Damascus meets Brecht’s Good Person of Szechuan meets Fatal Attraction meets My Super Ex-Girlfriend. Nevertheless, a confessional element is surely present even if in a disguised form. Like Strindberg and Brecht, Lui dons the masks of his dramatis personae in order to wrestle with personal questions about identity, sex, religion, ethics and politics.  

 

In particular, the character-avatars of The Buddha and The Monkey King as they appear in the play seem like dual aspects of a single person (conceivably the playwright himself). As such they’re reminiscent of the way the ‘good’ prostitute Shen Te in The Good Person of Szechuan splits off a part of herself and pretends to be her ‘bad’ male cousin Shui Ta in order to survive in a broken world (a splitting that also arguably reflected Brecht’s own compartmentalised personality).

 

Enlightenment is set in a comic-book-style generic dystopian metropolis that could be Perth, Melbourne, Singapore or Gotham City. The plot concerns an idle rich young Asian princess Sid (played by Alice Qin), a contemporary avatar of the young prince Siddhartha Gautama, who renounced his former life and became the Buddha. Sid hooks up via a dating app with angry young hustler Sage (Merlynn Tong), likewise an avatar of the legendary Monkey King (the title character in Monkey), who called himself ‘great Sage, equal of Heaven’ and was imprisoned under a mountain by the Buddha, until freed after promising to serve the monk Tang Sanzang in Journey to the West (Tripitaka in the TV series) on his pilgrimage to India. 

 

A sub-plot features two hapless straight White male cops (John Marc Desengano and Conor Gallacher), who I fancied might also be avatars of Tripitaka’s monster-companions Sandy and Pigsy in Monkey and Journey to the West (Sandy was a particular favourite of mine). Like their originals, they provide comic relief as objects of satirical mockery, though things take a somewhat darker turn when Sage gets pulled over for speeding and is recognized as the poster of a viral online video threatening to kill a cop in a violently explicit manner as revenge for a previous harassment. Elbow Room co-artistic director Emily Tomlins played a series of characters including a streetwalker, Sid’s housemaid, a police chief and a narrator-figure who was ultimately revealed (without being explicitly named) as the Buddha himself in his deified form.

 

Enlightenment deftly sutures Eastern and Western high art and pop culture in a way that’s worthy of Monkey itself and the TV shows and movies that followed it, right up to Tarantino’s Kill Bill or more recently (and most brilliantly) the Daniels Kwan and Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All At Once (easily my film of year for 2022). The production also featured an exhilarating performance by Merlynn Tong as Sage/Monkey, encompassing all the registers of the genre mash-up from slapstick comedy to rom-com cuteness, horror-movie terror, monstrous rage and spiritual angst. 

 

The characters, scenes, dialogue and plot owe more to popular film and TV than to a more rigorous and fleshed-out dramaturgy like Brecht's (at least in his mature work). In short, this is a form of theatre mediated by the screen – big, small and hand-held. As such it assumes a degree of pop-culture literacy on the part of an audience for its shorthand to communicate. Scenes are mostly short and begin or end abruptly; dialogue is relentlessly snappy or self-consciously cheesy (‘You’re so corny!’ is a signature catchcry); and there are holes, jumps and coincidences in the plot that a regular viewer of popular film or TV would easily take in their stride. 

 

The queering of the relationship between Sid and Sage is a refreshing twist on the standard rom-com formula – as well as a nod to the casting of a woman as the monk Tripitaka in the original Monkey TV series (one of that show’s many delights). Admittedly the portrayal of a queer relationship between two women as a ‘safe space’ free of patriarchal and heterosexual norms initially seemed a little idealised (including the orgasmic sex). In any event, their honeymoon period ended when it came to personal and class differences (though such differences were probably a plus when it came to orgasmic sex). 

 

However, the characterisation of both protagonists seemed a little lacking in backstory and motivation (in the case of Sage) or (in the case of Sid) as an avatar of the Buddha, even at the stage of unenlightened Bodhisattva. As a result, the climax of the play (or rather its anti-climax) felt contrived and implausible, with Sid convincing Sage to turn herself in, learning at second-hand from the police about her alleged betrayal, and then betraying and abandoning her in return – a somewhat complicated parallel to the Buddha’s entrapment of Monkey in the original story.

 

The minor characters were more two-dimensional and as such easy targets – especially the clownish cops, who seemed unsuited to their roles when the plot took a more sinister turn. They were also easy targets in a double sense, as Sage’s cop-killing harangue had unfortunate overtones in the light of recent events, which made it hard to laugh despite Tong’s ebullient delivery (a little rewriting here would be an easy fix).

 

Despite her stage presence and acting chops, I found the casting of Tompkins in her series of roles problematic, especially when she was revealed as the Buddha in the final scene. (In fact I was initially unsure ‘who’ she was in this scene, possibly because I’d identified Qin in the role of the Buddha up to that point.) Doubtless having a White actor with platinum blonde hair playing these roles was intended to be ironic. However her final manifestation as the Buddha felt clunky, as did the reduction of the Enlightened One to a variation on Tompkins’s earlier role as the police chief. Perhaps this clunkiness was likewise meant to be ironic, like a deus ex machina in a Greek tragedy. However, it had the retroactive effect of making Tompkins’s cumulative role seem like that of a White puppet-master throughout the play. As such, it left me confused as to the target of the play’s critique: Buddhism; wealth and privilege; or a more generalized notion of power in all its forms. 

To represent these alternatives as isomorphic surely involves a false equivalence. To be sure, we can attribute the emergence of Buddhism to a certain historical moment or class outlook. However, to reduce it to a form of ruling class ideology is as simplistic as reducing Christianity to what Nietzsche called the morality of slaves; and to identify Buddhism with theocracy, patriarchy, heteronormativity or White supremacy is a bit of a stretch. 

 

More broadly, to lump caste, class, race, gender or sexuality together as forms of oppression is to ignore the specificity of each and use a blunt instrument when more specialized tools are needed. Alongside a Nietzschean hammer, a Marxist sickle comes in handy, along with an anti-racist bolt-cutter, a feminist nutcracker, a queer screwdriver, and perhaps even a philosophical or theological torch to shine some light on things. 

As an aside: a common contemporary reading of Nietzsche or my old friend Michel Foucault leads to a similar oversimplification about power and its seeming ineluctability. However, Foucault was always careful to remind people that ‘where there is power, there is resistance’ – and therefore the possibility of freedom, which he said was the ontological condition of power and the underlying theme of his work. My old friend Jean-Francois Lyotard’s distinction between pouvoir and puissance (which might be translated as ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ power) also comes in handy here. The distinction helps us to maintain a sense of political optimism, as opposed to pessimism or cynicism (which Nietzsche said are the hallmarks of a slave morality) – but I’m wandering off the track.

 

To return to the play: possibly casting a non-White actor like Desengano (who gave an engaging performance as the more likeable of the two cops) instead of Tompkins in some of these roles would have helped. Alternatively (or additionally) having Qin play the Buddha in the final scene would have developed the relationship between Buddha and Monkey as a qualitative dialectic between alternately attracting and opposing personalities or forces (like Apollo and Dionysus) as well as socio-economic classes (like bourgeois and proletarian or master and servant). Instead, it was reduced to a quantitative difference between power and powerlessness that ultimately appeared to be about colonisation and race.

 

With substitution of a White Buddha in the final scene, Sid’s character-arc was left unfinished – unlike the story of Siddhartha, who leaves his life of privilege and enters a period of asceticism before finding the middle way of enlightenment and becoming the Buddha. Foreshortening this dialectic of enlightenment (to borrow a phrase from my old friends Adorno and Horkheimer) in the case of both characters led to a simple reinforcement of social and psychological structures with no possibility of change.

 

The original story is more complex (even in the TV show). Monkey is tricked and imprisoned by the Buddha, but later released by the Boddhisatva Guanyin; and the golden circlet of restraint placed around Monkey’s head by Guanyin and activated whenever Monkey becomes violent represents the force of conscience rather than oppression – with the promise of liberation once enlightenment is attained. Thus one might argue both Buddha and Monkey undergo a similar journey from excess (of wealth and privilege in the one case, or aggressiveness and the lust for power in the other) to privation (asceticism in the case of the Buddha, imprisonment and servitude in the case of Monkey) before finding the middle way and reaching enlightenment, which ends the cycle of suffering. This spiritual path arguably points the way to a political one as well (see my ‘Buddhism, Critical Theory, Post-Structuralism: Liberation Theology for a Neoliberal Age’ (Buddhismus, Kritische Theorie, Poststrukturalismus: Befreiungstheologie für Ein Neoliberales Zeitalte, translated by Humphrey Bower, unpublished). 

 

However, by foreshortening the dialectic of enlightenment to a vicious circle of entrapment and betrayal, the ending of Enlightenment (at least in this production) left the audience feeling as trapped and betrayed as Sage herself by the prospect of a revolution forever forestalled (a common reading of Adorno and Horkheimer too, by the way, which is just as cynical and pessimistic as the reading of Nietzsche and Foucault mentioned earlier).

 

This feeling of entrapment was reinforced by Cherish Marrington’s otherwise elegant set: a temple-like structure featuring steps rising from the forestage to a platform framed by an architrave of curtains and a roof-shaped banner onto which neon-outlined street-protest or emoji-style illustrations by Chinese dissident cartoonist Badiucao were projected. The whole ensemble was evocative of both ancient and contemporary China, but entrances and exits were made cumbersome by having actors slink behind the curtains and then clamber onto or off the stage – notwithstanding much creative use of fabrics being draped over bodies to ‘conceal’ them while they were having sex or make them ‘appear’ or ‘disappear’ at the beginning or end of scenes. 

 

Similarly, I loved the use of Mandarin surtitles throughout, but their impact was skewed by projecting them onto the bottom right-hand corner of the architrave rather than across the lintel above the action, where the Badiucao projections – while striking – were ultimately little more than decorative distractions. Alternatively, it might have been simpler and more effective (and more Brechtian) to do the whole thing on a bare floor or platform and project the surtitles across the back wall, allowing the space to transform as needed from bedroom to street and the actors to come and go without needing to hide anything.

 

The most disturbing scene (and arguably the turning point) in the play is when Sage is pulled over by the cops and identified, after which things rapidly spiral out of control. This was staged in darkness using voiceover, allowing the audience’s imagination to flesh things out. However, the impact of the scene was reduced by the fact that the cops had previously been played for laughs, and by the close-mic voiceover delivery (both factors made it hard to discern if these were even the same cops). Perhaps if Sage had recorded the event on her phone (like her online harangue at the start of the play) and played it back to Sid onstage, the device would have been more dramatically effective and allowed for more interesting possibilities in terms of the couple’s subsequent choices, as well as making the scene feel less like exploitation/torture-porn.

 

In sum: there’s a great play here about the relationship between Sid and Sage – whether in the fully realised form of a Brechtian parable, thriller, rom-com, superhero movie, or all of the above – waiting to be liberated like a trapped Monkey from beneath the mountain of intertextuality under which Enlightenment currently labours. That play (even in its current avatar-form) awaits a production that would strip away the artistic and cultural baggage of temple-structures and problematic casting to deliver the work’s potentially hilarious, sexy, touching, searing, terrifying and liberating message. The process of liberation might involve the original Monkey and Buddha stories being fully integrated and transcended; the violence of the artist-renegade being tempered by the golden circlet of theatrical discipline; and their artistic and spiritual pilgrimage from East to West and back again being accomplished.

 

Meanwhile, if the heavy-handedness of this critique of the play and production seems like using a hammer to crack a walnut – well, that’s how you crack a walnut, if you want to get to the kernel of things. It’s also a tribute to the thoughtful and thought-provoking nature of the artistic team and their work.

 

*

 

Enlightenment (The Enlightenment Of The Siddhartha Gautama Buddha And The Encounter With The Monkey King – Great Sage, Equal of Heaven) was at The Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre of WA, from December 14 to 17.

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. After leaving Cambridge he spent some years in Paris as Michel Foucault’s barber and personal stylist and as Jean-Francois Lyotard’s personal shopper, in which capacity he is said to have influenced the latter’s move away from libidinal economics towards the theory of language games as well as towards wearing more layers of clothing. On returning to Austria he was the lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen). He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.