IF you are someone who likes to see musical drama about a 15-year-old being raped by an animal, then Fox Wedding was the one for you. If, like me, you want artforms that tackle subjects such as sex with children to justify themselves mighty well, then you might have had a bit of a problem with this one. Thank goodness at least that the charming and compelling Eliza Ngan, who played young Ling-ling in The Naked Child Theatre Company's show, looked every bit of her 21 years. She wanders off into Cello Wood one night to escape the sound of her parents' love-making in the isolated cottage they share 'somewhere in China, sometime in the recent past'. There, with a nod to Little Red Riding Hood, she meets a fox (Benny Fung) who tricks her into his house, turns nasty and goes for her. End of story. So abruptly end of story, in fact, that a packed audience perhaps still waiting for an explanation sat on until told to go home by director Dino Mahoney. The theory behind this bizarre production for the Youth Arts Festival was fine, not to mention brave from a young cast of actor-singers and musicians in a city only gradually opening up about these things: taking apart the Brothers Grimm's black-humoured tale and creating a novel Asian fusion by using Po Song-lin's Dark Tales to raise awareness of a young girl's sexual awakening and subsequent corruption. The result, however, was lumbering dancing constrained by this small theatre and its set of a 'wood' of coat-racks that linked the unsettling juxtaposition of cosy domesticity and our darker sides, and a libretto from 21-year-old singer-composer Susie Wilkins and Mahoney that was often incomprehensible. With this simple storyline, a Cantonese show might have been a happier solution to the problem of diction. The music - a cello (Eva Tong) and Chinese flute (Ricky Yeung Wai-kit) - should have been enchanting if in keeping with the radical theme, but simply irritated, so abrupt and detached was it. Yet the production in the end received a deservedly warm reception. It was a complex subject, energetically and powerfully tackled. But let us not patronise youth theatre. Its visualisation could have been much better thought out. Fox Wedding Fringe Club Studio Theatre
