A return to slow, patient, epic storytelling

REMEMBER the theories of dreaming in that dazzling Christopher Nolan film Inception? One minute of dreamtime is the equivalent of 20 minutes in real life. So if you take 20 minutes to eat a steak, you'd take just one minute to dream the act of eating a steak from start to finish. Now, if you're dreaming within a dream, one minute of intra-dreaming supposedly feels like 400 minutes of real life.

Stan Lai's magnum opus of a play is called A Dream Within A Dream. And within its 7½-hour endurance test of a runtime, it criss-crosses continents, eras, characters and realities to tell a story-within-a-story-within-a-story: A doctor's attempts to get close to one of her patients prompts the latter to narrate the story of his life an…