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 and friendship with another patient, who in turn narrates her own life story as a Shanghainese courtesan.

Condensing 80 years of history into 7½ hours, A Dream has none of the economy, thrilling action and high-tech concepts of Nolan's Inception, which also tells stories within stories. In fact, some reviewers have complained that Lai's story of an architect's romances that is linked to the dramatic upheavals of a courtesan's fortunes is so sprawling, it could have been cut by half without losing its essence.