Imphal, January 08: On the second day of the Asian Theatre Festival, the Vietnam National Theatre performed its play Moonlight in a small courtyard.

Directed by Dang Tu Mai, the play was originally written in Chinese by Bach Phong Khe.

The play incidentally, has an all female cast and there is a complete absence of any male character.

But there is a linger presence of a male of a male character who affects the lives and the relationships of the female characters with one another.

The play is about three generations of a family - a grandmother, the mother and her two daughters.

Long back, when the grandmother was still a young woman, the man she loved betrayed and left her.

This incident left a deep scar on her daughter (the mother of the play), and when the times comes for her to get married and set the down, she chooses stability and position in life over love add forsakes her lover.

When the play opens, we are introduced to a very happy, contended, ideal family inhabited by these three generations of women - a doting grandmother, the mother - a well-settled, successful women and her two young and beautiful daughters.

But this serenity, this facade of a happy family gets ripped apart when it came to light that the second daughter has fallen in love with an electrician and the first one with the man the mother loved but did not marry.

The play is about the resolution of the emotional turmoil and chaos of the characters which the above discoveries unleashed.

Eventually as the cliché goes 'love triumphs' and everybody lived happily ever after.

The mother realizes that true happiness is not money or position or status in life.

True happiness lies in listening to the voice of the heart and not suppressing it influenced by other consideration.

The production itself is pedestrian and it never reached any inspiring heights.

Even the script, one felt going by the action and the gestures of the actors, drags on the emotional ding-dongs of the characters.

One was also disappointed in not seeing anything uniquely Vietnamese in terms of the production style and stagecraft and techniques.

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