The Lost Child, starring David, Dany Lee, Kelly and Li Sheng, is being broadcasted in the mango monsoon column. The play was adapted from the online novel Anemone by Bekebang, and more than 20,000 people in Douban scored 7.7, making it a recent high-scoring play.
The Lost Child tells the story of the sudden disappearance of Yang Mo (Li Qingyu), the son of Yang Yuan (David) and Tao Fang (Li Sheng), on the way to school and downstairs, taking this as the main line to run through the sub-lines of Yuan Wu (Vision Wei) and Lin Chuping (Yu Wenwen), leading to the final mystery.
One of the highlights of The Lost Child is its novel narrative. Yang Mo’s disappearance, Yuan Wu’s corpse-hiding case and Lin Chuping’s sexual assault are three lines in one, which trace the source and clarify the timeline from different perspectives of the characters, thus giving clues. First of all, the play set a suspense at the beginning: why did Yang Mo disappear? Why do men dressed in dirty clothes buy tiles? Why did Lin Wenzhao tell his sister not to go to Qinglan Garden? What is the connection between these plots?
In the following plot, they are revealed one by one and have a connection with each other: Lin Chuping is the landlord of Yuan Wu and his son. Because of the shadow brought by sexual assault, she moved out of Qinglan Garden and rented it to the father and son; On the day when she came to collect the rent, Yuan Wu’s father died suddenly in a cane chair after dinner, and Yang Mo’s dog snore was lost in Yang Yuan’s car on that day, seven days before he disappeared.
The second highlight is that the group images of the play are rich, showing the diverse appearance of human nature. After his father died, Yuan Wu chose to hide his father’s body in order to continue to receive his father’s retirement security. This is a departure from the practice of "Thieves’ Family" where grandma died and father hid the body to get a pension. When a man comes to a dead end, you can’t believe what he can do
Secondly, Lin Chuping chose not to call the police after being sexually assaulted. Obviously it was her who was hurt, but she chose not to call the police because she didn’t want more people to know; When she saw the only policewoman in the police station leave, she also lost the power to sympathize with her. This profoundly reflects the cruel situation that women are powerless in the face of sexual harassment and sexual assault, and also calls on the society to have more support and empathy for this.
Finally, Xu Enhuai was accepted by the Yang family because of his estrangement from his parents. Xu Enhuai is a typical "other people’s child", with excellent academic performance and courtesy to others. And her family is very abnormal. My father was away from home all the year round, and I didn’t say a word when I met him, and my mother ignored her.
But the warmth that was missing in family of origin, he felt it in Yang Mo’s home, so there was a saying that "Yang Mo’s disappearance was designed by Xu Enhuai, and she wanted to replace it". But the truth is, we still continue to watch the drama.
Finally, we return to the title of the play "The Disappearing Child". "The Disappeared Child" obviously refers to Yang Mo’s disappearance. In the deep sense, the "disappeared child" refers to why the child is missing. Let’s take a look at Yang Mo’s family. The mother’s "achievement-only theory" made Yang Mo go to various cram schools, but she didn’t care about her children and didn’t even know that her children had ADHD. Because of the strength of the woman’s family, the father has less right to speak in the family, and he has to ask the mother to take the children out to play. I promised my son to go out to play at the weekend, but because I was busy with my own work, I postponed it again and again, which led to the lack of trust of the child and planned an escape, which is why the child disappeared.
Yuan Wu, another hero, has not disappeared, but he has lost himself. He seems to be a mirror for Yang Mo when he grows up, showing us the tragedy of a top student falling step by step. Yuan Wu entered a prestigious school, got a good job and got married according to his parents’ plan, but his parents didn’t teach him how to resist the temptation from outside. He was like a flower in a greenhouse, which was destroyed by gambling: his mother died in a car accident, his wife divorced and took his daughter away, and his father finally left, so Yuan Wu "disappeared" step by step.
Under the suspenseful shell of The Lost Child, family of origin’s tragedy, the embarrassment of sexually assaulting women and the darkness of human nature are presented to us one by one. From the individual to the family and then to the society, let us think about how to build a wall for children, women and other vulnerable groups, and also let us think about the meaning of family and life, examine the past and think about the future!