I met Stan Lai (賴聲川) in 2004 when he was directing a production of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni in Taipei. I asked him what he thought of the opera’s protagonist. Lai replied that he was a liberator who freed women of their sexual inhibitions and led them into a new kind of independence.
I disagreed profoundly. Don Giovanni is a serial seducer who kills the father of one of his victims in the first five minutes of the opera and is dragged off to hell at the piece’s end.
There is a great deal of comedy in the opera, but it has