Cover Mercy Wong during rehearsals for ‘Liu Rushi, My Dear’ (Photo: courtesy of Hong Kong Repertory Theatre)
Mercy Wong during rehearsals for ‘Liu Rushi, My Dear’ (Photo: courtesy of Hong Kong Repertory Theatre)
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The company’s new artistic director talks about his new play, ‘Liu Rushi, My Dear’, and thoughts on where the city’s drama scene should steer towards
When Poon Wai Shum took up the role of artistic director role at Hong Kong Repertory Theatre (HKRep) in March this year, he had ambitions to bring change to the city’s cultural scene through his productions.
Six months into his role, the former dean of the School of Drama at Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA) is putting on Liu Rushi, My Dear, a drama he wrote and directs, which runs from September 9 to 24. The play centres on the eponymous heroine (1618-1664), who was a famous courtesan in the late Ming dynasty, widely known as one of the “Eight Beauties of Qinhuai”. Of all the great beauties, Liu stood out due to her talent for poetry, loyalty to her country and avant-garde thinking: she frequently dressed as a man so that she could engage in political discussions with scholars at a time when women were expected to do little other than tend to domestic affairs.
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The cast of ‘Liu Rushi, My Dear’ during rehearsals (Photo: courtesy of Hong Kong Repertory Theatre)
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While Liu’s tragic life alone—she was sold to a brothel by her stepmother, taken in by a scholarly family only to be kicked out again when her adoptive father died, and had a series of futile love affairs with married men—warrants being put on stage, Poon says it’s not his intention to “only offer entertainment, which would be the role of a commercial theatre. As a non-profit theatre, I believe it’s our mission to also deepen the city’s cultural understanding.”
In his ten years at HKAPA (2012-2022) and 19 years as the artistic director of Prospects Theatre Company (1993 to 2012), he felt that Hong Kong’s theatre scene was lacking in productions about Chinese culture. He feels that Hong Kong’s academic syllabus and institutions mainly focus on teaching western performing arts; HKRep has been guilty of this, too, staging translations of multiple classic western shows. “I believe it’s equally important to explore how we can showcase Hong Kong’s unique east-meets-west identity by presenting Chinese or local stories with western spoken drama.”
With his upcoming play, while the format is still a western play, the director will guide his actors to walk, move and speak in a way that “gives us a glimpse of people living in ancient China”.
More importantly, Poon hopes the play will present the essence of Chinese culture. “Historians today may think Liu’s suicide was to be expected when the Ming dynasty fell and she didn’t want to succumb to the succeeding Qing court. But from a dramaturg’s perspective—and a more humanistic one—I want to delve into her thinking and emotions: how did she come to be so loyal to the failing Ming court?” He adds that his play isn’t a faithful reproduction of Liu’s life story. “Nobody alive today has lived through her time and the show is not a history class, so the play is more about getting a sense, through research and imagination, of the how this historical figure thought, behaved and loved, and how far we have come from that.”
The director is far from being obsessed with in the past. In November, after Liu, he will stage Moscow Express, a play stringing together a number of Anton Chekhov’s short stories and adapted to give it a local and contemporary context. “I want to make sure that our productions are also relevant to our time and place, so while the story, on a surface level, is about passengers boarding a train from a Hong Kong station to Russia, it’s also, on a deeper level, a chance for reflection on our cultural exchange and make-up.”
Liu Rushi, my Dear. From September 10 to 24, 2023. Hong Kong City Hall, Central.
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Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
