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Theatre Du Pif stage one of their most haunting plays to date, writes Clare Morin

It’s Friday the 13th, and a storm is brewing in the gloomy skies over Cheung Chau. I trudge my way along a desolate beach to an interview with Theatre du Pif and its director Robert Draffin. Their upcoming play Hanako’s Pillow is based on Japanese ghost stories, making the setting suitably ominous.

As thunder rolls around the island, I find Draffin reclining on a seat in the shelter of the Cheung Chau Sports Centre, dressed in black and sipping a lai cha. Draffin, who was previously the Head of Acting at Melbourne’s Victoria College of the Arts and now heads the theatre research company Liminal Theatre and Performance, has been staying in Cheung Chau at the invitation of the founders of Theatre Du Pif Bonni Chan and Sean Curran. “It was a marriage made in Cheung Chau,” says the director with a laugh.

Husband and wife team Bonni Chan and Sean Curran set up Theater Du Pif in 1992. They have produced a body of original, cross cultural plays over the years that usually take literary works as their starting point. In 2005, they staged the critically acclaimed Dance Me to the End of Love, where they melded Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha with the music of Leonard Cohen. “We enjoy the devising process,” explains Curran in a gentle Scottish accent as he arrives for a rehearsal. “You get an ownership of the show. You’re creating the work yourself but you have this framework, an inspiration.”

Their latest production was born after the couple met Draffin at a theatre workshop in 2007. Impressed by the director’s unique style of physical theatre, the couple asked him to direct them. They then flew to Melbourne to brainstorm plays, where they came across The Sound of a Voice by David Henry Hwang (the Asian American writer of M. Butterfly.) It is a tragic story of a middle aged couple in an isolated hut, who grapple with the attraction and repelling powers of love.

Taking the play as their starting point, Draffin introduced elements of Japanese ghost stories to the brainstorming mix. They watched the 1964 anthology film Kwaidan by Masaki Kobayashi, which is based on a collection of Japanese ghost stories compiled by the British writer Lafcadio Hearn. Then they drew in the love poetry of Ted Hughes. Hanako’s Pillow was the result.

The play opens when a wounded swordsman (played by Curran) arrives at the hut of a mysterious woman (Chan) living deep in the woods. It is a fusion of drama, song and live music from a lone cellist.

With a minimalist aesthetic that allows the story to flip from the real to the supernatural, the play explores themes of love and death. “That sense of the haunting woman’s ghost is such a powerful archetype,” says Draffin. “It’s just an extraordinary woman who lives up there and has amazing knowledge. He’s going up there to be killed, or maybe he’s going up there to be cured. The male’s fear of a female witch is universal. It’s in every culture.”

The creation of the play has been a fascinating process for Chan and Curran – Draffin has pushed the couple to dig deep into their psyches, with experimental rehearsals that have seen them train in kendo sword fighting and write their own poetry as a means to create their characters. “My contract as a director is more than putting a story on,” says Draffin. “They’re writing, they’re using physical skills. The project is developing them as artists.”

With that, it’s time to head back into rehearsals. Draffin leaves me with a haunting sense that Hanako’s Pillow may be one of the most personal projects to date by one of Hong Kong’s most creative theatre couples. It starts raining…

Hanako’s Pillow is staged at the Studio Theatre, Cultural Centre, Thu 10-Fri 11, 8pm, Sat 12, 3pm & 8pm and Sun 13, 5pm. $180-$120, 2734 9009. In English with Chinese subtitles.