Local theatre pioneer Olivia Yan comes back down to earth with her latest production, Coming Home. She meets Edmund Lee after a long day of rehearsal.

Whether you think of her as a theatre artist peppered with acclaims, or the founder and artistic director of one of Hong Kong’s most popular theatre groups, Olivia Yan, in person, is far from being aloof. In fact, in the hour of rehearsal that I attended at PIP Theatre’s Arts Centre premises, the actor-director spent much of the time either sitting or kneeling on the floor at the stage side giving advice to the actors that occasionally stopped by her – not infrequently with a gentle smile on her face.

It was 8pm when the rehearsal finished, and almost 9pm when our interview concluded. Towards the end of our chat I tell Yan, visibly tired at that point but still brimming with enthusiasm, that when I was watching her during the rehearsal she was behaving like the actors’ – I pause for seconds to look for the right description, as Yan leans forward in anticipation – elder sister. “Wonderful! I was so afraid that you’d say ‘mother’!” She bursts into laughter. “Many people would just [call me a ‘mother’]. Thank you so much!”

By that, of course she is joking. Throughout our conversation, she mentions more than a few times her five-year-old daughter with celebrated comedian Jim Chim – Yan’s long-term theatre collaborator (their 1999 production of Eugene Ionesco’s tragic farce The Chairs is considered a local classic) and co-founder of the PIP Theatre group – and you can simply sense her full embrace of the role of motherhood. As it turns out, Coming Home, Yan’s long-awaited return to the stage as both director and actor, was only made possible by this experience.

“My new play has a lot to do with my state of being: I’m now a mother!” She says with a huge smile on her face. “In the past, I used to think that the topic of family wasn’t something that would concern me – the topic was so uncool, and [I’m] an artist after all,” Yan laughs at her own way of putting it. “Existentialism, deconstruction and the like were the kind of issues that concerned me back then. However, after my daughter was born I began to think more about the realistic side [of being], the meaning of life, and the way that a family can affect the way one grows up.”

In Coming Home –Yan’s collaboration with novelist Chan Wai, a close friend of hers – a young girl from a broken family has been raised by a paramedic, himself an orphan, who has also saved her mother’s life several times in the past. Through the eyes of these two characters, a series of family stories and life fragments – or ‘non-stories’, as Yan calls them – are weaved together in free-flowing form, swinging between reality and imagination, to explore the ideas of  ‘home’ and ‘family’, and to convey the significance of love and care.

“I want my play to be like a prose collection,” Yan says. “I can’t include in one story every idea that I have about family, not only because I’m greedy, but also because every person is an epitome of his entire family background. Chan is usually quite introspective in her stories, and it’s the same for me. We focus on the need, the loss, and the desire of the characters; what actually happens in the story is trivial. The experience is [like] a car: what’s really important is where it gets you, and the scenery that you can see from there.”

When compared with Jim Chim’s mainstream, audience-friendly comedies, does Yan find it strange sometimes to be seen as the more ‘artistic’ and ‘experimental’ half of PIP Theatre? “If you think that I’m a very artistic person, I’m not – I’m cheap boom boom! They know that I’m not that classy all the time,” a laughing Yan turns to her assistant, while playing with her front hair. “And if you think that Chim is always funny and [going] ‘wee wee wa wa’, he’s not. He’s a dead serious person. Some audiences also ‘don’t understand’ his productions! (You know, Hong Kong people have a tendency of ‘not understanding’…)”

Yan continues, “As I mentioned, I no longer want to put myself in the intellectual circle, because I left that behind after my daughter’s birth. The essence of our work is care for humanity. We want to know where our souls are.”

Coming Home is performed in Cantonese, at the Arts Centre’s Shouson Theatre from Friday 7 to Sunday 9.