Experimental theatre director Chan Ping-chiu tells Edmund Lee why he’s not the news he reads.

The good news about My Favourite Time, the latest Cantonese production of On&On Theatre Workshop, is that it’s a postmodern narrative theatre piece. The bad news is that we only learned that from its promotional flyer, which doesn’t really tell us much else. The play is based on two real-life incidents that made headlines in April and May 2009: a man happened to be visiting a subsequently sealed-off and quarantined Hong Kong hotel at the dawn of the H1N1 outbreak; a 15-year-old girl sold her self-designed hats in the Mong Kok Pedestrian Area and became a media sensation. All this happened, more or less; and Chan Ping-chiu – Artistic Director of On&On, and writer and co-director of this performance – even confirms that much of his characters’ background is based on their real-life counterparts.

So, at this point, you’re perhaps justified in wondering where the play will run amok down the postmodern route. For starters, My Favourite Time is the second entry in the theatre group’s ‘Consumerist Era’ series, which kicked off last year with Hamletmaxhine. While Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine is a ‘play’, in both theatrical and postmodernist terms, on Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, Chan’s script for Hamletmaxhine takes it one step further, creatively borrowing and reconsidering the East German playwright’s premise by conjuring a parallel reflection on the Hong Kong theatre scene. “It’s impossible to stage Hamlet in this consumerist world nowadays,” Chan says of his script. “‘To be or not to be,’ that’s no longer the question concerning the people. No one asks these existential questions anymore.”

Two characters took centre stage in that earlier play: one being a male actor playing Hamlet, who lost himself in exhaustion and disillusionment during his play’s global tour; the other being an obsessive female theatre fan, who follows him around. The two-story structure is retained in My Favourite Time, which, according to Chan, can be taken as a sequel of sorts. He says, “This new play extends the idea of the last work. The topic we’re tackling [with this series] is quite extensive. There were debates after last year’s show, because that one was directly dealing with the consumerist culture in the theatre scene. I want to explore the topic further with the new work.”

It’s only natural, then, to find that Chan has again set his protagonist as a man who is worn out by the creative industry. Even the young girl character, whose aspirations in the field have made her a recognized talent, is shown in the play to be incorporated into the all-consuming business world when she’s consequently grown up. “Personally, I’m not very optimistic about the creative industry right now,” the veteran writer-director says, admitting to his pessimism. “It’s up to the new generation to fight their way forward, because creativity and profitability are all mixed up today. The market-oriented mentality is too entrenched in us, so much so that, at the end, all we want to be are CEOs. This isn’t just a problem for the teenagers; we’re facing the same in the arts.”

From a run-through of the play that we visited in early November, it’s apparent that, while structured in a fragmented and almost kaleidoscopic manner, the news stories that inspired the play can still be comprehended in notable details. But that’s not to say that Chan hasn’t also torn into his material with a distinctive dash of melancholy humour. With a progressively nightmarish first half and an oddly cheery second half, My Favourite Time, in its essence, is an unbearably sad play; it is the story of our time. Having equated this globalized world as one of those glass rooms (for smokers) you find in airports – an area that looks exactly the same on every side, and from which there’s no way of escaping – Chan goes on to urge the spectators, in the play’s brief epilogue, to rethink their own reality. What, we’re asked, if nothing is really as it appears?

“The news reports we read these days are colourful enough to form many layers of our reality – they’re full of strange occurrences,” says Chan. “But they’re not all real, and are only moulding us in a way that we all get to see the world in exactly the same way. Sometimes I talk to my actors about the concept of alternative realities evoked in Zhuangzi’s ‘butterfly dream’ analogy. The significance of it isn’t to support one [version of reality] and negate the other, but to initiate a new perspective to look at things. Many social issues have been ‘mythicized’ in this consumerist age, in the sense that they are given easy and clear-cut definitions. Things are much more complicated in reality.”

My Favourite Time is performed in Cantonese, from Fri 27 to Sun 29 at Hong Kong Cultural Centre’s Studio Theatre.