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Hong Kong’s Class 7A Drama Group go Brechtian in their musing on social justice, writes Edmund Lee

You don’t need a special occasion to stage a Bertolt Brecht play; although, given the social function that the great German playwright regularly attributed to his work, it doesn’t hurt to chance upon one, either. So when the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link saga rolled on during his new work’s early creation process, Panda Leung – founder and artistic director of Class 7A Drama Group, and one of the co-directors of The Chalk Circle in China – had no hesitation in setting the prologue to his Cantonese adaptation of The Caucasian Chalk Circle against exactly that backdrop.

“The question behind the whole Express Rail Link debate is on the ownership and access to public properties,” says Leung of the story’s contemporary relevance, comparing the current scenario in Hong Kong with Brecht’s – himself a committed Marxist socialist – investigation into the interplay between socialism and capitalism in the 1940s. “The financial tsunami last year has made us reflect on the best ways to carry out public policies, and whether capitalism is really the ends to achieve everything.”

Written at the close of World War II, Brecht’s parable is framed with a prologue set in the then Soviet Union, where the new ownership of a piece of abandoned farm land is negotiated among its pre-war residents, as well as another group of peasants who have the skills to make better use of the land. During the discussion, a fable – involving an abandoned child’s kind-hearted adopted mother, and his greedy and heartless biological mother who wants him back purely for monetary reasons – is told by a narrator to substantiate the benefits of collectivisation.

Although the story proper distantly echoes the Judgment of Solomon, Brecht’s play was indeed directly inspired by a legendary court case decided by China’s ancient folk hero Judge Bao, in which the child is placed in a chalk circle on the ground and the two mothers are asked to pull him out from opposite directions. To downplay the original play’s religious imagery and underscore its strong Chinese roots, Leung and co-director Chan Ching-kwan have set the main portion of their production in China’s Spring and Autumn (700-476BC) and Warring States (475-221BC) periods, in the State of Zheng around the Yellow River region. But that’s not to say we’re in for a period drama.

“We don’t want to stage TV dramas in the theatre space; we want to emphasise the performance aspect,” Leung says of his Brechtian staging, which consists of the use of neither backdrop nor props. “We’re using an empty stage for this production, and we’ll let the actors handle the rhythm.” Chan elaborates: “Different theatre directors have used different forms to interpret the ‘distancing effect’ advocated by Brecht. For us, most of our actors will be differentiating between their multiple roles with various ways of speaking and gesturing, so that the audience can be very much aware that they’re watching a performance. It’s like when you’re watching a Beijing opera: you are at once watching a play and appreciating a form of performance art.”

That faith in theatre’s ‘non-realistic’ aspects, incidentally, is precisely the founding value of Class 7A. It must have been a long, long wait for Leung to finally stage their first Brecht play since the group’s 1997 inception. “We believe strongly in the value of the text,” he says. “There were many people who didn’t share our belief; they were using lots of fanciful effects in their productions. We thought it essential to put the focus back on the text.”

The Chalk Circle in China is performed in Cantonese at APA’s Drama Theatre from Fri 29 to Sun 31. Tickets: www.urbtix.hk, 2734 9009; or www.hkticketing.com, 3128 8288.