Cattle Depot Theatre Tuesday 23-Sunday 28 (Knives in Hens); April 8-11 (Far Away); April 22-25 (God is a DJ)

The frantic pace of Hong Kong can often make you feel like you’re looking through a kaleidoscope, on a carousel, whilst drunk. Which is why mindless entertainment can be so appealing; and why the three thought-provoking plays in this series, presented by On and On Theatre Workshop in association with Theatre du Pif, may come as a shock to the system. As Vee Leong, one of the directors in the series, puts it, [these] are all plays that basically think aloud on stage.”

Set in a pre-industrial, feudal society, Knives in Hens by Scottish playwright David Harrower tells of a recently married young woman who, through her husband, gains social status – and a better understanding of her own identity. Marjorie Chan, guest director of Theatre du Pif, says of her protagonist: “She [eventually] figures things out by the way she names things, and she discovers that it’s easy. You just have to name it; you just have to do it; you just have to make the action happen. It’s actually as easy as sticking a knife in a hen.”

Chan’s dedication pushed her to stubbornly pursue an understanding of this very Scottish script. In fact, certain phrases and expressions are so Scottish in nature that only through comprehension of its original meaning could Chan trust herself to present the play as it was intended to be. Despite these linguistic and cultural obstacles, Chan feels that her reputation of being involved in feminist theatre, or what she calls “protest theatre”, made Knives in Hens the perfect play for her.

While Harrower has his protagonist twisting free of the cords tangled round her by society, English playwright Caryl Churchill has hers bound and destroyed by fear. Far Away presents a dystopia in which trepidation is the axle on which the world turns, and the characters’ lives are burdened with the nameless terror they have for a society in transition. The play opens with the familiar family scene of a little girl seeking comfort in her aunt, while she is kept from her sleep by a disturbing scene. But instead of reassuring her niece, the aunt leaves the little girl with the notion that some nightmares are real and must be kept to herself.

Like Chan, Far Away’s director Vee Leong found the language of the play to be among the most trying of challenges she’s encountered. “Actually, we are lost in translation,” Leong says of her Cantonese adaptation of the English script. “But the play itself is so interesting; it’s like playing a game of filling in the blanks for the directors and the actors.”

God Is a DJ is similar to the two other plays in that it’s largely an allegory on our current global society. However, rather than dealing with the liberation from it or the fear of it, the play navigates the blurry line between what’s real and what’s staged. “The story is about a DJ and a VJ who begin a project together,” says director Mann Chan, “which involves the two of them being featured in an onstage reality show. The audience will see these two characters living their lives on stage, doing everything from the mundane to the vulgar and explicit.”

He feels that this play, by contemporary German playwright Falk Richter, is an appropriate piece with which to address our current reality TV phenomenon – a trend that begs the question of how much of what we see is real, and how much of it is scripted.

Heidi Yeung 

Knives in Hens is in English with Chinese surtitles; Far Away is in Cantonese with English surtitles on the Apr 8 & 10 performances; God is a DJ is in Cantonese. Tickets: 2734 9009; www.urbtix.hk.