Popular actor-playwright Wong Wing-sze tells Edmund Lee about her dark sense of humour.

Barely a moment has passed and Wong Wing-sze – theatre actor, celebrated playwright of 17 Cantonese titles, and one-woman factory of snappy, cerebral humour – is already turning our interview on its head. Picking up my voice recorder from the sofa and pointing it straight at my face, she starts her unrelenting interrogation: “Now let me interview you: what do you know about me? Tell me, tell me. What do you know?” Not much, I reply, half-expecting the worst. “Well then, I’ll tell you my life story from age two,” she says, before savouring the awkward moment with a jovial laugh.

Awkwardness galore, incidentally, is precisely what sets this rising theatre artist apart from her peers. As fellow theatre actress Kearen Pang – a long-term friend of hers since their school days together in the acting programme at the Academy of Performing Arts – remarked in a recent chat with me, Wong’s works “are so wickedly funny that they’re infuriating.” And Wong knows it. “After watching a play by Pang,” she offers what many would agree to be an objective analysis, “you’d want to go on stage, console her, and give her a hug; whereas after seeing a show of mine, you’d feel like beating me up with a chair.”

It’s not hard to see where she comes from. Wong’s one-actor play My Grandmother’s Funeral, first staged in 2008 to great acclaim and currently set for a third re-run in Macau this coming May, manages to see the hilarious side of the traditional Daoist funerals. Her second solo show, Crazy for Cats (to re-run this fortnight at Arts Centre’s Shouson Theatre), takes her signature black humour into the relationship between two women – a mysophobic coroner and an emotionally empty theatre usher – and the abandoned cat they take home.

While she’s quick to downplay her rapidly growing popularity (“If you pay tens of thousands of dollars to put up advertisements in the MTR, you can be popular too!”), Wong is clearly more at ease with her by now widely-recognised writing and performing style. “This weird sense of humour is a special trait of my personality,” she explains. “Whenever I come across really sad or tense situations, I’ll blow my fuse and laugh out loud. My defence mechanism ensures that I won’t sink into unhappiness; instead, I get detached from the circumstance and see the ridiculous side of it.”

True to her words, Wong’s first solo show turns her grandmother’s death and the subsequent funeral into an improbably exciting time for the audience. Combining stand-up comedy and performances in role playing, singing and Daoist funeral rituals, My Grandmother’s Funeral’s youthful abandon in treating the taboo subjects may be explained by the family business of Wong’s relatives: her grandfather was a master in Daoist funeral services, while her grandmother was a psychic who could communicate with the dead. That, however, doesn’t seem to make Wong’s own persona any more explicable to the ordinary people.

“I can’t go to funerals,” she tells me bluntly. “Not so much the Chinese-style ones, as the extravagant rituals and costumes [of the Daoist priests] are enough to distance me from the scenario. The last time I went to a Catholic funeral, it was all very sombre, with the [deceased’s] body placed in the middle of the room, and everyone else dressed in black clothes and with their heads down. But when the master of ceremony announced in a very high pitch the ‘closing of the coffin’, I was like, [fakes a frantic tone] ‘Why on earth do you have to suddenly say those words with such passion? Why?’ I ended up rushing into the restroom and laughing hysterically.”

Wong, as she’d tell you after the fact, is not a heartless person. It’s more like she’s simply seen it all. So even during those few instances in her shows when she’s seemingly creating a romantic mood, the playwright is, admittedly, only waiting to burst her audience’s illusory bubble, thereby dragging them back into the harsh reality. She says: “Because of my family, I knew from a very young age what it means to be dead. In Daoism, [people believe that life is] like a walk in the park. Everyone leaves eventually; it’s all about the journey, about the process. I’m only using my [theatrical] expression to persuade people to let go.”

From her solo works, it’s obvious that Wong’s inspirations do frequently stem from her own surroundings. In fact, it is no less a joy to hear her animated account of the sweet moments living with her two cats, than it is of her past experience working as a theatre usher (“Someone in the audience is eating mango!” “Row five, seat six, peeling the skin. Peeling the skin!”) – which in turn directly informed one of Crazy for Cats’s two protagonists. Apart from these, is there any other major creative influence behind her work?

“Like the fact that I can see ghosts?” Wong replies with a poker face. The room turns silent, before, seconds later, the habitual prankster mercifully breaks the dead air. “You look like you actually believed what I said!” She’s now bursting into laughter. “Sorry about that – I’ve no idea how it came up to me.”

Crazy for Cats is at Arts Centre’s Shouson Theatre from April 14 to 18; tickets: 2734 9009, www.urbtix.hk. My Grandmother’s Funeral is at Macao Cultural Centre’s Small Auditorium on May 14 and 15; tickets: 2380 5083, www.macauticket.com.