Don’t disregard them because they started amateur, love a good farce as much as the next person, and have day jobs. Edmund Lee meets The Nonsensemakers.
 

At one point during the run-through of The Nonsensemakers’ new production, Anna & Seven, Rensen Chan dashes around the rehearsal room in a frenzy while Jo Ngai is screaming hysterically. An hour ago, Ngai – the Anna of this play, executive director of the theatre group, and formerly one of the most recognisable TV news anchors in Hong Kong – is roaring with laughter when I tell the two that, compared with their latest roles, they are rather earnest in person. “Earnest? Really?” Ngai jokingly asks me while trying to regain her composure. She fails and keeps on chuckling. “Have you seen us on stage?”

That’s a legitimate question there. For the answer is readily available if you’ve seized the chance to catch the two in their wildly popular – and really quite wild – Cantonese adaptations of Ben Elton’s Popcorn and Dario Fo’s The Open Couple, the latter of which has now developed into an original prequel, Anna & Seven, to be staged this fortnight. Then again, Chan – the Seven in the title, writer-director of the production, and artistic director of the group – is seemingly unmoved by my awkward remark. “When we are playing different characters in theatre productions,” he says, “we just have to find a way to deliver whatever the plays demand.” Ngai chips in, “And that’s theatre for you.”

Formed casually by several Chinese University students twenty years ago (with Ngai one of the only two who are still with the group), The Nonsensemakers have evolved from an amateur drama group to a well-regarded professional theatre organisation, despite having neither government funding nor a fixed roster of contract actors. All they have, as Chan puts it, is the right attitude. “In my mind, whether we are working a day job or not, what we’re creating is art,” he says. “We are not just serving our personal interest in staging plays. If we were, we could have done whatever we wanted and ignored the audience – that would be amateur. But we wanted to be professional; as we sell tickets, we must do justice to those who paid to see us.”

Fortunately, there are apparently many of those who are taken by the group’s sometimes sentimental, usually light-hearted, and always socially conscious productions – of which Anna & Seven stands as a lucid testament. It first began with their 2006 adaptation of The Open Couple, the one-act play by Italian playwright Dario Fo, who is perhaps more renowned for his radical political satires. The production marked Chan’s first collaboration with the group that he’s served as artistic director since July 2007. The story – which tells of an unfaithful husband’s suggestion to have an open marriage, as well as the truly absurd aftermath that ensues – has drawn such unexpected rapport with the audience that it has since spawned three sold-out re-runs, a book (which originated from Chan and Ngai’s character building exercise, where they thought up slices of life from their respective roles’ early backgrounds), and now, a stage adaptation of the book.

“Whenever we create, we’re drawing on a mixture of our own experience, of what we’ve heard, what we’ve seen, and what we’ve imagined,” says Ngai on the play’s boy-meets-girl, boy-falls-in-love, boy-marries-girl, boy-has-affairs, boy-loses-girl trajectory. “It started with a simple question: why does [the husband character in Fo’s play] have affairs? And why doesn’t [the wife] seek a divorce [instead of going along with her husband’s suggestion to have a open relationship on both sides of the bed]? Could it be that they’ve experienced something [special] in the past? I think every couple must have had some good old days before their relationship goes awry.”

Anna & Seven takes a rose-tinted look at those early days; and it’s quite an excuse – be it a welcome one – for the two to depart from Fo’s cynical world and stage a sugary-sweet romantic comedy instead. True to the brisk and relentless pace of the original play, Chan’s staging of this unofficial prequel also continues with their elaborate wink at Fo’s penchant for the theatrical style of commedia dell’arte, an Italian comedy form that is characterised by its improvised element during performances. “To encourage audience participation, we jump out and interact with them,” says Chan. As Franca Rame – the wife of Fo and the actress who played the wife in The Open Couple – did in her performances in those early days, changes were made throughout The Nonsensemakers’ various productions. “We even go into the audience to play with them,” adds Ngai, “and surprisingly, the audience reaction has been so passionate that the only thing we haven’t yet done is to have an outright voting [to decide a character’s fate].”

While it promises to be quite an enjoyable romp, the fun-loving duo is insistent that Anna & Seven is not meant only to be pure entertainment. “With this play, we want to remind the audience that a relationship or a marriage may not necessarily last,” cautions Chan. “It has to be consistently maintained.” Ngai, in all her earnestness, agrees, “We don’t want the audience to come in, laugh and laugh, and completely forget about the outside world for that couple of hours. When it finishes, we don’t want it to be merely, ‘Well, well, it’s very funny.’”

Anna & Seven is performed in Cantonese at Arts Centre’s Shouson Theatre from August 20 to 22. Tickets: 2734 9009; www.urbtix.hk.