Review-FILTH- Hong Kong Arts Festival
18-3-14
By: Olivia Rosenman
There are good stories about bad people, but in order to make it so, the bad people need to be real. Instead, FILTH presents four predictable clichés of Hong Kong expats, each of them one-dimensional, unengaging characters.
Rebecca, a thirty something half Chinese, half British princess feels like she doesn’t belong anywhere. Shipped off to England for her schooling, she’s been back in Hong Kong for 13 years, having inherited her father’s staid, bankrupt newspaper and bringing along her British banker husband. Joe is the ultimate stereotype of the cocaine-sniffing party animal who is ultimately disenchanted with the work hard, play hard lifestyle of bankers with more money than they know how to spend. Give me a break. Then there’s Ricky, the pot-smoking Aussie hippy who lives on Lamma Island and protests every year for universal suffrage. And Elaine, a boring broker who is Rebecca’s best and oldest friend who has been sleeping with Rebecca’s husband. Plus a couple of token locals – a driver and a nanny with roles reduced to a couple of crude Cantonese lines – their only real function seems to be to get a cheap laugh. Could these characters be any more predictable?
Four nasty expats, who are “Filth” – Failed in London, Try in Hong Kong - are all dissatisfied with their Hong Kong experience. Horrible people leading horrible lives in their own individual way. They are supposed to be friends and lovers but there’s no real connection or emotion between any of them.
Clichés aside, the biggest problem with the play is that all the action and emotion evolves in a limbo somewhere between the stage and the audience. The characters hardly interact with one another. Their conversation is not credible, the lines are not written in a way that people speak. Too often, their speech comes in prolonged diatribes. If the playwright was aiming for monologues or soliloquies, she failed on both counts. They are clumsy, not at all poetic and only perpetuate the expat clichés.
The set was a great success. A cinema sized screen in the backdrop gave a nice effect. For the scenes in Rebecca and Joe’s place, projections of skyscrapers and sparkling night lights made us feel like we were really sitting up high in a penthouse apartment. At Ricky’s place on Lamma, waves lapped on the beach. The sound and music were well executed and the lighting was perfect. The actors carried out their stereotype roles well.
The play touches on what could have been several interesting and compelling issues: the handover, the disparity of wealth in the city, excessive riches, the challenge of language and identity, the feeling of belonging. It fails to meaningfully explore any.
FILTH is sold out! For more information, click here.
Comments
Karen
I completely agree. To be honest I was really quite disappointed - the description of the play promised so much, but failed to deliver. On no level was the play any sort of exploration into the depths of these character stereotypes, and there was no ultimate message that the audience could walk away with or sentiments they could relate to. The characters finished the play at almost the exact same point they started out.
18 March 2014Errrin
The characters aren't likeable. The story is weak. No theme and actors with no heart. A fatal combo of bad directing and a weak script made all hk expats look like assholes.
18 March 2014Mike Conner
I saw this play last year at grappas that had ten times the heart of this play and was about expats in Hong Kong. I remember falling over with laughter, I remember pointing and saying I know that problem, I know that character. I don't remember what the show called but it amazes me that a show I saw at grappas with no budget was infinitely better than this show that had all the money but no heart. HK arts feat should keep producing English theatre but they need to find better stories to tell. This was just a giant pool of stereotypes. Does anyone remember what play I saw at grappas last year? It had a lot of twitter stuff in it. I want to recommend that play to HK arts festival.
18 March 2014Michael Waugh
I left City Hall Theatre before the show finished on Monday evening, March 17, furious that the HK Arts Festival had the gall to offer such a ghastly production as Filth. It is all very well to encourage new writers, but the Festival itself should not be a celebration of what Peter Brook calls 'deadly theatre'. Whilst it is grossly unfair to risk savaging the confidence of a fledgling writer, it is equally unfair to inflict theatrical dross on paying audiences.
22 March 2014
With a cliché for a title, and loaded with hackneyed ideas about expatriates in Hong Kong, Filth (an acronym for Failed In London, Tried Hong Kong) was a great disappointment. It seemed as though the playwright, Jingan MacPherson Young had something to say about a particular social group, but had chosen the wrong medium in which to express it. It certainly did not grab the attention or excite the imagination as a piece of theatre. Perhaps Miss Young had to write this play to get it out of the way, before she matures as a writer, but it was an abysmal choice to present in the HK Arts Festival.
The dialogue began crisply enough, with some light-hearted banter between Ben Yuen as the Chauffeur and Wong Ching-yan as Fanny, the temporary helper. But with the arrival of the other characters, the plot descended speedily into tedium.
Even the talented Charlie Schroeder as the disaffected expat, Joe Losey, was unable to make the best of his undoubted gifts as an actor. This was very likely the result of cheerless, uninspired material weighing heavily upon him. Nina Kwok (Joe’s wife), David Peatfield and Nicole Russo (as the couple’s friends) were often inaudible, sometimes too quiet, sometimes mumbling their lines – inexcusable for so-called professional actors.
Directorial incompetence was in evidence, too. There was movement for the sake of movement. For example, characters sitting in a chair right beside a sofa would get up and move to the sofa for no reason whatsoever. Then, there was the dreaded split focus. When Joe’s wife and her friend were talking downstage, Fanny was to be seen cleaning and dusting the upstage balcony of the apartment! Fanny was animated eye-candy and, therefore, she gained infinitely more attention than the two ladies.
That the cast played to a full house was, I suspect, partly because the play was written by a local author, but also because of the play’s inherently sensationalist title. I stayed to see the second Act; but, alas, that evening in the theatre proved dreary in the extreme.
Yilung
I find these reviews somewhat lacking in self reflection. Must be a bit of 'gweilo, gweipor' discomfort. I saw the play BUT also read the play on sale at the performance. WHAT a difference. Obviously the director took many weird exceptions to the play--I find it odd that he had to cast himself in the play. LOL what does that mean? Certainly was not added value. I found the that the speeches and lines written in the play were arbitrarily shifted or deleted in the stage performance. WTF?. Does a director have such power? Too bad.
22 March 2014
I found the writing strong and muscular. Where the speeches were retained they were dark but also comedic (see the excellent performances by the characters Ah Fung and Fanny). I think the main actors had to struggle within this dyspeptic directorial vision, and it is to the director not giving the actors feedback as to simply project their voices. Perhaps he as too concerned with his 15 minutes of fame to have cast himself as the ghost' on stage. As a lover of theatre I felt that there were moments or flashes of brilliance by the actors. I thought the writing was spot on and controversial therefore pushing the envelope of theatre in HK. I think it would do VERY well outside of this expat/bizarro world that thinks they are exempt to te critical eye. Well done. Too bad the Arts Council (funded by our tax dollars) cannot find personel i. e. director and so on that can give our theatre here a big push to put us on the map internationally. We deserve it.