Review-Smear-Hong Kong Arts Fest
16-3-13
By: Tom Hope
A play about a play which is slammed for being (literally and metaphorically) a ‘sell-out’ by a critic (who’s also a playwright) who is then sued for libel by the play’s actor/director/producer – what more explicit warning could this critic have that he pans this particular production at his peril?
Well, I refuse to be intimidated. I shall speak my mind freely. This ‘New Work New Stage’ commission for the HK Arts Festival from Wong (‘The Truth About Lying’) Wing Sze is a (literal and metaphorical) sell-out – a didactic, over-written, clever-clever, self-indulgent and utterly un-engaging piece of work. There, I’ve said it. So come on, Wing Sze and HKAF, come on and sue me – go on, I dare you – or are you not women enough to turn this unreal play into a real life over the top drama too?
OK, before anyone starts instructing lawyers, let’s retrench and let me say what I really think – which is that this play, while trying to be English language accessible, is probably beyond the non-Cantonese speaker’s pale. The staging is minimalist and driven by rapid-fire dialogue, with a full translation flashing on the surtitle screen at a thousand words a minute. If your eye-muscles need strengthening, sit near the front as I did (row G) and let your retina rock; there may come a point when, like me, you relax and just sit there reading the surtitles while the actors’ blur of words streams through your ears in a post-modern dysjunction of sound and vision…
And at the same time be amazed that the (almost exclusively local Cantonese) audience is apparently having a great time. Then, like me, buy the script on the way out and read it back home and begin to appreciate that what seemed a puerile and poorly characterized play about a pathetically improbable law suit might in fact be a cleverly multi-layered satire on contemporary Hong Kong’s capacity for making a media show-cased crisis out of the least of domestic dramas.
Appreciate also that the silliness of the plot and the tendency of the characters to make over-blown speeches could be Chekovian in its subtlety – a subtlety which the surtitles struggle to send across the socio-cultural divide which makes Hong Kong so special.
In other words, be mystified as to whether you really have any right to criticize what might be a work which you would laud as a masterpiece were you a local, for whom this play is very much written – and be a little bit reluctant to put any of these thoughts down in print for fear of being told that you too, by this precious prevarication, are selling out by not saying boldly and honesty what you really thought.
Well, thank the stars for those HKELD balloons. When push comes to shove, this is not a play I’d want to watch again and which had little in it to engage me as I watched – but which was clearly very much to the liking of those around me. And (speaking as a playwright/producer rather than a critic) it’s a play I could be tempted to restage in a re-worked rendering in an attempt to better convey its sophistication to and for an English speaking audience.
And my address for service of legal proceedings is…
Smear is playing at Hong Kong City Hall through March 24th. For more information, please click here.
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