A Taste of Hong Kong is a one man show written by anonymous and performed by Derek Chan as Jackie Z.  Richard Wolfe directs.  It’s a sort of tragi-comedy about the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong from the British.  There’s a lot of audience interaction, especially at the beginning, so at first I thought it was going to be like a version of Monks but with fishballs instead of lentils but it gets much darker pretty fast.

It’s essentially the story of two young men whose ideas of reasonable conduct and decency have been set by the British administration which shaped their schools, their city, their university etc.  Now that’s not setting the. bar particularly high but what comes after the takeover is shocking and it’s told here in gruesome detail.  “One country: Two systems” is quickly dropped in favour of extreme surveillance and intense police violence.  The show doesn’t shy off statistics; arrests, numbers of tear gas canisters fired, etc.

But this is woven into a food friendly coming of age narrative; what one takes on camping trips to the outlying islands, what one buys on the street after a night’s drinking and so on.  It’s funny and there are samples.  It’s all backed up with intriguing visuals; footage of police violence, annotated maps of Hong Kong etc and there’s quite a lot of Cantonese.  But it could never end well and it concludes with Jackie in Vancouver and his friend in prison facing vague charges of “sedition”.

What really comes over is a sense of disorientation that comes about when an (essentially) authoritarian system is replaced by a different kind.  British rule in Hong Kong was pretty heavy handed but what the authorities cared about was what one did.  What one thought was a matter of personal conscience.  Under the regime of the People’s Republic thought crime is punishable and what one thinks is a matter for the police.  Historic parallels are not hard to find.  In England under Mary you could be burned for holding incorrect opinions about the nature of the Trinity.  Under her successor you had to conform outwardly to the CoE but nobody enquired what you thought.  It’s a subtle, but disorienting, difference that I found myself reflecting a lot on during this show.

So the show has a serious purpose and a real edge but as I said earlier it’s very funny and Chan has great energy and is an infectious communicator (in a good way… no viruses are involved) and the 70 minutes or so goes by pretty fast.  And there’s food.

A Taste of Hong Kong is a co-production by Pi Theatre and fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre in association with vAct, presented by Theatre Passe Muraille at the #Beyond TO Festival.  It continues until May 17th.

Photo credits: Richard Wolfe (pics 1 & 2) and Javier Sotres (pics 3 & 4)