Outside the box
It was hard to imagine in 2000 that playwright and theatre director Edward Lam Yick-wah would come up with anything even remotely entertaining. Examination, his critique of our rigid education system, made for excruciating viewing: to show students' struggles to get attention, the play featured actors with their hands raised for more than half an hour.
But these days Lam is going all out to entertain. Since his 2003 collaboration with Zuni Icosahedron's creative director, Mathias Woo Yan-wai, in their political satirical series East Wing West Wing, the founder and head of the Edward Lam Dance Theatre has been involved in shows that entertain and are related to entertainment, showbiz or celebrity in one way or another.
The Great Entertainer (2004) featured Canto-pop idol Gigi Leung Wing-kei, 18 Springs (2005) starred Taiwanese actress Rene Liu Ruo-ying and last year's L'empereur du Chant, a show about Canto-pop, boasted stage actor and popular comedian Jim Chim Sui-man.
Lam's recent literary classics series - including What is Man? (2006) and this year's What is Fantasy?, inspired by Chinese classics Water Margin and Journey to the West, respectively, and last year's Madame Bovary is Me, loosely adapted from Gustave Flaubert masterpiece - is what he calls intelligent entertainment. The accessibility of his classics shows has won him new fans, especially in Taiwan and on the mainland.
With this track record it comes as no surprise that Lam's latest and second full collaboration with Chim, My Life as a TV, should be about entertainment. Lam says his obsession with entertainment and showbiz comes from the fact it reflects contemporary reality.
'I live in the moment, so my material for any new show often reflects what's happening at that particular moment in time.
'My theatrical style is to engage with the present while looking into the past and projecting the future.' Lam says entertainment is ubiquitous in society today.
'Politics is entertainment, education is entertainment, the media is entertainment,' he says.
'My Life as a TV aims to explore the politics and ideologies behind this phenomenon.'
The show is the second of a trilogy on which Lam and Chim have collaborated to look at local popular culture, having already trained their sights on Canto-pop in L'empereur du Chant, and before they tackle cinema in their next effort.
My Life as a TV coincides with TVB's 40th anniversary and examines the role of TV entertainment, which, says Lam, fills an emotional void for local people. He says it's more than a satirical attack on the broadcaster.
'Jim and I wanted to look at how local TV culture has affected and shaped the emotional and moral values and spiritual well-being of Hong Kong people,' says Lam.
In preparing My Life as a TV, Chim spent hours studying shows produced by TVB. He and Lam concluded that most shows lack intellectual and emotional depth, and that they're parochial and send out all the wrong moral messages.
'The messages they convey are that it's OK to be mercenary, it's good to be smart - but not intelligent - and that we should all put in minimal effort for maximum profit,' says Lam.
He says it's no surprise that Hongkongers are a sad, shallow lot. 'It's a vicious circle: the more we feed on these emotionally shallow programmes, the bigger our emotional void becomes and the more entertainment shows we devour to fill that void.'
My Life as a TV is a blackly comedic portrayal of what Lam and Chim see as the negative effects of watching too much local television, played out by mostly female characters of their own invention.
'It's not a drag show and it's not about Chim pretending to be a woman,' says Lam. 'He's merely interpreting the emotions and conditions experienced by Hong Kong people.'
Lam says preparing the show involved Chim improvising while dressed up as different characters. The fact the characters are mostly women, he says, reflects the 'lack of masculinity in Chinese society today'.
Part of the show is also about female fantasy and how it is portrayed in local television. Lam says there are many references to TVB dramas. 'Like, in every female executive's office there must be a phone,' he says. 'She is constantly on the phone. That really caught my attention when I was watching these shows years ago.
'The telephone in these dramas often symbolises power, so I wanted to explore the relationship between the telephone and women - how they're emotionally connected to it.'
Chim says he enjoys working with Lam because the director doesn't repeat himself creatively, 'which means he always embraces new ideas to explore different issues'.
Lam, who will take his literary classics series on tour to the mainland, Taiwan and Macau next year, says he hopes the show will entertain as well as enlighten.
'On the one hand, we have to entertain, but on the other, we want the audience to walk away feeling that they have not only been entertained,' he says.
My Life as a TV, Hong Kong Cultural Centre Grand Theatre, until Dec 9, 7.30pm; matinee, 2.30pm. Tickets: HK$170 to HK$420, Inquiries: 2734 9009. HK Academy for Performing Arts Lyric Theatre, Jan 12-Feb 3, 2008, 7.30pm; matinee, 2.30pm. Tickets: HK$180 to HK$420. Inquiries: 2511 0139
