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Outside the box

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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.

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