In 2004 Hong Kong playwright Wong Wing-sze wrote a semi-autobiographical drama titled This Happy Valley is Very Happy. Despite its cheerfully silly title, the full-length play is neither: it charts a period in Wong's life when her relationships and career were floundering. The protagonist in the story wants to end her life.
'Yes, it is a sad story,' Wong says. Her life as a writer had not been particularly happy up to that point: 'There were few opportunities to stage works, and when they did get staged, they'd run for a weekend and that was it.'
But that was then. Life is now looking up for Wong, who has written close to 30 plays since 2001. This Happy Valley is Very Happy, which has been renamed Our Best of Youth in Cambrian, got another run last November as part of the World Cultures Festival organised by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD). The Truth About Lying, a Hong Kong Arts Festival commission in 2010, was named the best script at last year's Hong Kong Drama Awards. It will return for another run at the festival in April. Her collaboration with director Edward Lam Yick-wah, Awakening, inspired by the literary classic Dream of the Red Chamber, will also get another airing when the show tours the region next month. A new play is in the pipeline.
Wong, who is also a stage actress, says more theatre companies are looking for new scripts because more are available. 'Playwrights have become more vocal and visible ... they now even get top billing. The times are changing.'
Much of that change springs from 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in Theatre', a workshop programme that offers local playwrights a platform to develop and stage new scripts. The project was launched in 2006 by the artistic director of Prospects Theatre, playwright Paul Poon Wai-sum, in collaboration with Theatre Ensemble and the Hong Kong Arts Centre. They staged 17 plays in the first year and were so successful the LCSD took the project under its wings the next year and made it an annual event. Last year, the programme presented 22 works.
Poon is pleased with the results of 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in Theatre'. It not only produced a new generation of playwrights such as Wong, Harriet Chung Yin-sze, Wu King-yeung, Yan Yu, Tam Hung-man and Chu Fung-han, but also became the first stop for theatre companies and cultural presenters scouting for original plays by Hong Kong playwrights.