Best stage for Lo

AS promised earlier in a 45-minute-turned-two-hour interview, actress Lo Koon-lan calls to confirm the name of the award she will receive this month and of her drama course. It is way past midnight. 'Sorry I have been slow in getting back to you but I've just finished a show,' the principal actress of the Hong Kong Repertory Theatre says. 'And thank you for doing this interview.' Lo is easy-going, likable, polite and well-spoken. With the sort of lead roles (both on stage and screen) and awards she is getting these days, the 41-year-old is also in demand. After the success she had in the runaway hit musical I Have A Date With Spring, which won her the Best Supporting Actress Award in the 14th Hong Kong Film Awards earlier this year, Lo has now acquired movie star status. But the diminutive actress is no prima donna on stage or in real life. As she arrives for the interview in a casual T-shirt, jeans, and a fashionable backpack, Lo could pass as one of her own young drama students rather than a 'star'. Ironically, becoming a household name has never been Lo's ambition, yet owing to her recent roles on the big screen, Lo Koon-lan is no longer only known within theatrical circles. Her resume is impressive. In 1994, she picked up the Best Supporting Actress (Tragedy/Drama) Award in the Third Hong Kong Drama Awards for her role as Lady Britomart in Major Barbara. The same year, Lo received the prestigious Hong Kong Ten Outstanding Young Persons Award. This year, she won the Best Actress (Tragedy/Drama) Award in the Fourth Hong Kong Drama Awards as Claire Zachanassian in The Visit and will be picking up her PHF (Paul Harris Fellow) Award later this month for her contributions to the art scene, alongside legislator Christine Loh Kung-wai. Lo also received training from, and acted for, the Circle Repertory in New York five years ago and directed several drama productions in Hong Kong. Since I Have A Date With Spring, which Lo admits has opened many doors for her career, she has co-starred in the acclaimed movie Summer Snow and the upcoming The Umbrella Story which hits the screen later this month. Though Lo received her early training in classes run by a television station, and despite her recent involvement with movies, her real love has always been theatre acting. 'I thought it was slightly strange to be awarded the Best Supporting Actress Award [in the 14th Hong Kong Film Awards] because I'm not in the entertainment business,' she says. 'Though I had done movies and television dramas before, I love theatre best. 'Learning theatrical acting techniques is the biggest training for any actor. 'In a theatre, the audience can look wherever they want. On stage, you have to act in such a manner to capture the audience's attention so they can see even you wink. 'For movies, the director can choose to zoom up on to your face to highlight an actor's facial expression or emotion. 'Which type of acting is easier or harder, that depends. Both can be difficult. 'Of course, television is a different ball game altogether.' Lo, who has remained single, confesses she used to concentrate on just theatre and would not even contemplate acting in movies or television - a 'different media and language' she was not familiar with. 'Initially, I just wanted to concentrate on theatre. I shut myself off from the other media,' she says. 'But later, I realised acting can be done through other channels and media. Television and the silver screen are also forms of media. Therefore, I thought I should try them out.' Born and educated in Hong Kong, Lo graduated in 1977 from Baptist College after having spent four years studying history. She says: 'I had never quite understood why I liked history, but now I know. 'History is about people. Without people, there is no history. Theatre is also about people. I see it that history is to use a telescope to look at people while art is to use a microscope to look at people.' Lo says her love for theatre acting was 'natural' and went back to her college days when she skipped history lectures to attend drama rehearsals. It is something so important to her that when Lo talks about acting, she becomes very serious, critical and anxious that she is understood correctly. Acting has never been just remembering and delivering her lines. When Lo talks about her work, she no longer gives short and straightforward answers: 'Art is not simple and straightforward.' Asked what kind of roles she can associate herself with (after all, the on-stage Lo can be sweet as well as vicious and one critic did once suggest she should try Cleopatra after playing the cunning and manipulative Regan in King Lear), the actress suddenly became a psychologist. 'There are roles I feel easy with, but I don't categorise and say this role is of the nice or bad or chatty or sweet type,' she says. 'People are more complicated than just being a fixed set of characteristics. 'You can stereotype a character but that is not good. It is too simplistic to say a person is just nice or bad.' She pauses and apologises for not making herself clear: 'I'm a heavy person. 'People are complex, their personality depends on their upbringing and background which highlight a particular set of characteristics. If someone is 'nice' that doesn't mean he is incapable of being bad. 'When I play a bad character, I understand them, so I must possess some of the villain's personality in me too.' Lo adds she can be any character the script or director demands, and stresses an actor must understand the purpose of his or her role in a play. Apart from acting, Lo has also started teaching in a certificate course at the Hong Kong University and her own workshop (The Koon Workshop set up last year) because 'as stage actors, when they get older, they know they have to retire at one point'. Lo adds: 'As you get older, your memory begins to deteriorate and you start to forget your lines and become less confident; it's a burden to the others. 'In a way, I'm paving the path for my future.' She says she wants to share her experience with other people: Firstly, to pass on acting techniques and secondly, to help people to understand their lives and society better. 'Drama is more than a form of entertainment and art creation, it also acts as a social role. 'A drama creation helps actors to discover themselves,' Lo says. 'Drama exercises like a role play help young people to develop themselves and gives them a chance to look at their lives in another perspective.' Lo believes the standard of local theatres and actors varies from highly professional to amateurish but Hong Kong has done well given its brief history. But local theatre critics have yet to mature. And is she concerned that freedom of expression may be stifled after the territory returns to communist China after 1997? 'It is a worry because I think self-censorship exists even now in government-funded theatres. 'They would drop any production that is remotely sensitive for fear of trouble. 'Have you seen any production that clearly refers to June 4?' But I really have no idea what will happen. 'Whether our freedom of expression will continue is anyone's guess.'