IT sounds like a joke, but Hitler Killed My Canary has been an astonishingly successful play in Germany. Another hit - particularly in Poland, performed as the Berlin Wall came down - was a black comedy about Stalin, which involved actors eating the heads off jelly-babies and throwing the decapitated gelatine bodies into the audiences, who were both crying and laughing.
Now the International Theatre Company is bringing its own brand of irreverent, yet darkly relevant theatre to Hong Kong, with two versions of Charles Dickens' classics, David Copperfield and, next month, A Christmas Carol.
Miss Murdstone appears on stilts, Peggotty bursts out of her stays, the evil Steerforth has vampire characteristics, and the bottles in the bottling factory where David is condemned to work come alive in a grotesque nightmare of child labour exploitation.
'Don't think that this is going to be any sub-BBC twaddle,' warned director and playwright Paul Stebbings. 'This is not just a version of a novel: it's a separate play.' During world tours, taking in places as far apart as Sweden and Japan, children and unaccompanied adults enjoy the plays; teachers sometimes have their reservations, Stebbings said. When they performed Oliver Twist in Singapore one teacher complained because he had given each of his students a character to follow and write up afterwards and half of the characters never appeared.
'It's a 500-page book for God's sake; I don't know how he expected us to include every sub-plot in a short play,' Stebbings laughed.
In Hong Kong earlier this year there was also a minor incident when a couple of teachers tried to herd an entire class out of the theatre after the The Murder of Sherlock Holmes opened, set in a seedy brothel.
