WHILE cooking her meat loaf, the housewife tells her audience: ''It was Tuesday and half-past six in the morning . . . my first reaction was to have a bath, but they told me it might cause bacterial infection. Then I counted my fingers and toes, not one was missing!'' Such was the intriguing monologue that opened Oops! Back Again , Chung Ying Theatre Company's latest production staged at the Hong Kong Arts Centre's Shouson Theatre recently. And just as one concludes that the woman might be recalling the day she gave birth to her first child, more unusual and, perhaps, symbolic actions take place. One man (Ben Yuen) opens a refrigerator (there are five) and discovers a bicycle inside. The housewife, now bound in her train of wedding headdress, reappears in a sleepwalking pose. Another woman (Sylvia Ho) shrieks wildly but her cries are silent. Maybe to the discomfort of some, Back Again is not a play devised out of formal script, connected narrative and a defined theme. In fact, it is closer to a collage of images, voices, music, actions, smell, occasional monologues and dialogues among a small nameless cast, who randomly crosses each other's paths. ''It may look a bit abstract, but I think Chung Ying's audiences, being about the age of our performers, have common ground to share the experiences enacted. We want to give them the space for individual interpretations,'' said director Lee Chun-chow, who drew this theatre-devising idea from a play he watched in London last year. ''Such devising provides us with alternative creative resources from the actors themselves.'' Back Again tells of memories of three men and two women with different backgrounds. One's memories never really vanished, Lee said. Instead they hide, listen, watch and wait. And just when one believes he will never meet his ''frozen'' past, it jumps out of nowhere, maybe from the refrigerators on stage. The performers started with collecting objects and images they felt deeply about and then improvised out of them. Actor William Lo said: ''I had a childhood fancy - to dangle freely in the air. And it was great to be able to do that in the play when, through stage device, I could be suspended from the ceiling and rotate around!'' Set and installation designer Hon Wai-hong was part of this innovative team. For instance, new space dimension was created when a transparent plastic camp got inflated, when Sylvia Ho crawled inside this bubble. Back Again was also made interesting in sound effects, thanks to Kung Chi-shing, founder of the performing group ''Box''. Kung brought together a range of sound possibilities with violin, piano, trumpet, bass guitar, voices from opera, folk, modern songs. When the actors finally lay their past to rest by covering the objects on stage with cloths, one was left with the feeling they would hop out again somewhere. Somehow.