IF Sir Percy Cradock has any say in the matter, Chris Patten will be forcibly restrained from getting chummy with Laurence Boswell.
''English culture is so psychologically repressed,'' observes the artistic director of London's Gate Theatre. ''It's about apologising and negotiating rather than confronting. We really do need to explode and get the madness out.'' The chance will come from February 18 to 22 at the Arts Centre's Shouson Theatre when the Gate makes its Hong Kong debut with The Cheating Hearts by 18th-century French playwright Pierre Marivaux.
''This sophisticated and dangerous drama is a wild narrative of sexual adventure, of heartbreak and romance,'' reads the stirring blurb. In London, the Gate's enticements are to audiences what sheer cliffs are to lemmings.
''Can everybody squeeze up,'' the crowd was urged on a recent Friday night as more and more bodies piled into the small theatre above the Prince Albert pub in Notting Hill Gate.
As usual it was capacity plus, with a sprinkling of celebrities from stage and screen. Actors coming to see actors. The trendies eyeing them and each other. The less agile anxiously wondering if they could last the distance on their bit of congested backless seat.
That night it was Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclan's 1924 play Bohemian Lights, translated and adapted by David Johnson, professor of Hispanic Studies at Queen's University, Belfast, and transposed to Dublin, 1915.