Today to February 4
Hong Kong plays host to this year's month-long Chinese Drama Festival, a biennial event that showcases new works and classics by local theatre companies as well as those from the mainland, Taiwan and Macau.
The pan-Chinese drama extravaganza has been deliberately postponed until this year to coincide with the centenary of Chinese theatre. Other than stage performances, it will include seminars, a film retrospective and an exhibition.
Windmill Grass Theatre's new production Pine Tree Under the Moon will open the festival, which is being held in the city for the first time in 10 years. The show is by playwright Wong Kwok-kui, who based his period ghost drama on the aesthetics of Noh, an ancient form of Japanese musical theatre, and Chinese opera.
'The spirit of the play is fully realised by the combination of two unique art forms,' says producer and actor Edmond Tong Chun-yip, who plays a travelling scholar opposite Joey Leung Cho-yiu and Shaw Mei-kwan, who plays a brooding lovelorn spirit.
The play won the top award in Prospects Theatre's play-writing competition in 2003 and was first performed at the Macau Arts Festival the next year by Windmill Grass Theatre. The revised version will have its debut as part of the Chinese Drama Festival tonight.
The show is one of 15 productions being presented by the Hong Kong Federation of Drama Societies that range from the traditional to the avant-garde. Others include Taiwan's Greenray Theatre, which will stage an adaptation of David Auburn's Pulitzer-winning play Proof.