Playwright-director Crystal Kwok Kam-yan's latest work is a celebration of the female body, but don't expect a bunch of young 34-24-36s parading up and down the stage.
Pussycat Theatre, to be staged at the Fringe Club this week as part of the City Festival, deals with how women cope with the fear of ageing.
'There's a funny area we don't focus on,' says Kwok. 'You have these beautiful, blooming women, just 18 or 20, then you have the older ladies you respect for what they've accomplished. But then there's a whole area of middle-aged women that nobody really touches on.'
A mother of three, the television personality cites the effect that childbirth has on a woman's body as a topic that rarely gets a public airing. '[After having babies] my friends all started to complain about their bodies ... They weren't used to all the skin and the floppiness that comes after giving birth,' she says.
Starring Marsha Yuan, Margaret Kutt, Sabrina Foote and Terence Yin, the one-hour show looks at how three women react to such changes. There is a thirtysomething who has young children and is dealing with the ageing process for the first time; an ex-Miss Hong Kong who's getting older but still feels she's in her heyday, and the older woman who has already passed menopause and teaches the others about life.
'We're making fun of the ordinary things women have to go through that no one cares to talk about,' says Kwok.
