I have given talks on drama to schoolchildren and also taught the subject in continuing education courses to schoolteachers and arts administrators. Each time, I asked audience members to raise their hands if they had ever engaged in any drama activities. Typically, only a small number claim to have done so; and I tell them that they are being too modest, that in fact everybody has experience in playwriting - when they tell a story to their teacher, boss or date to explain why they were late. 'Remember the response?' I ask, 'You've got such an imagination! You should be a playwright.' I am speaking from experience as a parent of three natural-born playwrights. I used to tell bedtime stories to my children. Recalling how, as a child, I had listened to dramatised Chinese classics such as Water Margin, Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West serialised on the radio, I read these stories to Phoebe and Phoebus when they reached two years old, also serialised in nightly instalments. Phoebe amazed me with her precocious talent for drama: she held toy figures in her tiny hands while sitting in the bathtub and acted out Water Margin scenes, albeit with her own interpretations, including such lines as 'This gong [tub in Cantonese] is called Soong Gong' - the hero of Water Margin. When she was once scolded, she soliloquised: 'My tears are flowing silently in my heart!' We recognised that as a direct quote from a television soap the night before. Combining her other hobby of drawing cartoons, she started producing her own comics with storylines. With such early exposure, it was little wonder she was cast in the leading role in her primary school play, King Solomon's Judgment. At 11, she was overall champion in a citywide storytelling competition, delivering the dialogue of a mother and daughter in different voices, and aptly receiving the trophy from contemporary performing arts veteran Chung King-fai. After I started translating children's plays into Cantonese for the Chung Ying Theatre Company in the mid-1980s, I took Phoebe and Phoebus, then primary students, to watch them. The productions included Insect Play by the Czech brothers Karel and Josef Capek and Fantastic Fairground by Bernard Goss. When Chung Ying staged Sha Yexin's Looking for a Man, they asked 10-year-old Phoebus to join the production. It entailed merely playing with a ball on the stage and listening silently to 'mother' lecturing. But the upshot was he received a warning from his school because the rehearsals and performances affected his work. Amusingly, the same school now packs off students for a month-long attachment at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts' drama school. Phoebus went on to win a best actor award on campus as an undergraduate, and to take part in several stage productions as an actor, musical director and pianist. While engaged in my translation work at Chung Ying, I got caught up in a debate. One school of thought argued that we should preserve childhood innocence by filtering out all the bad elements from children's plays. The other school felt that this would be like nurturing hot-house plants, with children suffering great shock and trauma at their first encounter with the ugliness in the world. I sided with this latter school, pointing out that there was already ugliness in children's classics, such as witches, the big bad wolf and fire-spitting dragons, and so on. Coming back to my family, my youngest son Fabian enjoyed an even earlier introduction to drama. When he was two he watched my translation of Bernard Goss' Monster Man, the story of Theseus retold as a satire on modern-day idols, while sitting on my lap. A year earlier, he had starred in an 'in-house' production masterminded by his elder sister and brother. He was sleeping in a hammock-like basket resting on metal rockers. Using this contraption as a catapult, Phoebe and Phoebus launched Fabian like a missile. He landed face first on the floor, narrowly escaping a broken nose. Such were the hazards of encouraging early expression of dramatic creativity. Fabian actually trod the boards only at his graduation show - from kindergarten, that is - when he was the fourth star in the third row. Much less spectacular than his infant debut. The parents' experience I mentioned at the beginning refers to my children's excellent acting and playwriting talents displayed when facing the music: their parents' interrogations about suspected misbehaviour. They could have got away with murder, telling the most original stories - plots, to be precise - that gave them flawless alibis. I confess to collusion with them at times, like when my wife went out and asked me to supervise their revision. We were all watching television, until we heard the key turn in the door. I then turned off the box, one dashed to her desk and flipped open her book, while the other darted to the piano to start practising. To complete the picture, Chocolate, my pet toy poodle, has a talent for a disarming, innocent look when caught in a mischievous act. Armed with such domestic experience, I continue to encourage my classes, be they children or adults, to let their imaginations soar and develop their innate dramatic potential. Everyone is a born playwright. Just express your natural gift in carefully plotted scripts dramatically acted out. Draw your own cartoon serial drama. Make toy figures your cast. Produce (meaning simply read aloud) your own radio plays; just remember that for this particular art form, without visuals, one has to add a superfluity not normally spoken on stage. For instance: 'Why, you are wearing a wicked look, flashing an evil glint in your eyes, brandishing a knife in your hand, coming closer and closer, step by step towards me, in a most threatening manner that scares me to death.' Have fun! Rupert Chan is a recently retired university administrator and chairman of the Chung Ying Theatre Company