Review | Sebastian Kaiser’s The Drunkard adaptation is chaotic, timely and fiercely alive.

Sebastian Kaiser’s stage adaptation of Liu Yichang’s The Drunkard is as chaotic and electrifying as an exhilarating night out. This two-and-a-half-hour commission for the Hong Kong Arts Festival stays true to the 1962 novel’s rebellious spirit while freely adapting the stream-of-consciousness ramblings of a struggling writer drinking himself into oblivion. Among the many liberties taken is the splitting of the unnamed protagonist into two parts, played by actress Sze Wei and actor Yeung Hop-to. The former is rather too dashing for the role, but she is, after all, the more lucid half of the Drunkard, still shakily hanging on to his lonely, avant-garde ideals. Yeung, in contrast, is in total shambles. His interpretation of the jaded anti-hero is an impressively uninhibited display of pathetic clowning and wheedling pleas to beautiful women that ends in dark despair. The play begins not with the famous line “Another day of rain, on my rusty emotions,” but with five actresses on a bare stage, bellowing, “War! War! War!” This startling opening brings forward the horrific recollections of civil war and the Japanese invasion of China in chapter nine of the book, zeroing in on the long-lasting impact of war trauma suffered by Liu’s generation. The timing of such a focus is uncanny, with the United States and Israel having made air strikes on Iran hours before the show’s opening night on February 28. Yet the inevitability of history on repeat is not the main point here: the “War!” chant is also a protest against today’s fixation on tradition and the monetisation of culture – the Drunkard’s bête noire. Kaiser was an unusual choice for this Cantonese production since he does not speak it. But his embrace of “superpoor theatre” – stripping away elaborate, costly sets and relying on ingenious improvisations like Vito Tong Tsz-hin’s raw sound effects – goes hand in hand with Liu’s condemnation of capitalism, showing that art does not need mega budgets. An upturned table, for example, is ingeniously transformed into the squalid hut of the prostitute Yeung Lu, played by Birdy Wong Ching-yan with superb pathos. As a co-production with the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, the cast are all graduates or current students of the school. To Yim‑shan cuts a sleek, icy figure as the Drunkard’s old love Lily Cheung. In a challengingly episodic and non-linear production, Wong and To manage to make their characters three-dimensional. While Ng Wing‑ha’s portrayals of three other women – Szema Lee, Mrs Wong and Mrs Lui – are very different, she appears in all three roles as a sad and creepy automaton made into a hollowed shell by the brutality and injustice of society. Mak Ho-mun, the idealistic sidekick to the Drunkard, is played by Caro Chan – another cross-gender casting that highlights the book’s universal relevance. In one memorable vignette, she appears swathed in white, arms stretched wide as she holds out two jugs of milk representing Liu’s literary heroes. As the Drunkards feed from the vessels, she presents a striking tableau of the strength required to keep ideals aloft. Kaiser’s version treats Mak more tenderly than the novel, skipping the Drunkard’s brutal mockery of the young man’s literary journal. That tenderness underpins the finale: where Liu drives his Drunkard towards self‑obliteration, Kaiser transforms the ending into a public reckoning. The five women who opened the show now queue up to accuse Yeung’s Drunkard of betraying art itself, while also calling out the irony of the book: Liu wrote bitterly about Hong Kong’s lack of cultural appreciation, and yet, he enjoys saintly posthumous fame in his adopted hometown. The play has flaws. It is possible that the language barrier – though Kaiser worked with local dramaturge Alastor Chow and assistant director Chow Wai-chuen – has resulted in some unevenness of pacing and acting, or rather, overacting. But as Maria Callas sings “Vissi d’arte” in the final scene, neon lights blaze “love” and “art”, and the young cast kicks down the structures they have built, the stage feels fiercely alive. The Drunkard, Hong Kong Cultural Centre Studio Theatre. Reviewed: February 28. March 5 to 8, 2026, Hong Kong Cultural Centre Studio Theatre, 10 Salisbury Road, Tsim Sha Tsui. For more information, visit www.hk.artsfestival.org.

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Cross-cultural and gender-blind, Sebastian Kaiser’s stage adaptation of Liu Yichang’s 1962 novel stays true to its rebellious spirit

Cross-cultural and gender-blind, Sebastian Kaiser’s stage adaptation of Liu Yichang’s 1962 novel stays true to its rebellious spirit