A play about a time where humans talk through machines so much that they almost become machines. A play about a boy who is locked in his own body because of an inability to speak. A play where there’s just one member of the audience, and each performance requires them to have a conversation with the single actor, by camera, via the internet, from little screen rectangle to little screen rectangle. 6 highlights of 50th Hong Kong Arts Festival including ‘Game of Thrones’ star’s transhumanism play Only one of three unique pieces of drama being performed virtually at this year’s 50th Hong Kong Arts Festival was devised after the world went into lockdown in early 2020. But all of them could have been designed to explore some of the mixed, complex feelings of being human during a pandemic. To Be A Machine (Version 1.0) stars 29-year-old Irish actor Jack Gleeson – best known as the psychopathic Joffrey Baratheon in HBO’s fantasy drama television series, Game of Thrones. He plays the 42-year old Irish writer Mark O’Connell, who published an award-winning non-fiction book in 2017 about transhumanism – the belief that people can evolve beyond their current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology, even if it means they stop being human at all. It describes O’Connell’s journey around the world to learn more about a company which for US$200,000 will store your body in a coffin of liquid nitrogen in the optimistic hope you can be brought back to life. The play also finds out about people such as entrepreneur Peter Thiel, co-founder of online payment system, PayPal, who is spending some of his multimillions on “vastly extending” human lifespans, and particularly his own. The one-hander is staged by Dublin’s Dead Centre – a theatre company so unafraid of dramatising complex non-fiction books that its previous show was based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s austere philosophical work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . If you hold a ticket for its live-stream virtual shows, which run in Hong Kong from March 23 until March 26, then when you press the link your computer camera will transport you into a special kind of theatre in which the face of each member of the audience appears on an iPad, supported on its own stand. What Gleeson sees is like a deconstructed theatre, where each human being appears like a rectangular lollipop, or a machine – and they sit together, yet are isolated. “It’s this weird version of being in a theatre,” director Bush Moukarzel says. “We had to code a special app for it.” Bristol Old Vic’s live recorded stage performance of Wonder Boy , will also be streamed live into Hong Kong homes from March 26 to April 2. This time virtual audience members won’t see themselves on iPads, but they will see another kind of real playfulness with technology. The coming-of-age story follows 12-year-old Sonny, with a stammer so severe that he stays locked in his world of frustration and inability to speak. His biggest nightmare is to have to show his stammer in public. He’s assisted by his own superhero, Captain Chatter, who collaborates with him in keeping the rest of the world out. So when he’s forced to play the guard in Hamlet – with very few lines, but plenty of his worst-ever vicious vowels and confusing consonants – he is left in despair. The result, after much heartache and vowel-searching, is a tender transformation that might make you cry; it also involves one of the most hilarious summaries of Hamlet I’ve ever heard. “It’s basically a s**t version of The Lion King ,” Sonny’s friend, Roshi, says before she goes on to talk about Hamlet’s “shocked Pikachu face”. A play about being locked-in sounds today like a metaphor for being locked down, and in part it has become that, but like To Be A Machine (Version 1.0) , Wonder Boy was planned well before the Covid-19 pandemic. Bristol playwright Ross Willis first wrote it almost 10 years ago, when he was 20 and was invited to read out part of his play in public. He has a stammer – and he was mortified. All the words, not just the ones Sonny can’t say, appear on the back wall behind the actors like a kind of techno graffiti, which is probably fitting for a production devised in the city that also produced the street artist Banksy. There’s a lot of realism, and also this bonkers energy that needs to be interpreted Sally Cookson, director, ‘Wonder Boy’ When award-winning director Sally Cookson first read the stage direction: “ SONNY sadly watches his name fall. The word lands on the ground. SONNY stomps on it. A sad pause. He stomps on it again. And again. And again”, she was intrigued. And when she got to “SONNY rips out his vocal cords” she knew she had to do this. “There’s a lot of realism, and also this bonkers energy that needs to be interpreted,” she says. It is also a story that looks under the surface, she says. “I’m interested in extreme storytelling taking us to the darkest place in a person’s mind.” The theatre company’s fourth attempt to stage the play in England during all the Covid restrictions was a success on March 5, and Cookson is delighted that the first night finally went ahead – and received a standing ovation. TM , a new Belgian play – the only one of the trio that was created as a direct result of lockdown, but also the rise of totalitarian states and how we deal with people who don’t think the way we think – achieves its moving intimacy in a different and extraordinary way. The play, which runs until March 27 and lasts about 20 minutes, asks the audience to be part of a “TM” movement. It involves one audience member talking to one actor who could be anywhere in the world (although it’s likely to be Belgium, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Singapore or Germany), and is framed as a recruiting session for the new movement. Director Alexander Devriendt could have gone down the “this is a cult” route, but it is more intimate and caring than that. “I believe that art needs to be challenging your world view,” he says. “And also I wanted it to be positive.” I believe that art needs to be challenging your world view Alexander Devriendt, director, ‘TM’ Devriendt also wanted it to be an equal space for both the performer and the audience member, and for those few minutes spent with another person, talking about a future, to reflect on something more complex and uplifting; critics have described it as unique, intense, and touching. This is not Zoom, but it has also involved a new kind of coding to fulfil the group’s ambition – discussed at length over Zoom at the start of lockdown – to answer the question “How do you build a theatre that isn’t actually there?”. “I wanted there to be a backstage,” Devriendt says. “The audience won’t see it, but I wanted it to have a physicality, for it to be a place [where] the actors can talk and prepare – because that is one of the things we missed.” Book tickets to these plays which are being shown at the HKAF 2022 here . This year’s edition will conclude with a Festival Finale performance by the Shanghai Opera House. Check out the festival’s full programme listing here .