Theatre du Pif’s Love Letter to Hong Kong

It’s rush hour in Sheung Wan and Bonni Chan is running between two tram lines in the middle of Des Voeux Road. The appropriate reaction is not to wonder why or to pull her to safety; this is a photoshoot and her husband, Sean Curran, is keeping an eye on approaching traffic. Better to follow the example of many commuters on this busy Monday evening who have stopped to gape. As dusk falls and shop lights come on, the duo are improvising scenes, synchronising Chan’s movements with the street’s energy. Curran shouts at her to chase a bicycle; she lays her palm on a tram car as if it were an animal or a patient. When the photographer wants to finish with some portraits of them as a “normal couple,” they finally look uncomfortable. “What is ‘normal?’” Chan asks unironically.

Playfulness and imagination may be the superpowers that set them apart in daily life but these are the everyday tools of Theatre du Pif, the company Chan and Curran founded 30 years ago and lead today with undiminished vigour. In August, they returned to Edinburgh, where Pif began, to premiere their 50th work, Must I Cry. For this milestone, they have written a love letter to the city that keeps inspiring them, with help from Xi Xi, Hong Kong’s most childlike and fanciful writer. 

Must I Cry is a memoir that reads like a fairytale, drawing from Xi Xi’s novel Flying Carpet: A Tale of Fertillia (2000) and the posthumously published story “Hong Kong mon amour” in which the author entangles the grief of losing her father with nostalgia for the To Kwa Wan neighbourhood of her childhood in the 1970s. Because this is Theatre du Pif, there is also a rhinoceros wandering the Hong Kong hills; leave it to these two performers who trained in clowning and mime to make even more mysterious Xi Xi’s fantastical city.

We don’t have time to discuss any of this until the next day, however; what with Chan’s perfectionism and Curran’s encouragement, the photoshoot has run over the alloted time for an interview. When we finally speak on Zoom, they are at home, processing their emotions after a reading of Cry two days earlier. Chan and her co-writer Tsz Wai Pun developed the script in English for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and the same production will be reprised at the Cultural Centre this month. But they wanted Hongkongers to hear Xi Xi in her native Cantonese at least once. The author typically avoided naming Hong Kong; in “Hong Kong mon amour,” it is “a city, next to the sea, surrounded by the sea” (呢嗰城市就係海邊，被水圍住). This line alone was enough to create a powerful intimacy with the public, they say.

Local audiences will also need no prompting to resonate with the production’s whimsical set, which makes colorful use of Hong Kong iconography. For example, in the opening scene, a miniature Pan Am jetliner is approaching the island city; audiences can’t help but imagine a spectacular landing at the old Kai Tak Airport. The visual storytelling also hinges on archival footage of landmark events of the 1970s like the opening of the Cross-Harbour Tunnel and the arrival of McDonalds, which the city celebrated by launching a giant Big Mac in Victoria Harbour.

Chan has reserved one addition for the Hong Kong premiere that she knew audiences would understand implicitly: a tiny shipping container. “In the 80s when I was a child, it was the pride of Hong Kong to be a busy port,” she explains. “Hong Kong is always shifting and the concept of home cannot be really built. It’s like a container in the sea, always going somewhere and coming back.”

 Chan was born and raised in Cheung Chau, where she and Curran live today. She still recalls “‘sobbing” goodbye to her family at the dock when she left the Hong Kong Repertory Theatre to “go to the source” of Western drama. “I told them, when I grow up, I’ll come back,” she laughs. In France, she studied with the master clown Philippe Gaulier, famous for his ego-crushing methods and top-class alumni that include Sacha Baron Cohen. Curran, meanwhile, was a student of Gaulier’s own teacher, Jacques Lecoq, whose best advice, Curran remembers, was “to find the right people to work with.” Chan and Curran have been a team ever since. 

Humour and improvisation were the bare minimum for what came next: creating community theatre in Edinburgh’s housing estates. As shorthand for the vibe there, Curran, an Edinburgh native, just says, “Trainspotting” – the title of Danny Boyle’s 1996 film about heroin addicts living on the edge. Those early productions were transformative. Pif began earning five-star reviews at the Fringe, but what Curran cherishes most from those “wild” seven years is when their newly-minted actors realised “that they could accomplish something that other people could understand and love.”  

For Chan, it was a turning point. “In Edinburgh, [the participants] shared about themselves very freely and talked half an hour about what happened that morning. For me this was so unreal,” she says, pausing for effect. “In my home, no one spoke. So I wanted to see how community theatre can go into Hong Kong communities.”  

The couple exchange knowing glances when they describe how it usually went in Hong Kong when they would try to secure institutional support for drama workshops that had no goal other than fun and enrichment. “They would say, ‘Why do you want to teach a housewife to act? Can you teach English or can you teach Chinese typing, something useful?’” Chan remembers, imitating a scolding civil servant. 

This was in the late 1990s, when families were moving into satellite towns in the New Territories to make it easier for men working jobs across the border to see their wives and children on weekends. The women, however, found themselves isolated from their families with few opportunities for leisure. Eventually, a proposal arrived to work with 11 housewives in Tuen Mun, one hour a week for 12 weeks. They dramatised stories about their experiences but the performances, which were held in town halls, didn’t get much attention. Still, the women “were so amazed by themselves,” Chan remembers, proud of their accomplishment even today.

30 years later, audiences will know the company from devised productions that Chan directs, such as Dance Me to the End of Love  and Love in the Time of Cholera, as well as revivals of classic texts from Antigone to Waiting for Godot with visiting directors. “Our fundamental thing is we create original work which hopefully can be international,” Curran explains. “The choice we made very early on was to make our own theatre rather than wait for the call from the agent or whatever.” 

Community remains a strong through line in everything Pif does, however: part of an ethos of teaching and care that goes beyond stage work. Ten Waves is their dedicated programme of sharing sessions, arts workshops and Feldenkrais training – movement training purported to integrate the mind, body and psyche to treat mobility issues and enhance general well being. 

“Feldenkrais is a huge part of our lives and a key part of our development as artists and people,” says Curran. The method is sometimes described as a path toward self-discovery with particular applications for artists. It lies at the core of their practice of  “creating a narrative in the theatre space not just with words.” 

Although these partners in art and life exude a symbiotic complicity, Chan is happiest directing and starring in the lion’s share of Pif’s productions, albeit at the risk of repeating performative tropes. She explains her single-minded focus as a quest “to be most simple, most resonant.” Curran concedes she is a born director. 

For his part, the transplanted Scotsman calls his adopted home “the People’s Republic of Cheung Chau,” in deference to its close-knit community, and assesses his Cantonese with a self-deprecating “maa4 maa4 dei6” (麻麻地, “so-so”). Visible in their Zoom screen is a large world map; when asked about a knobby bump on its surface, Curran looks surprised, then explains. “Mucking about one night” after dinner, he stuck two pieces of ginger root in the South Pacific and baptised his islands New Ginger. Chan may figure more prominently in production credits but it’s a good bet that Curran is Pif’s in-house entertainer. 

 Xi Xi believed Hong Kong deserves its own origin story, so she imagined it was dropped from the sky and scattered into many islands, or that it was raised from underneath the sea on the back of a giant sea turtle. Either way, its shores are relentlessly worn by wind, waves and human activity: the famously disappearing city. Xi Xi wrote of her return to Hong Kong to bury her father: “Here I am, searching in a foreign place, for someone I no longer remember.” Must I Cry is about “how you weigh the loss of memories,” says Chan. The show’s rhinoceros — an idea they had after reading about the death of Sudan, the last male white rhino — is a thinly veiled metaphor, or a warning. 

Memories may not last, but history repeats itself. Coincidentally this month, McDonald’s is celebrating its 50th anniversary in Hong Kong with a Mickey D’s themed Star Ferry where passengers can see memorabilia of the original Big Mac sampan. And in June, Theatre du Pif will return to Tuen Mun to create a new show with the same 11 housewives. It will be about their lives 30 years on, and they will perform at the Cultural Centre this time. Community work, Chan says, “is the best theatre training. You can’t talk about theory, you have to make sense.” She and Curran know they could always return to Europe, but they choose to press on here, building islands of their own making against the erosion of memory.

Must I Cry will be performed from January 17–19, 2025 at the Cultural Centre Studio Theatre.
For more details click here. 

Correction: An earlier version of this piece misstated the location where Curran and Chan met. We apologise for the error.