‘The Liar’ Confronts Reality in the Post-Truth Age

We live in the post-truth age, and nothing can shock us now. Hydroxychloroquine? Seen it. Pizzagate? Been there. #IWokeUpLikeThis? Done that. No surprise to epistemologists, people call on highly subjective cognitive processes like memory and introspection, in addition to their social media feeds, to parse the “facts” that will construct their worldview.  Is there any antidote to the wildfire spread of conspiracy theories? Is it okay to give up trying to resist the enshittification of the internet?

For the cynics out there, or if you’re thinking, “Bruh, what’s the problem?” Danish director Tue Biering and Hong Kong actor Tai Yin Chan extend an invitation to The Liar. Think of it as a mildly creepy polygraph experiment to shake us out of our complacency. Why? Not to put too fine a point on it, Biering says: “If we are living in a society where we cannot trust each other, then we’ll get super paranoid, or very mentally sick, and everything will fall apart.” (Free tickets for anyone who doesn’t believe that! JK JK JK!!!)

“In this post-factual world, we are not really sure if what’s happening is true at all,” Biering explains by Zoom from Copenhagen, where he and Chan are rehearsing, two weeks from the show’s premiere at Tai Kwun. “The performance is very much about the imbalance between lies and truth and how easily we are convinced that [something] is true or we are accepting lies as long as it’s entertaining. The Liar is like a play between the actor and the audience, and the audience is very much a part of it.”

It is also a play about another trending Internet topic: the Hong Kong emigré. Even though the most recent wave of emigration that began in 2020 has subsided, a recent poll found that one in three Hongkongers still plan to leave the city, a stunning rate matched only by countries facing economic or political crises. Chan, who moved his young family to Berkshire, England in 2023, has watched the online conversation shift from cheerful photos and tips to the challenges of long-term expatriation. “In Hong Kong, we really need stories to keep people going after everything we’ve been through,” he opines while expressing fatigue with the “emotional bubble.” 

Chan is the first person to admit his story would never make an even remotely lit IG reel. Like many Hongkongers, he spent his student years in London, where he got a degree in acting from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and discovered a passion for experimental European theatre. But upon returning to Hong Kong, where opportunities are forged through the networks of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, he didn’t see a path for himself, notwithstanding some collaborations with the Hong Kong Arts Festival. It was a natural next move to relaunch his career in the UK, but there he was the victim of a racially motivated incident that bothers this culturally and linguistically fluent transplant in ways he doesn’t want to discuss. 

Hence, The Liar: speaking to a camera as if he were livestreaming to his TikTok channel, Chan warns us that he won’t reveal anything about a certain confrontation but he will tell us a story and let us decide what to believe. In conversation, he glides past the episode, never naming it or giving any shape to the events. He does reveal his insecurities, however: “Being an actor gives you a lot of hallucinations, illusions about why things happen. So I try to not think about a lot of these things now because it really doesn’t help.“

Step by step

On the topic of his career, Chan defers to  the actor’s mantra: “It’s all about the last gig.” In the three years that he has been building a career in the UK, he hasn’t caught the proverbial big break or landed a dream role. Now that self-tapes have replaced live auditions for TV and film — a gamechanger for a stay-at-home parent like himself — he has focused his attention on screen roles. To date, his bragging rights include shared credits with Keira Knightly and Ben Whishaw in Netflix’s Black Doves, a small role in Now You See Me 2, and playing a Chinese flight attendant on the British TV series Red Eye. 

He describes a very unsexy routine of “doing it just step by step, working it out,” and says he takes inspiration from Amy Madigan, the 75-year old actress who finally won an Oscar this year after decades fighting for Academy worthy roles. If making it as an actor wasn’t a hard enough row to till, “East Asians are a minority of the minority” in British drama, he says, but he refrains from making any excuses. “You have to dedicate the time to hone your craft and eventually it might not come to anything,” he says. It’s a hope-killing mantra but he insists, “That’s the conviction you need to have.”

For the first international commission of Tai Kwun’s Spotlight series of performing arts, Chan’s pragmatic striving is a story the festival’s curators are eager to share. “We are noticing a larger group of Hong Kong-trained artists now developing a pretty good international career — but because they left home, people don’t remember them anymore,” explains Mimi Lam, Senior Producer of Performing Arts at Tai Kwun. “On the one hand we want to tell the general public that Hong Kong-trained artists can be very successful abroad. On the other hand, we want to show younger artists that their career is not limited to this city. They can always flourish somewhere else if they’re talented.”

With Tai Kwun’s invitation to return to the stage, Chan knew he wanted to work with Biering, having missed an opportunity in 2023 to act in the sci-fi thriller Imperial Troopers for which Biering was casting Chinese actors. But as reserved and cautious as Chan is, Biering is unafraid to jump in where angels fear to tread. His company fix+foxy has been ripping the skin off the blister of uncomfortable social realities like sex work, veterans’ health, seasonal migrant labour, Europe’s refugee crisis, racism, incarceration, mass killings and domestic violence, over 25 years and three times as many productions. With a kind of South Park instinct for using the tropes of pop culture against invisible hierarchies of power and corruption, Biering is both a provocateur and a self-proclaimed theatre activist, one who believes in the power of theatre as a live social experiment to get ideas through to an audience.

“AI know you”, fix+Foxy og Odense Theater 2025 – Photo courtesy Tue Biering

Imagined constructs

Biering starts the interview looking inconvenienced and announcing that he has to leave as soon as possible, but he warms to the task — or at least pretends to — discussing his own disillusionment with the political left as a young director. “I think the worst experience I had was when I had to face that my own political views were not as perfect as I thought,” he says. 

The conversation turns to the cowardice of safe spaces — “The world is a really, really problematic space and it’s problematic if I create an arts space that’s all safe” — and the megalomania of people like himself: “I don’t think we should give any false picture of artists who are just kind people who tell a story. No, I think it’s a super egocentric business and most of us are into this belief that we can change the world by doing art because we are telling the right stories, but it’s just because we want to change people and we want to control people.” If he is stirring the pot, his reasoning tracks: if politicians and the tech bros can play that game, why should artists be judged differently? 

His latest work, AI Know You, is proof of concept. The show asks audiences to participate in a live questionnaire which results in a large-language-model (LLM) AI-generated summary of their lives, habits and ambitions as well as guidance on how to decide one of their most pressing problems. He calls audiences “small bits of brains walking out with some kind of neuro-programming that I [did] to them for one hour and maybe something will happen afterwards.” What they get from his algorithmic experiment is as old as Greek civilisation, he implies: “We have always longed for this oracle to tell us what to do so we don’t need to make these very serious decisions in our lives.”  

As for some of his operating ideas behind The Liar, he references Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which teases out how the institutions underpinning human civilisation — religion, money, systems of governance and so on — are imagined constructs susceptible to biases leading to injustice and conflict. Asking the audience to question why they will accept one version of Chan’s story over another gets at the problem of what we “know” and why. “My biggest fear is that I really want to believe [what I hear] and I really want to live in a world where I trust people, so I have to grasp some kind of truth somewhere even though it’s maybe not the full 100% truth,” he offers, echoing how he imagines people fall prey to conspiracies and disinformation. 

The use of video is a reminder that “most of our reality is mediated and experienced” through that medium and he calls the tendency to believe a person in front of you rather than a character on a screen “very problematic.” “Lies always happen between real people,” he points out. 

Chan is excited by the freedom he has in The Liar, where he can tell his story obliquely. “We can’t point in a direction,” he says. It’s a “challenge” for everyone involved because “we don’t really know what is good or bad about these lies and what narrative manipulation is doing in the world. We don’t have an answer.” 

The Liar is the opening production of the Asia-Europe Cultural Festival, which takes place through June in multiple cities across the two continents, with government funding this year from China and Denmark. Tai Kwun’s commission asked for a technically flexible production in the hope of taking Hong Kong stories on the road. “Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others,” Dostoevsky said, or at least Google Search claims he did. The truth can be brutal, and The Liar wants us to know that if we follow a lie, we might just discover it was sown in our own delusions.

The Liar runs from 23–26 April as part of the Spotlight festival at Tai Kwun. Click here for more information.