Manifold Developments in Theatre Making: Original Works of Theatre in 2017 & 2018 and Sociopolitical Issues

Hong Kong has undergone rapid changes in many respects since the 1997 handover, and the year 2014 saw its largest and longest-running social movement in nearly half a century. With participants on all sides, the movement affected people in every walk of life in all of Hong Kong, and naturally had an impact on the performing arts. One of the functions of theatre is to reflect and examine social reality. The build-up of changes in Hong Kong’s situation and the explosions in recent years have galvanised many theatre makers to portray and respond to these events in a variety of ways. Many performances in 2017 and 2018 are related to this. Perhaps some of such relationships are not a direct result of the said events in society, but they stem from the imagination fired in the creators. A close look at the performances in those two years, then, reveals the ways in which local works have developed through the borrowing of foreign texts or aesthetic forms or engaged in various kinds of exploration on the basis of local aesthetics. Such exploration includes formal or aesthetic responses involving text, stage design, sound effects and space.