When Theatre Space decided to stage Arthur Laurents’ West Side Story in 2000, they chose Hong Kong Cultural Centre as the venue – not the theatre, but the piazza outside. Facing the magnificent night view of the Victoria Harbour, the audience experienced a Hong Kong side of the story. This month, the same director, Dominic Cheung, will convert
an exhibition hall into a café setting to share the story of childhood friends in American playwright Craig Lucas’s musical Three Postcards.

Three women in their 30s meet for a reunion dinner in a chic restaurant in Manhattan. Supposed to feast on their good old memories, they find themselves in meaningless conversations and uncomfortable silences. “It should be such a precious moment to meet with your old friends,” says Cheung, “but they’ve got nothing to say.” He says that as one grows older, it can become difficult to share one’s feelings in words. “How can I express my feelings towards my life, my career, my friends or even my wife? A lot of the time, language can’t describe how we feel.”

However, the younger generation may have a different view of friendship. “I had a long discussion with the cast last night. They think it is already good enough if they can stay together with some true friends,” Cheung recalls. “Say if you are down, you only need a friend beside you, maybe patting your shoulder. Talking is not necessary. I think it is good to leave the audience thinking about it.”

Though we may value friendship in different ways, few would disagree with the inability of words to describe our feelings. And that’s when music can help. The music is not so much sad, he says, as gentle, and will lead audiences to leave the production pondering. Shum Wai Chung, who has penned the lyrics to more than 30 musicals in Hong Kong, as well as the theme song of 2005’s movie blockbuster Perhaps Love, will add new words – and life – to the Lucas piece.

In Cheung’s last production, Hugh Leonard’s Da, he swapped the Irish for a Chinese background. But he won’t be making any adaptations for Three Postcards. “I don’t think a good script will need any adaptation,” Cheung says. “Some may think re-writing the play with a Hong Kong slant can make the audience feel closer to the play, but I don’t agree. We choose to stage a play simply because the script is good.” He explains the adaptation of Da was the result of long discussions with the leading actor, and he agreed that the Irish and the Chinese have many ethical values in common. But he does not want to limit the horizons of viewers by making everything familiar. “Say I am doing a drama on the Second World War. Even if you don’t know much about the historical events, you can still be touched by the play,” he says. “And if you want to know more about the history, you can study it after the show.”

Desmond Tang, who will be directing Chung Ying Theatre’s Our Bad Magnet, a black comedy by Scottish playwright Douglas Maxwell, holds the same view. He doesn’t like localizing a foreign script too much as Hong Kong cannot provide much room for the play of the audience’s imagination.

“The first thing I looked at after I decided to stage this play was how much I needed to localize it, like how much local slang would be needed,” he says. The play follows four friends, from their junior school days until their 20s, as they evolve from a small village to Glasgow and finally to the dream metropolis, London. Tang thought rewriting the locations into Shek O, Aberdeen and Central could help the audience to understand the play better. “But then I thought that wouldn’t work well. It couldn’t show the big changes the characters experience.”

The four characters are huge music fans and songs from The Beatles and The Smiths often colour action in the play. But for a Hong Kong audience unfamiliar with the tunes, the relevance could be lost and so Tang may avoid many of the songs in his production. “But I am thinking of playing instrumentals of hits from local bands like Beyond and Tai Chi at the door. It may help people get into the mood before watching the actual performance,” he says.

Although he won’t make much cultural change to the script, Tang strongly believes Hong Kong audiences will take to the show: “I like the form of the production because it is playful.” And the reason he chose this play was, he says half-jokingly, because he values friendship a lot. “This story is not about big, serious issues. It is about human relationships and so I think it is suitable for Hong Kong audiences.”

Three Postcards will be performed from February 1-16 at Sheung Wan Civic Centre. Tickets are $150. Our Bad Magnet will be performed from March 9-16 at Sai Wan Ho Civic Centre. Tickets are from $100-$180 at URBTIX. Both shows are in Cantonese. For show dates and times, check out our listings.