words stephanie wu

They may not have won any medals, but in a new musical the Hong Kong soccer players of the 1936 Olympics are remembered as heroes.

While most people look at the football pitch and see raw competitive energy, agile bodies or intricate footwork, Leon Ko, composer for HK Repertory Theatre’s upcoming musical, Field of Dreams, sees music. “There’s an intrinsic movement involved that lends itself very well to a musical,” observes Ko, who spent a considerable amount of time watching football matches on taking up the project. “It’s very rhythmic. From time to time there are lapses or rests when people are just on either side, and then suddenly they’ll converge. It’s like an expansion and contraction,” he says, forcefully mimicking a conductor’s crescendo at his mention of ‘expansion’ and diminuendo at ‘contraction’.

The musical, written and directed by Anthony Chan, narrates the true story of the team of 14 men from the village of Tai Hang – just off Causeway Bay – dispatched to represent China’s football team at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Though they lost in the first round, the fact that a group of Hongkongers played for China at the first Olympics to which the country sent multiple athletes remains symbolic. Strip away the most glaring reason for staging this musical now – ‘It’s the Beijing Olympics’ – and other curiosities surface, the most obvious of which is how to set a football match on stage.

“Really playing football would be difficult,” explains Chan, leaning back in his chair after having struggled all morning to block a scene in which the team travels Asia playing games to raise funds. “With a musical you can use the song, the dance, the steps – we can make everything more stylized. Instead of really using a ball, we just use a light that flashes across to signify the ball and dance steps to signify the football match.”

Indeed, much of the show seems to use creativity to circumvent physical constraints. Ko, for example, admits that the theoretical harmony between the rhythms of the football pitch and musical performance does not transcend the difficulties of an actor trying to play football while singing. “I try not to have them sing and dance at the same time because that’s very taxing, so I’ll try to play a few tricks when they can open with singing and then graduate into dancing. As an illusion you feel like they’re singing and dancing, but actually they’re singing then dancing,” he reveals.

Ko also grappled with what he perceived as a lack of musical breadth in 1930s Hong Kong. “I’m trying to get a local sound, but there were very few types of entertainment back then, and the diversity really wasn’t that great. So I had to find my way into using different types of music to butt together for a whole score, so that it would sound like its period – believably 1930s but not completely homogenous.”

The result blends tunes stylistically loyal to Ko’s historical research and movements with creative licence based on the composer’s musical tastes and background as a music student at New York University. For example, the first act includes a song based on Chinese nan yin, a bluesy style commonly played in the ’30s by blind musicians on traditional Chinese instruments, which transitions into an anachronistic 1950s American swing number. “I think it fits right into the rest of the score and doesn’t sound too out of period because swing music has been around since the ’20s,” Ko says, to justify his flight from historical accuracy.

In addition to capturing the tone of the period, Ko notes that his main concern was to represent accurately the personal development of Cheng Hoi Moon, a 20-something-year-old street kid obsessed with winning football matches, and suddenly thrust into the position of representing an entire country at the Games.

“I moved from something very local, something very personal to something more majestic because that’s the arch of the whole show,” he explains. “It really represents the journey of this person – the sound of something small and so internal to something that represents everybody.”
Thus the reason for Ko’s score to develop from a localized Chinese sound in the first act to the full, bombastic Nazi national anthem in the finale: not to support the ideology the anthem represents, he reassures, but to evoke the feeling of a few foreign villagers bombarded by the alien grandeur of such an international event. “They’re suddenly plucked out and put into a huge world stadium. What do they do? How should they feel? And do they still remain composed or do they just get completely carried away with this roar of people?” Ko asks, verbalizing the internal dialogue he tries to create through sound.

Similarly, for Chan, the force of the story is not in its Olympic grandeur, but in the individuals – especially Cheng, a fictional character only loosely based on the real player Tam Kong-pak, known as ‘Iron Head’ for his talent in heading. “He learns, as the play progresses, that he can represent China at the Olympics as part of a team. He learns that it’s not just to win certain trophies or to beat others. So he develops from being a very selfish individual to a more open-minded person who sees his self-worth as he begins to consider others,” Chan explains.

The play was inspired by Chan’s conversation with historian Vincent Heywood, who had been piecing together the true narrative – preserved mainly via oral tradition since most records were destroyed in World War II to prevent identification – out of personal interest. “My actual history is just sort of a bedrock [for the play] – this curious incident that, when China first went to the Olympics in 1936, most of the footballers came from Hong Kong,” says Heywood, who further indicates that 14 out of the 22 Chinese footballers came from HK because soccer enthusiasm had been imported to the island by its British colonists.

Accordingly, Chan – who conducted personal interviews with Heywood in Tai Hang – used the British influence to give complexity to his characters’ decisions to represent China, making them struggle with feelings that they “identify more with Britain than with China. They have this allegiance, but later realize that because [stronger nations] are occupying China, it’s a good time to fight for China.”

Other historical incidents Chan includes in the play are the government’s construction of King’s Road to connect Causeway Bay to Shau Kei Wan – thus displacing many of Tai Hang’s residents – and the Japanese invasion of China. The displacement, which could lead to the eviction of Cheng’s family, highlights the sheer unlikelihood of the team’s Olympic achievements by underscoring the ordinary, underprivileged nature of their lives. Chan uses the Japanese invasion to demonstrate Cheng’s initial selfish character: “His girlfriend decides to go to China to fight against Japan and makes him really upset. It affects his performance on the football pitch. These historical events become the flavour of the play,” he says.

Still, Chan emphasizes that he was careful about using the politics of the time. If anything, in his play the politics are significant only insofar as Cheng interacts with his communities and integrates the social and political circumstances into his sense of self. “It’s not political, it’s personal. It’s a little patriotic, but it’s personal,” Chan reiterates. “It’s about self-discovery, about being a Hong Kong guy, saying ‘what can I do for Hong Kong or for China? It’s time for us to work together and stand up to show the world that we are not weak.’”

And despite the fact that the play does centre on past individuals and their interactions with the circumstances of their time, Chan’s words and Ko’s notes immortalize in print a story that has so far only floated down the generations through voice – thus creating a small piece of history themselves, made relevant by the Beijing Games. “Maybe [the team] lost for an instance, but they won for an eternity. They may lose a football game, but in front of the world the Chinese stood up and entered the world arena. This year, China is hosting the Olympics. It’s time again that China is standing up for herself in front of the world, and that group of Chinese [in 1936] – it was their time to stand up and face the world,” says Chan.

The HK Repertory Theatre will perform Field of Dreams in Cantonese with Chinese and English surtitles from August 30 to September 8 at the Kwai Tsing Theatre Auditorium (12 Hing Ning Road, Kwai Chung, New Territories). Evening shows begin at 7:45pm on August 30-31 and September 2-8. There are also matinees at 2:45pm on August 31 and September 6. Tickets cost $300 to $120 from URBTIX, 2734 9009.