words stephanie wu

Not many people in this world are cerebral enough to structure their conversations like academic papers, and of this heavily analytical crowd, Dominic Cheung is probably the only one who also cries during mahjong.

I sat down with Cheung – artistic director and resident translator of HK’s Theatre Space group – to discover why he’s staging Abby Mann’s Judgment at Nuremberg as Theatre Space’s 10th anniversary highlight. The choice is particularly remarkable since the play is an American courtroom drama about the prosecution of Nazi judges by the International Military Tribunal after the Nazi decimation of 12 million people in World War II. It has no socio-political ties to Hong Kong, let alone a decade-old HK theatre company. As it turns out, the most revealing insight comes not from Cheung’s discussion of Judgment itself – steeped in plot and theme analysis – but from a seemingly irrelevant anecdote about breaking from a late-night mahjong game to translate Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
“My friends were playing mahjong there,” Cheung said, gesturing toward the invisible kitchen table of the apartment he’d just pantomimed in the empty rehearsal room, “and I’m doing translation here, and they kept asking me ‘Come on and play!’ And I said, ‘No, no,’ because I was so moved by the text that I cried, and they didn’t know. I cried and cried as I did the translation. I enjoyed that private moment – it seemed like I had direct contact with the author, with the characters.”

Just as Cheung found himself emotionally moved from his Hong Kong lifestyle into Miller’s foreign yet compelling world of 1940’s middle-class America, the audience at Judgment will also transcend their politics to form personal connections with the characters on stage. At least, that was Cheung’s idea when he chose the play. “I don’t want it to be related to a political issue or something that happens with the society of Hong Kong. Our [Theatre Space’s] concern is here and here,” he explains, touching first his heart, then his head.
Cheung’s bent toward pantomime is hardly symptomatic of being lost for words. When pressed to explain how he expects Judgment to provoke people’s hearts, he tells of his own relationship with the character Ernst Janning, a Nazi defendant in the play who, despite already being convicted, asks the presiding American judge on a personal (not legal) level to understand why he did what he did under Nazi pressure. The American refuses. “From then on Janning won’t have a day without being hurt by his own conscience. I felt the pain that was in him. And that’s why I say people are vulnerable; people are forced to do some things in a situation like [the Holocaust]. I could say he’s responsible, but if I were in his position I might have done what he did,” Cheung confesses.

Cheung’s explanation of how he expects audiences will connect intellectually with the play is less tortured, more academic. “When you put on a court drama, with different viewpoints about certain things – pros, cons, whatever – naturally, it’ll provoke people to think,” he says, and then enumerates three issues that Judgment raises. “First, it’s against war,” he begins, counting on his fingers, “secondly, people will say things to their own benefit – in a situation like this, can people ever tell the truth?” Cheung dubs his third point ‘silent approval’: “If you said the Germans are responsible, what about Winston Churchill [who wrote in support of Hitler in 1938]. Hitler signed treaties with Rome and Russia. There were a lot of American industrialists helping Hitler rebuild his armaments. Without those people, could Hitler have done what he did?”

Considering the way Cheung almost channels Mann as he describes the translation process, his ability to rattle off the play’s main themes comes as no surprise. “I had a feeling when I was translating this one that the author only put in the things he wants us to see. It’s quite easy to stage a witness’s vow [to tell the] truth. But in the play, some witnesses do [take the vow], some don’t – why? He didn’t stick to normal courtroom procedure, and I think he’s using this to show us the theme. It’s like the characters of the play – they only say the things they want to say, it might not be the truth, and the author is doing the same thing. He’s using the format, the style of the play to question truth.”

Cheung’s elevation of the story from its historical context to the more universal issue of truth brings us to the deep relevance of the play to Hong Kong, a city he perceives as filled with people too gullible and too willing to “believe and just repeat whatever they hear.

“They don’t have independent thinking most of the time. It’s too comfortable and too easy to make a good life, and so our concern is only how to compete financially,” he says, citing personal experiences with legislative council members who have been elected solely on the basis of expensive dinners bought for constituents. Cheung hopes the questions Judgment raises about what can be taken as truth will encourage critical thinking in HK. “I put on this play not to arouse people’s concerns about political issues, but to get people to exercise their own faculties of thinking, their own judgments. Then they would think instead of being manipulated by someone who is a good speaker; they would pay attention to the subject matter and the content [of the speech]” he says.

This doesn’t mean, however, that the play will instantly wake any viewer from political lethargy: Cheung’s sympathy for the ex-Nazi Janning highlights the play’s impossibly murky exploration of right and wrong, guilt and innocence – which is hardly made more digestible, Cheung admits, by his refusal to adapt English phrases to more common Chinese syntax. “There’s a lot of passive voice in English but in Cantonese that’s not the case,” he says. “In English, there’s passive voice and active voice and you have to think about why the author chose one over the other. There must be a reason, so I place it in Cantonese as it is in the original. People still complain, ‘Ew, that’s English grammar!’”

Despite the complaints and possible ideas lost in translation, Cheung remains adamant about bringing foreign, translated works to his Cantonese-speaking audience. “There are a lot of good plays in the universe, so why should we have to confine ourselves to Hong Kong? Even translated plays started out as originals somewhere else, in the UK or the US or France. We do this to show the Hong Kong audience there are many, many good plays all over the world. That was the idea when we set up Theatre Space.” Ten years later, the idea persists.

Theatre Space will perform Judgment at Nuremberg in Cantonese at the Hong Kong City Hall Theatre. Showtimes are 7:30pm from September 11-13 and 2:30pm on September 13 and 14. Tickets cost $180-$120 from URBTIX, 2734 9009.