Out of business hours, Hong Kong office workers sell themselves in the seedy underbelly of the French capital

Paris in the roaring ’20s. In the Quartier Pigalle, prostitutes leer and beckon with suggestive hips while addicts lurch into the path of anyone vaguely ‘respectable’, hoping to con or threaten a franc or two towards their next fix. Aimless souls gather at street corners to exchange insults and share cigarettes over plans to make fortunes that will always only be dreams. This is the quarter of actors, dancers, painters – anyone on the fringes of so-called ‘society’ – the bohemian or ugly spirits who call forth shudders and sniffs from the genteel in more elevated suburbs.

It is also the setting for Hong Kong Theatre Association’s second production, after the professional March staging of John Pielmeier’s extraordinary play Agnes of God. Quartier Pigalle, a tale of many tales centred on jealousy around the arrival of a popular new Italian girl in a brothel, is, however, is a very different project from Pielmeier’s story of a nun who claimed to have given birth as a virgin. For one thing, Quartier Pigalle is a play born out of improvisation and, for another, many of the cast have never previously set foot on stage.

Newbies playing prostitutes and druggies have not daunted the director of the play and founder of the Hong Kong Theatre Association Emilie Guillot at all. In fact, it is because of the freshness of the cast that the play came about. ‘I’ve been teaching an adult class for about a year now and this is their first time on stage,’ she says. ‘At times it was a bit hard to get my students out of their shells. But through the year they learned new skills and techniques and got more confident with themselves. And then they let themselves go and started to trust me.’

Given that trust, Guillot set them assignments to explore characters on themes. She describes the result: ‘They came up with different crazy characters and started writing. I put together all the stories with a co-writer. So every actor is playing their own character, I just polished their writing. It is the work of the group.’

Many of the actors joined HKTA out of curiosity, others wanted to pick drama up again after joyful memories as childhood thespians. Some have banking or office jobs that have nothing to do with the performing arts. But Guillot believes that doesn’t make her cast any less talented: ‘On the contrary, in a way I think everyone can be a performer. But these actors have pushed themselves. They are nothing compared to the people they were when they started the classes.’ Being recreational actors made them even more motivated. ‘For them,’ she continues, ‘it was also working on their personality, therapy. At first they were a bit shy or weren’t very confident about speaking in front of an audience. They have all evolved.’

If her stars lack experience, the director makes up for it. She has been involved in the performing arts for some 20 years – when she first came to Hong Kong she was a regular in dinner theatre shows in several bars in SoHo. But the time came when she saw the need for something else: ‘Hong Kong is an international business centre, but artistically speaking, we’re far from global peers like Paris, London or New York. I don’t think it is because of an audience problem. I think it’s because there is a lack of professional opportunities: All the performers either go abroad to seek more opportunities or stay but without the support to fully commit to their productions.’

So in 2007 she took matters in her own hands and founded the Hong Kong Theatre Association to enrich art and cultural development in the city and create cross-cultural experiences for aspiring artists and performers. And Hong Kong’s public. Now, apart from the theatre group, HKTA conducts workshops, dance and acting classes in French, English and Chinese for adults and children.

Quartier Pigalle, as the name suggests, is in French – though Guillot doesn’t think that will be a barrier for non-French speakers: ‘Because we are subtitled, we are targeting the local community as well as the French community. That is what we are trying to do with the association – to produce shows that are diverse and can be presented to everyone. It’s done in a way that English people still can enjoy and understand the humour through the subtitles.’

She may have accomplished much with her last two shows, but Guillot is still brimming with plans. She is currently working on an English-language production to be followed by another two – one in Chinese and the other again in French. And by the end of next year she would like to have organized a theatre festival with all other locally based international companies like HKTA. “We’ve already co-worked together but not enough to get our name out there. We feel we are still unknown among the majority of the people in Hong Kong population,” she states. Given the energy, vision, and forward thinking of her current projects, that surely cannot last too much longer.

Quartier Pigalle will run from June 24-27 from 7:45pm at the Fringe Theatre (2 Lower Albert Road, Central) in French with English subtitles. Tickets are $160 from www.hkticketing.com For enquiries, phone 2521 7251.