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Under intense political scrutiny, the real drama in Hong Kong’s arts scene often happens not on the stage, but in the offstage machinations of censorship. The planned rerun of Candace Chong Mui-ngam’s Cantonese play, We Are Gay – poignantly titled “We are the Happiest” in Chinese – has gone from defiant revival to seemingly insurmountable defeat within days. In mid-August, a November rerun of the award-winning play was announced, and advance booking began for the shows that would be performed at the Xiqu Centre in the West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD). On September 9, the producers halted sales, saying on social media that they were awaiting an update from the “relevant authority” and hinting at a cancellation. Advance booking was briefly reactivated on September 24, after WKCD, in charge of renting out the venue, gave the official green light once again, but on October 18, the production team confirmed the worst: the show was cancelled. The cancellation was for real this time, with WKCD taking the unusual step of explaining why: it had received “a large number of complaints” claiming the play “promotes confrontation and defames Hong Kong”, and that the decision was made in consultation with the Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau. Some of the complaints were public. Wenweipo, a Beijing-backed newspaper, published several diatribes that vilified Chong while also attacking the play for being negative and sexually explicit. We Are Gay premiered at the Hong Kong Arts Festival in 2022 and clinched best performance of the year, script/playwright of the year and director of the year at the 2023 International Association of Theatre Critics Awards in Hong Kong. It touches on discrimination and the lack of equality for the LGBTQ community, but is not as political as Chong’s other works such as May 35th (2019), which is about the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, and The Wild Boar (2012) with its focus on press freedom in Hong Kong. The fact that Chong is one of very few practitioners in Hong Kong who has continued to speak out against censorship, and who does so very publicly, undoubtedly puts her in the firing line of pro-Beijing critics. In fact, just before the cancellation of We Are Gay, she took to Facebook to name and shame the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts for blacklisting her in separate incidents. Speaking to the Post after Saturday’s news of the cancellation, Chong says she wants to bring attention to the unfairness of the situation. “Of course I feel sad. But most importantly, people who make these decisions don’t realise that so many people are involved in a production – ordinary people who are in the theatre business. The last-minute cancellation cost them financially as well as incurring significant opportunity loss. The authorities don’t take that into consideration and there’s no compensation. It’s so unfair,” she says. Speaking earlier, Hong Kong star Anthony Wong Chau-sang, who was set to play a central member of the play’s ménage a trois, voiced his outrage over the way those in control dithered over the whole production. “It is extremely infuriating,” he said, condemning the “layman decision” that forced many people involved in the production to have to adjust to the flip-flopping over the show’s cancellation. The winner of multiple best actor film awards compared the cancellations of shows and blacklisting of individuals since the introduction of the National Security Law in 2020 as “a haunting” that makes practitioners afraid. “Because you don’t really know why these things happen, there are all kinds of speculation. It’s like when you hear different people say there’s a ghost on the bridge. If you walk past that bridge at midnight you still shiver even if you don’t believe in ghosts,” he said. He was set to play the complex, guarded barrister Neil, an older, successful man whose history is scarred by the suicide of a previous partner. Young trainee lawyer Philip (played by Leung Ho-pong) is a hedonist who knows legalising same-sex marriage is a distant dream. Completing the trio is Ah Sang (played by Lam Ka-hei), a swimming coach who has been in a long-term relationship with Philip. A tension-filled ménage à trois ends in tragedy. The rerun was being advertised just as the government failed to pass a law granting more rights to same-sex couples, making the Chinese title a poignant piece of self-reflection for a city that is often complacent about its relative progressiveness. Wong confessed that he wasn’t terribly interested in the role at first. “I only agreed because I wanted to help ‘Cancer’ [Chong’s nickname] and to stop her from nagging,” he said. He read the script and was moved by the universal themes of “love and loneliness, indulgence, jealousy and temptations”. And given the initial uncertainty about whether the production could continue, he was energised and was determined to “do this play really well” when the project restarted in September. Now, the team does not have much hope of finding another venue in the near future. Despite the setbacks and frustration, and having recently come back from a successful staging of Wild Boar in Japan, Chong is not planning to spend more time working overseas. “I want my plays to be seen by Hong Kong people.”
