ZUNI ICOSAHEDRON'S Mathias Woo Yan-wai is getting repetitive in the green room of the Hong Kong Art Centre's Shouson Theatre. 'Hong Kong is so strange, and it's getting more like a prison cell,' the writer-director says - again.
Woo presents such bizarre, property market-related phenomena in the theatre group's latest comedy, Strange Strange Hong Kong Series 1: The Agent.
It's about a real-estate agent couple (Carson Chung Ka-shing and Tanya Chan) looking for a place in Hong Kong - and in the process it reflects Hongkongers' values and concepts about property.
The production is another comedy series from Zuni, after the political satire East Wing, West Wing, which was first staged in 2003, with the collaboration of theatre artist Edward Lam Yick-wah.
This time, Woo has taken on all the directing and scriptwriting himself. He says he chose property because it's such a major topic in Hong Kong.
'If you open a coffee shop in Taipei or other places, the business concept is totally different from how you do it in Hong Kong - because Hong Kong's landlords can raise the rent at anytime,' he says. 'People don't have any sense of security in a lot of things, except property trading.' The 35-year-old architect-cum-artist says people are becoming short-sighted with Hong Kong's heavy reliance on the property and stock markets.
