This was a theatrical performance of 4 scenes – 3 monologues and one duologue – from Shakespeare and Caryl Churchill. This was a highly innovative thoughtful, and powerful piece of theatre which amply fulfilled the requirements of a capstone: it both served as the culmination of some of the things you’d learned over your English major, but also intimated some of what you will continue to explore in the years ahead. The overall theme of the piece – the difficulty of speaking about/in such times as HK has lived through – was well chosen. I saw that most powerfully in the first monologue. Here, the barriers to expression were articulated as a kind of artistic blockage (as Grotowski might have termed it) in which the artist becomes consumed with self-awareness and self-consciousness such that they cannot create. (Hamlet is the perfect avatar for this.) This idea of the difficulty of speech was perhaps also present in the final video montage in which, essentially, you give over some of the performance to others: they say the words, and you become a more implicit and less visible directorial presence. This was well-handled, very interesting, and well-performed. Although your performance in Cantonese of that section from the “Tomorrow” speech was excellent, it was your grandpa (?) and the children which were most powerful. Here, the fundamental problem the play was exploring – how can we speak at such a time? – achieves a kind of resolution: we don’t speak, but listen; and, in listening, we bear witness; and, in bearing witness, we show (i.e. put on a play). Thus conceived, the whole piece assumes a very exciting shape: the actor at the beginning, who is creatively impotent due to an excess of self-consciousness, gradually gives his piece over to others. To me, that was the story that was emerging here. And that was very beautiful.

“A Play on Words” is a performance of a series of compiled monologues, presented on 29^th April at the Shaw Lecture Theatre. Monologues include the “To be or not to be” speech from Hamlet, excerpts from Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker and Far Away, and the “tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech from Macbeth.

The initial piece was introduced as a self-parody, the performer finds his performance fake and ingenuine as he is overwhelmed with a sense of hypocrisy, most likely due to the use of cliches as well as a possibility of misrepresentation. The performer, despite his emphasis on how fake he finds his performance, is nonetheless (perhaps unwillingly) immersed in his monologue and thrown back into a PTSD-esque recreation of the imagination/memory that follows.

The following monologue (excerpt from Far Away) was done with the aid of a recording, which the performer (a court spectator who was at the hearing of the first performer) completed a “duologue” with. The Skriker excerpt was then presented as a dictator-like speech. These two monologues explore the themes of conflict, peace and power through different narratives.

The final monologue was then presented in the form of an audiovisual piece, with the speech given (in order) by an old man, the performer on the stage, and two children.

While this Capstone was not necessarily my best theatre work, it is one of the things that I am proud of completing in my university life.

Indeed, looking back it was obvious that my performance (from the execution, creative process, even to the choice of monologues) was laden with flaws, but it provided a great opportunity for me to look back at myself and realise two things:

1) What my most obvious obstacles and (subsequently) weaknesses were when it comes to creative work, and;
2) What I really wanted to achieve/bring out from these four years of university

Especially with all that is happening in the world, I don’t want to confine my studies just to textbooks, readings and papers. I hope that this Capstone is only the beginning to the journey that lies ahead.