Review by William Chan
“In Search of the Playwright”, created by local arts organisation PO Art Studio, initially presents itself as an immersive mystery. I attended the final rehearsal on September 24. The audience enters the shell of a theatre that was completely gutted by a fire in the 1980s that killed the entire cast and the theatre’s staff. The actors in the play are the ghosts of the cast members who perished. Divided into “speculators” and “investigators”, we, as “investigators”, follow the performers through the theatre, while other members of the audience who were assigned to be “speculators” sit in the seats.
The investigation, however, is only the production’s frame. Its real subject is the precarious process of putting on a play or any theatrical show: securing money, negotiating with authorities, satisfying patrons, filling seats, and protecting artistic intentions from institutional pressure. The mystery draws us in, but the more revealing drama concerns the people and compromises behind a performance.
Theatre under pressure
A group of audience members, including myself, followed João, the theatre director played by Tsang Wai Dick. João is trying to mount a production while struggling with operating costs, institutional expectations, and pressure from management. A wealthy patron also demands an intimate encounter with the leading actress in exchange for his support.
These conflicts show how artistic work depends on people who may also seek control over it. Tsang gives João an intense, practical frustration. He is not merely suffering from artistic doubt; he is trying to make the accounts work and convince people to care about a show before it opens. The scenes in the Macao Cultural Centre’s dressing room reveal theatre as labour rather than glamour.
The production encourages us to identify the person responsible for the fire. Yet the clues do not produce a conventional solution. Three characters are implicated, and responsibility becomes distributed rather than isolated. The evidence forms a knot instead of revealing a single culprit.
Audiences expecting a murder mystery or a fully developed live-action role-playing experience may be disappointed. The interaction between actors and the audience is limited to small tasks and brief exchanges. The clues function less as evidence than as devices leading us towards the production’s larger ideas.
That limitation is meaningful. We remain constrained by a script. This becomes explicit when the characters realise that they are fictional creations, and so are we. To escape their cycle of death, they must find the playwright to rewrite the ending for the cast members.
The sharper critique
The funniest section involves the cast seeking audience members with theatrical experience. Audience members who have worked in theatre become targets of suspicion of being the writer and face playful interrogation. Audience members familiar with the production team create spontaneous inside jokes, making the performance feel socially alive. Yet the experience also depends heavily on the people nearby and their willingness to participate.
The discussions about budgets, bureaucracy, empty houses, and “free tickets that no one wants” are also dense because they are painfully accurate, especially to the local situation. The theatre’s reconstruction adds a broader critique: cultural spaces may be developed as leisure destinations while the artistic labour within them receives less attention.
“In Search of the Playwright” is uneven as a mystery game, but persuasive as an examination of theatre-making. Its most interesting question is not “Who started the fire?” but “Who has the authority to decide how the story ends?” By placing the audience inside that struggle, PO Art Studio turns the production process itself into the performance’s central drama – and leaves us wondering whether the elusive playwright they chase is really an absent artist, or something far less poetic: the unseen apparatus holding the red pen.
Cast members perform during a live production of In Search of the Playwright last month. – Photos provided by PO Art Studio
