Playlists light the blue touch paper in a political Hong Kong romcom

Photo by Laurie Fletcher: Mei Mei McLeod and Liam Lau-Fernandez in rehearsal for A Playlist for the Revolution

Daniel Nelson

A Playlist for the Revolution at the Bush Theatre is a blast.

Playwright AJ Yi takes a cliche — a sparky party encounter between a carefree, kooky woman and a serious, conventional young fogey — and injects fresh charm and wit into it, before hitting us with a strong Hong Kong twist.

Opposites attract, generating a brief heady flirtation that dazzles like a starburst but fractures equally rapidly because Chloe, who dreams of becoming the next Obama, has to fly home to England.

They keep the relationship going by phone, and by sharing their differing music playlists, which further boost the bustling Hong Kong-style tempo of the play as song samples belt into audience ears.

Yi gradually steers the engaging romcom into deeper waters, as the physical gap takes its toll, and, more significantly, as it becomes clear that Chloe’s identification with Hong Kong is based more on emotional need than on experience of the reality on the shifting ground (“My Hong Kong is not your Hong Kong”, Jonathan tells her later./ “You’re not from here. You don’t speak the language.”)

Her excitement about her rather abstract notion of protest clashes with Jonathan’s cautious neutrality and lack of interest in activism (“I wish ‘quiet’ was a superpower, but it’s not.”). 

Enter a gruff, older, university janitor Chu, who provides an entirely different, tougher world view, distinct from Chloe’s naive, self-interested superficiality and Jonathan’s earnest apolitical family-oriented narrowness. Chu is angry, dissatisfied and an enthusiastic demonstrator in the 2019 democracy movement — and Molotov cocktail thrower. He has no truck with China or Britain: he speaks for Hong Kong as a home(land) in its own right.

Yi has lit the blue touch paper. The romcom slips out of focus, foundering on painful misunderstandings, and the ethics of protest move centre-stage. The personal becomes political, the political becomes personal, and the music plays on as catastrophe looms and finally strikes because of a missing element in the play: geopolitics.

As someone who has lived and worked in Hong Kong, I found the play witty, thrilling and very much to the point. On the night I saw it, many Hong Kongers now living in UK supercharged the excellent acting (Liam Lau-Fernandez, Mei Mei Macleod, and Zak Shukor) and production by reacting to every reference, however stereotypical, such as the awfulness of chips and gravy and other British food or the straightness of Hong Kong society. But even without this added spice, the evening is hugely enjoyable and thought-provoking.

* A Playlist for the Revolution, from £15,is at the Bush Theatre, 7 Uxbridge Road, W12 8LJ until 5 August. Info: https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/event/a-playlist-for-the-revolution/