Review | Hong Kong adaptation of The Play That Goes Wrong is a hilarious hit

It took close to a decade for Chung Ying Theatre to secure the rights to stage the Cantonese adaptation of The Play That Goes Wrong, according to the troupe’s artistic director Dominic Cheung Ho-kin. Judging by the audience reception on October 18 when the hit British farce premiered at the Kwai Tsing Theatre, it was well worth the wait.

Created by playwrights Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, The Play That Goes Wrong went from playing at a small venue above a British pub in 2012 to the London West End two years later, before moving to Broadway in New York in 2017, picking up the prize for best new comedy at the 2015 Laurence Olivier Awards along the way.

The premise of this slapstick farce, a play within a play, is simple: an amateur theatre troupe is about to perform a 1920s-style murder suspense, called “The Murder at Haversham Manor”. To say the production is not ready for the opening is a gross understatement.

With props still not installed or placed properly, and one actor still learning his lines, what could go wrong does, indeed, go spectacularly wrong on the night.

Directed by the company’s assistant artistic director, Edmond Lo, and translated by Selina Kan, this adaptation lives up to what is expected from Chung Ying, a 46-year-old theatre company known for its Cantonese and bilingual staging of English-language plays, especially comedies.