Review | In a Perfect World is a Hong Kong play with a brilliant cast and a bleak outlook
Jun Li Jun-shuo’s time-jumping play with Patra Au about Chinese people living in a crumbling America asks one very uncomfortable question
Not long into the time-jumping, three-hour-long play, we are plunged into a not-too-distant future. It is a terrifying reality in which the worst-case scenarios – the ones we only suggest sardonically and not wholly seriously today – have come to pass.
In this universe, created by award-winning film director and scriptwriter Jun Li Jun-shuo, Germany has fallen under Russian rule by 2030, and the United States has been wrecked by civil war by 2036.
Presented by Hong Kong’s foremost independent theatre company, On & On Theatre Workshop, this believable, ambitious and grim drama follows in the success of the troupe’s Flowing Warblers 2.0, an update of a 2024 work that revolves around Hongkongers living abroad.
In a Perfect World features 20 closely intertwined characters. Played by a cast of 10 actors, these characters encompass a broad range of sociopolitical backgrounds – from left to right – and perspectives gleaned from a diaspora stretching from Hong Kong to Taishan to New York to Berlin to Guyana.