WOLF IN THE HOUSE is a psychological drama set on a stormy night in Hong Kong.  A university professor on the Star ferry invites a young man from mainland China back to his smart flat.  But this is the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts, and as we get to know the two men all is not what it seems.

Shanghai, summer 1935, an outwardly normal happy family is trapped in a dark web of hidden desire which threatens to destroy them.  Fengyi Xu and his twenty year old daughter feel a love for each other that pushes the boundaries of father daughter love to its limits. As their relationship threatens to spill over into forbidden territory, the mother is faced with the dilemma of ignoring it and letting the family fall to pieces or confront the unknown.

This play is based on a short story from the Lust, Caution Shanghainese writer, Eileen Zhang, and tells a gripping yet compassionate tale of a taboo love in pre-communist China.

The play is set in the glamorous cosmopolitan Shanghai of the thirties, a time when the sophisticated Shanghainese adored the West but remained resolutely Chinese at heart. 

THE TWO OF US is a psychological thriller; one side of identical twins peers through the looking glass – is he seeing his own reflection, or somebody else’s: is he the killer or the victim?

BBC World Drama –
Bare Branches by Simon Wu and Dino Mahoney
Saturday 12 January
8.00-9.00pm BBC WORLD SERVICE

The crisis in gender imbalance in China, where 40 million men may not be able to find wives, is explored in the comedy Bare Branches.

Shen and Ping, a pig farmer and a teacher living in a small mountain village, discover that they have left it a bit late for love. They fight over the only two unmarried girls in the village, begin liaisons with the same widow but have no luck. In despair, they drown their sorrows and end up marrying each other.

Shen longs for fatherhood and adopts a piglet. A trip to town, however, and an encounter with two goodtime girls, forces them to explore the nature of love, jealousy and happiness.

When Ping's cousin announces she is getting rid of a baby girl, the two men set off for the big city. Two men, a pig and a baby – what could possibly go wrong?

Producer/Anne Edyvean

BBC World Service Publicity

SPIRIT MONEY (©Simon C.K. Wu)

SPIRIT MONEY is an action horror film set in contemporary London; the action is kung fu, specifically Tai Chi Quan, and the horror is a Chinese ghost world unleashed in a London setting.

There is an old Asian belief that says, ‘Coins found in the street belongs to the dead’ – so what happens when a teenage Londoner picks up a strange coin he finds in a Southwark gutter?  “SPIRIT MONEY” is a ghost story based on the strange encounter between Keung, the spirit of a Chinese man who died in a gangland kung fu fight, and Leroy, a thirteen year old Caribbean British boy.

While playing truant, Leroy spots and picks up a strange old Chinese coin from the gutter. But by picking up the coin Leroy unwittingly releases the ghost of Keung, a Tai Chi master. Keung appears to the boy and asks him to avenge his death.  At first Leroy refuses but when, with Keung’s supernatural intervention, he discovers that kung fu can protect him from the street gang he agrees to help. Keung teaches Leroy Tai Chi Quan and Leroy promises to challenge and defeat Keung’s murderer.

Leroy is a loner with problems; he grew up with no father, his only male role model being his older brother. But when his brother gets killed while saving him from a speeding car driven by local joy-riders, Leroy is crippled with guilt.  Smitten by grief his mother also becomes reclusive; mother and son live separated by individual grief. 

There are two juxtaposed climaxes at the end of the film.  The first is the fight between Leroy and Keung’s killer.  At a critical moment in the fight, Keung possesses Leroy to help him win the fight; but in doing so Keung turns into a powerful, malevolent shape-shifter intent on creating a mayhem of death and destruction. The second climax sees Leroy racing against time to collect three cleansing objects with which to defeat the ravaging shape-shifter and save Keung’s soul. Risking his own life and the lives of his mother and best friend, he barely manages to succeed.

This is a story of how two people can be ghosts in their own city, disaffected and cut off from mainstream life they wander the streets in search of connection. But who is the real ghost, the dead Chinese man, or the lost boy?

The theme that runs through the different threads of the plot is the need to let go of the past and embrace the future, a theme reflected in the philosophy of Tai Chi Quan.   Keung eventually realizes that he should not have risked Leroy’s life as Leroy was not ready for such a demanding dual. But he has learned a lot from meeting Leroy and feels Leroy is like his lost son. And Leroy feels that Keung has become like a father to him, a positive and affirming role model. During the battle with the malicious shape-shifter, Leroy sees his mother risking her life for him and rediscovers how much she really loves him. His mother also learns that she should let go of the past and treasure her surviving son.

My radio plays and interview:

1. Bare Branches

(BBC World Service)
2. Demolition Man

(BBC World Service)
3. Looking for Stones

(BBC World Service, RTHK, ABC & CBC)

Note: please skip the first ten seconds of weather forecast

4. Diwali & Curry

(Theatre Voice, part of Urban Scrawl)
5. Cantonese interview broadcast

(Canada, 2008)