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Review: Hot Pot, Playhouse East ★★★★

Review: Hot Pot, Playhouse East

Twenty years on: four friends, one pot, and an examination of choices

University is a peculiar window of time. You are thrown together with people you might never otherwise choose, at an age when you are not quite adult and not quite free, when home is somewhere you have left but the world has not yet fully arrived. You can experiment. You can dream of the journalist you will become, the life you will build, the person you might allow yourself to be. And then you graduate, and you have to make choices.

Hot Pot, the debut production from new company Auka Productions, opens those choices out with real care. Four East Asian friends reunite at a hot pot restaurant, twenty years on. They studied journalism together. They shared ideals. What they have done with those ideals could not be more different.

Playwright Hongwei Bao uses the meal itself as the engine of the play. Hot pot is a shared meal where everyone cooks and contributes. Here, the theme of choice in the play is echoed in the way shared decisions make up everyone’s meal. Who orders, what gets shared, and who eventually picks up the bill all carry their own weight.

Review: Hot Pot, Playhouse East

My companion, unfamiliar with the communal mechanics of hot pot, did not spot the significance of who was choosing the meat and the broth, as it got slightly lost in the pace of the opening exchanges. It is a small thing, but it meant she lost a layer of understanding.

The opening and closing scenes, with a massive steaming hot pot filling the stage, are extremely effective and pull you straight into the world of the play. The sound design uses the bubbling of the pot very effectively to move between scenes; once you recognise it, the shift is instant. The flashback scenes, in which the characters step away from the table into younger versions of themselves, take a moment to read at first but quickly become a reliable visual grammar.

The set is spare but well-judged, and the rabbits displayed around the restaurant space earn their place: Tao explains early on that the rabbit is the god of homosexual relationships in Chinese mythology, a detail that centres the story.

At the heart of the play is the university relationship between Ming and Tao and what has happened to it in the intervening two decades. It is not quite a love story, not quite a tragedy, more a study in the cost of the choices that felt unavoidable at the time.

Review: Hot Pot, Playhouse East

Windson Liong as Tao carefully exposes layers. Generally warm and at ease in himself, in a relationship with Josh in London, making art for very little money, we see longings from his past flickering through the warmth. Struan Davidson as Ming is deliberately harder to like. He has stayed, succeeded, married well, produced children and is perpetually teetering on the next choice he cannot bring himself to make but feels he must. He has buried himself. Shin-Fei Chen as Mei channels something of the class prefect about her, all business attire and surface control. Chen is very good at showing us her discomfort when conversations refuse to be managed back onto safer ground.

Michelle Yim as Lin has a remarkable physicality: if she is feeling disgust, joy or discomfort, you see it in how she holds herself. Lin has carved out her own path as a writer of Danmei (耽美), the Chinese literary genre centring homoerotic relationships between male characters, a detail that adds another layer to the question of what it means to tell queer stories in a cultural context that actively discourages them.

That question sits at the core of what Bao is exploring. In most of East Asia, LGBTQIA+ people navigate not only social expectation but state policy, with Confucian traditions of filial duty adding their own considerable weight. The play does not lecture on this: it surfaces it through what the characters reveal about their lives and what they choose to conceal. What begins as a simple catch up becomes, gradually, a life examination. Whether belonging demands conformity, whether leaving is always liberation or sometimes another kind of loss.

Revisiting old friends can take you back to who you were with them, and there is something painfully true in the way Hot Pot shows these four falling back into older patterns. Ming and Mei default to authority; Tao defaults to warmth; Lin fights being constrained by others’ rules. What has changed is that they can all see it happening now in a way they could not at twenty-two.

This is a moving production that looks through a valuable cultural lens and genuinely welcomes you into it. It introduces the textures of East Asian experience, particularly around queer identity, without making non-East-Asian audiences feel they are being educated at rather than spoken to. And underneath the cultural specificity is a question that carries universally: if what you want is not what society says you should want, how much do you lose by listening?

A moving production that welcomes you into East Asian queer experience and asks questions that resonate far beyond it.

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Images: Brett Kasza

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