Vera Chok

Vera Chok is a London-based actor and writer, who has featured in stage, screen and radio roles.

Early life and education

Chok was born in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, of Chinese ancestry. After attending Assunta Primary and Secondary schools in Malaysia and Abbots Bromley School in Staffordshire, she graduated from Queens College, Oxford, before training as an actor at the Poor School in London and with Philippe Gaulier in Paris.

Career

Chok's main theatre roles have included parts in the award-winning Lucy Kirkwood play Chimerica (2013), as part of the original cast at the Almeida and Harold Pinter theatres^[1] and in The World of Extreme Happiness (The Shed at the National Theatre, 2013), in which she co-starred with Katie Leung. Chok played the part of Ming Ming, a female migrant worker, in a production about the world of migrant workers in rapidly emerging modern China.^[2]

In early 2015, she will appear in Nicholas Hytner's final production as artistic director for the National Theatre, Tom Stoppard's The Hard Problem.^[3] The play is Stoppard's first for the theatre since 2006 and a special screening will be broadcast live to cinemas.

Chok was nominated in the 2015 BBC Audio Drama Awards (Best Debut Performance In An Audio Drama)^[4] for her performance in the BBC Radio 3 production of British Chinese novelist Xiaolu Guo's first play, Dostoevsky And The Chickens (2014), in which she co-starred.^[5] In Liao Yimei's comedy drama Rhinoceros in Love, also for Radio 3, she plays the beautiful Mingming, the object of a zookeeper's longing, in a performance described by the Sunday Times as 'bewitching'.^[6]

She appeared in Jingo (2008, Finborough Theatre, London) and played the lead role of Lila in the stage adaptation of Philip Pullman's The Firework-Maker's Daughter (2011, Theatre by the Lake) - described by The Stage as a 'poignant performance'.^[7]

In addition, Chok has appeared in a number of independent films and in the long-running ITV series Coronation Street.

Producing

In 2010 Chok founded saltpeter, an independent theatre company. She produced and starred in their opera production Tonseisha - The Man Who Abandoned the World (2014 - Studio, Central Saint Martins), which is adapted from the play by Erik Patterson.^[8] In the work, which features opera, dance and theatre, Chok plays Yukiko, a Japanese woman, who is haunted by the loss of her father and Beat writer Richard Brautigan. In 2011, Vera Chok founded the Brautigan Book Club, which stimulates creative explorations based on Brautigan's work.

Filmography

Film

Television

Radio

Theatre

External links

• Official website
• Vera Chok at the Internet Movie Database
• Vera Chok on Twitter
• Spotlight Actresses 2013/14 - Vera Chok

References