EMILY OF EMERALD HILL by Esplanade’s The Studios: fifty

“A patchwork of love”

Reviewer: Sam Kee
Performance: 3 April 2015, 3pm

Flipping through the archives of Flying Inkpot, I came across a review of Emily of Emerald Hill staged by Wild Rice in 2001. The author lamented that he was then watching it for the first time, suggesting that it was a play worth repeated-watching. 14 years on, I would lament the same for myself. Stella Kon’s Emily has won first prize in the Singapore National Playwriting competition but was pronounced to be too difficult a play-script – given that it is a monodrama of 2 hours. So it was not until 1984, that Malaysian director Chin San Sooi took up the challenge and directed Leow Puay Tin to perform for the Malaysian audience. The debut gave rise to Chin’s founding of the Five Arts Centre. In the following year, Emily finally debuted in Singapore during the Singapore Drama Festival, directed by Max Le Blond where Margaret Chan breathed life into Emily, which was to become an icon in the history of our English-language theatre. Emily‘s next phenomenal milestone would be in the year 2000 when Ivan Heng redefined Emily in his crossover rendition, directed by Krishen Jit, inaugurating W!ld Rice Productions. For such a phenomenal play script, it is to my dismay that I am only watching it for the first time in my late twenties. It is, however, heartening to see many young children, accompanied by their parents, in the audience today, how lucky of them, I thought.

Stella Kon’s Emily is indeed demanding. It is a monodrama showcasing only the presence of one speaking performer while the audience collaborates in creating the other characters in their minds. In this iteration of Emily, Karen Tan is Emily Gan. She drives the play and its plot forward while navigating the audiences through the trials and tribulations of her life.

Aidli ‘Alin’ Mosbit’s Emily seems to place more emphasis to the theme ‘family’. Given the minimalistic stage design, she has chosen a thrust stage made up of several hexagonal platforms that resonates with the play’s thematic prop – the patchwork quilt.

What does it take to keep a family together? As the sun sets on Emily’s life, she accomplishes one last favor, incognito, for her good friend, Bee Choo. Then, she is left to her own devices in the grand house on Emerald Hill. In the end, she wins the battle against her husband’s mistress but is turned away at his deathbed; she coerces her first-born to give up his horse-riding dream to return to his law degree, only to receive news of his suicide later. Ironically, in order not to alienate and lose her daughter, Emily relents to her settling down in America. The feel of Emily reminds me of The Great Gatsby – the grand parties, the intrigues, the secrets. But after all the grand parties, intrigues and revelations, what is left for her? Karen Tan plays the resilience and fragility of a woman with great equanimity, revealing the irony that it is her fragility and fear of abandonment that drives her to seize power which ultimately drives her loved ones away.

The magic of Stella Kon’s writing lies in the way she managed to weave nuances of the Peranakan heritage with bits and pieces of the society’s progress into the context of Emily’s dialogues. This gives the director a lot of room to explore other themes embedded in the story, while still preserving the heritage elements to offer the audience a glimpse of the past.