1 TABLE 2 CHAIRS EXPERIMENTAL SERIES by The Theatre Practice

“Artistic experiment“

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 18 July 2014

Like its title suggests, 1 Table 2 Chairs Experimental Series presents three starkly different plays that emphasise the process of creating theatre rather than the product.

One table. Two chairs. Two performers. A short play of twenty minutes. Everything else is fair game.

Returning for the second year in a row, 1 Table 2 Chairs Experimental Series presents three different plays (performed in Mandarin) from three directors (Cai Bixia, Eva Tang and Liu Xiaoyi), each from very different backgrounds. The result is a very interesting combination of performances that runs the gamut from the refreshingly quirky to the downright bizarre.

The first piece, Emperor Qin and Lady Meng Jiang, directed by Cai Bixia, tells a small tale about love and the corrupting influence of power. Cai’s Chinese opera training was evident in the way both actors sang their lines and expressed themselves in their body gestures. Yet, she cleverly circumvented the issue of the long staging times of Chinese opera performances by having her actors snap out of their characters and engaging in casual small talk about their characters’ motivations. This puts a new spin on a traditional performance style, making for a strong opening piece.

The second piece, X2, directed by Eva Tang, seemed to be a meditation about loss, with a woman at a divorce lawyer’s office grieving over the death of her pet dog. (At the post-show dialogue, Tang elaborated that it was about how we express love in a contemporary setting.) While Tang’s background in film did give rise to an extended use of the space, such as playing different levels of action and using shadows to evoke spaces, ironically they ended up being constraints to the premise of “1 Table 2 Chairs”. The actors’ engagements with the props were only restricted to that of a physical level and the transformation of space was only made possible by pre-existing technical modifications. If this were a proper game with rules, I would term this as “cheating”.

The closing piece, UnSound 2, directed by Liu Xiaoyi, took the idea of “experimental” and ran with it. Nothing was too avant garde to be left out, and everything collided in an atrocious mashup of theatrical elements. To illustrate, at one point the male actor positioned a chair millimetres away from the ground and froze for what seemed like an eternity, while the female actor played games on her iPad whilst performing what seemed to be the couch potato version of the whirling dervish. All this while the multimedia screen overhead superimposed contrasting words on top of each other (“crass”/”refined”) and a grating soundtrack hummed over the speakers.

Yes, this show does not make for easy viewing at times. But keeping in mind that these pieces are essentially raw and unpolished creations, it may interest audiences hankering for some off-beat Chinese Theatre.