THE LADY OF SOUL AND HER ULTIMATE ‘S’ MACHINE by Esplanade’s The Studios: fifty

“Lost Soul”

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 7 May 2015

The Lady does not age well.

The cast. Photo credit: Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay

Punchlines are the pay-offs in comedy and satire. For this performance, I wait and wait for the punchline.

And I wait.

The house lights come on and it is the end of the performance. To say that I am dismayed is a massive understatement.

As an undergraduate who is intimately familiar with Tan Tarn How’s original playtext, The Lady of Soul and Her Ultimate ‘S’ Machine, I have high expectations for this re-staging. Politically naughty yet at the same time unflinchingly honest, it is not difficult to see why this script was scrutinized by the censors before its premier was allowed. Although to director Zizi Azah Abdul Majid’s credit, she does update the 20-plus year old script with references to the recent Thaipusam public holiday episode and rewording the religious reference to “The Father, Son and the Ho-Lee”.

Despite these efforts, The Lady of Soul has not aged well. The puns on Singapore’s hierarchical power structure with words like “acting” and “vice” feel old and stale. Lines like “welcoming with open arms and open legs” while not unfunny, feel decidedly dated.

However, the production has some highlights, namely the standout performances from Rizman Putra (in drag) and Gene Sha Rudyn who plays the minister to megalomaniacal perfection, in an appropriately epic style. Rizman Putra, on the other hand, piles on the sass and flirtatious energy in his rendition of Mdm Soh. Strutting, mincing and prancing around the stage, his sweaty muscular physique performs the double-standards that the play criticizes.

Nevertheless, Zizi’s direction for this play feels rather trivial at times, never moving beyond a superficial treatment of Tan’s text. From the reduction of Les and Chris to the infantile bimbo stereotype, to the repeated (and convenient) use of shadows within a set that was no more than a white elephant: enormous yet under-utilised. The political humour, is way too banal: the all-white outfits for the entire cast fairly obvious and uninspired. The portrayals of protagonists Paul and Derek are astonishingly unconvincing as well, almost as non-descript as their outfits.

I have mixed feelings for this rendition of a Singapore theatre classic. I guess part of the problem comes from the fact that political theatre is always topical, but political critique always changes with the times. Despite that, The Lady of Soul is a play that deserves more re-stagings and re-readings, because it is as much a historical artifact as it is a political one.