“Less is more.“

Reviewer: Beverly Yuen
Performance: 17 December 2016

This play is an original script written and directed by Sarah Howell. It revolves around the relationship between sisters – Sel and Gaya. With Sel’s clinical depression, a missing persons plot, and a series of Facebook messages sent by the deceased to Gaya, suspense is created. However, the ending is anti-climactic with a unnecessary plot twist.

While Alison Wong plays Gaya with convincing emotions and physical actions, the rhythm of the acting score falls flat during the second half of the piece. Ranice Tay plays Stephy, the colleague of Sel, who visits Gaya to return her Sel’s office belongings. While Tay is assiduous in keeping focused on the character that is filled with guilt, her actions are externalised and hyper-agitated without being sustained with inner impulses or intention. I would advise – less is more; start from the intrinsic then move to the peripheral. Nonetheless, it is commendable for a young actress to play a challenging role with such a complex psychological state. The relationship between the two also needs to be further excavated.

It is a delight to watch Susie Penrice Tyrie playing the mother of the two daughters. She injects humour into her melancholy state. The scene of her making salad and putting pieces of greens which drop on the floor into her mouth, together with the fragrance of the salad filling the space, is delightful to experience.

The play is solemn with heavy pauses which filled the play. It could work better if it is “less salty” (not too heavy). The video images add some light-hearted moments to the play by showing flashbacks of the joy and playfulness shared by the two sisters. However, there is no coherent fuse of the narrative onstage and the video images.

While the pauses add to the suspense and sombreness of the play, the actresses need to fill the silences with more energy or an extension of thought. As is the pauses seem to be a dead pause, instead of something that speaks.

The play is staged in an intimate space, in a theatre-in-the-round setting. The change of scenes is cumbersome to watch, when two to three crew members frantically enter the performance area for each scene change. Though their actions are prompt and clean, it cuts the flow of the viewer’s experience.

Overall, I find that there is a great potential to further develop the piece, with more training given to the younger actresses and perhaps a twist at the end.

“An ‘A’ Production- Artistic, Amusing and Adept!”

Reviewer: Beverly Yuen
Performance: 26 November 2016

Written by Alfian Sa’at, directed by Sebastian Tan and with music composed by Elaine Chan, Monkey Goes West is an award-winning play first staged in 2014 to sold-out audience.

The cross-cultural and cross-gender casting is hilarious and effective. Siti Khalijah Zainal, who cross-dresses as Sandy, brings a dynamic comic and hip upbeat depiction of this traditionally down-to-earth character. Siti Khalijah also plays the Chinese goddess Guan Yin with a motherly disposition. Chua Enlai plays Auntie Fanny and Princess Iron Fan who mispronounce words incessantly to rib-tickling effect.

Joshua Lim plays a school boy who is mistaken as the monk Tang Xuan Zang by the Monkey King (Sugie Phua), Pigsy (Frances Lee) and Sandy. He interacts with the audience and engages both adults and children with aplomb. He is the charismatic crowd-pleaser of the evening! Phua plays the Monkey King with his agile movements, and sings in the midst of vigorous movements which requires skillful execution of breath, rhythm and emotions simultaneously. This despite  a few mishaps while executing his stunts. Lee brings Pigsy to life with its lumpy movement, and the constant “oink” in her lines.

A huge credit has to go to the playwright, Alfian, who fuses an epic fantasy and the modern Singapore using witty localized dialogue filled with double entendre of political and sexual innuendos for the adults among the children crowd. The music and songs are a mix of traditional Chinese music, pop and rock. The highlight is the duet between Siti Khalijah’s soothing tune and Lim’s Chinese childhood song “Mother is the Best in the World”.

Set design by Wong Chee Wai fluidly and swiftly changes from one landscape to the next, with the characters scaling mountains and seas. Scenes which involve children from Martial House Kids performing their aerobatic fights are a joy to watch. The shadow play by The Finger Players depicting the fight between the Monkey King and King Bull (Darius Tan) brings the contests between the characters to a new dimension.

Monkey Goes West is a must-watch production for anyone who is looking for an evening of extravaganza with a dip in the arts. This is a production artistically, amusingly and adeptly created for Singaporeans of all ages.

“Reimagining History of the Holocaust”

Reviewer: Beverly Yuen
Performance: 15 October 2016

Starring Hitler as Jekyll and Hyde, directed and written by Chong Tze Chien, is a collision of Robert Louis Stevenson’s characters Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and history of the Holocaust during World War II. Mirrors and cupboards that form the set remind the viewers of the possible extremities in each of us.

In the play, Jekyll (Daniel York) is a young painter who is rejected by critics and the art school. The pending frustrations seem to turn him into a monster by night. This parallels the historic Hitler’s real life when he failed the entrance exam of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna twice in his late teens. York handles the split personality of Jekyll and Hitler with swift transitions and dramatic effect with variations in expression and voice, aided by the changes in lighting designed by Lim Woan Wen.

The frequent shadow play by Lim is intriguing with the actors performing in stylised and puppet-like movements, and providing narratives that drive the plot behind a white screen. Behind the screen, Julius Foo effectively adopts a sarcastic tone and pitch as Mrs Stevenson, the elegant and arrogant art critic who finds fault in Jekyll’s art works to comic effect. In other scenes, he also plays the commissioner with impeccable comic timing in his interactions with the other officers, providing comic relief to the serious theme.

Edith Podesta plays Eva Braun, a blind art sponsor, with a depth of charged emotions. She delivers her crafty lines with a keen ear for the rhythms inherent in them.

While Starring Hitler as Jekyll and Hyde is a witty script superimposed on the contemporary political and social state of Singapore, it ultimately feels like we are presented with an art lesson articulating the key discourses from the art history. This, together with the constant drawing of familiar inferences to scorn the current society we are in, is exhausting especially during the second half of the show.

We are only given some respite with the intimate and well-scripted conservations between the commissioner and his lover (Lian Sutton); and the police inspector (Joshua Lim) and his nanny (Jo Kukathas). These brief moments shift the audience out of the heavily intellectual and philosophical content to a glimpse of emotional intimacy between the characters.

“Entanglement of Intimacy”

Reviewer: Beverly Yuen
Performance: 1 October 2016

What happens when your family member is your love, your burden, sanctuary, and hatred all at the same time?

The Malay Man and His Chinese Father, directed by Noor Effendy Ibrahim, and staged at Goodman Arts Centre Black Box, was first presented at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2015[1].

In this staging, the Chinese father (Michael Tan) and Malay son (Yazid Jalil) are played by the same actors as the first. However, one prominent element which is missing is Asnida Daud vocally accentuating the helpless states of the characters, and suggesting the presence of the wife’s “ghost”. The presence of this “ghost” throws the contrast in ethnicity into sharper relief.

While the character development and psychological narrative of the father and son are much more detailed and layered in this realistic rendering, the contrasting ethnicity is downplayed in this staging. Nonetheless, I am not suggesting this piece is any less enjoyable.

I savour this work with disconcerting relish. The speechless and cyclic representation of life reminds me of film director’s Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’Amour. But this show is much more repressed and dysfunctional, as the world of the father and son is contained within a two-room flat.

The play opens with the father and son in their briefs, and going about their daily household chores in a routine manner. This immediately establishes an intimate space, with audience seated as close as 50cm from the actors.

Through realistic actions of the son serving the father porridge and coffee, bathing him, and movements of tussling and cuddling, the conflicts of the intimate relationship between the two are portrayed— embrace versus struggle; support versus resistance. The son feels the need to help the father relive the memory of his wife by dressing in his mother’s kebaya, and experiences sexual abuse from his father thinking that the son is his wife.

The recurring action of opening and closing of windows also has great symbolic significance in the piece. The son is finding a way to escape from the household to seek a way to live, but he seems to be trapped in the pleasure of torture while being confined with the father. The simple act surrounding the windows also signifies the secrets within the household which risk exposure.

With suppressed frustration, the son wants to help his father find strength through the latter’s reminiscence of his wife, but he grapples to let go of his father. This too, hurts for the audience.

[1] Beverly Yuen’s review of the first staging of the production can be found here.

“A game of throne: Cultural bytes, digital bits”

Reviewer: Beverly Yuen
Performance: 10 September 2016

Sandaime Richard, written by Hideki Noda and directed by Ong Keng Sen, is a bold encounter with works of William Shakespeare. It introduces Shakespeare (Doji Shigeyama) into the play as a character put on a trial for falsifying history of Richard the Third (Kazutaro Nakamura).  Inspired by the War of the Roses, the fight of an ikebana clan is depicted. The story is also staged in the framework of a Zen paradigm. This results in texts which suggest the non-duality of things, a minimalist set design, and repetitive patterns of multimedia images.

Each performer plays different characters. It is presented on a bare stage which is transformed into a series of digital images by Keisuke Takahashi. This creates a sense of a cyberspace, complemented with electronic music by Toru Yamanaka. The audience is thus put in a trance-like state, while the characters seem to be modified, re-edited, intertextualised and cross-referenced with the convenient use of editing technology.

In this induced digital world, the characters from Shakespeare’s texts are dressed in white surrealistic and futuristic costumes designed by Yanaihara Mitsushi. They are like avatars reprogrammed to take on changing identities or one that is faceless. In this flux, they challenge history, traditions and assumptions. Multimedia images such as the continuous feathers which endlessly fall on the characters and the circular shapes that sustained the scenes remind one of the cyclic existence of life.

The lighting design (Scott Zielinski) employs bold use of shadows, striking colours and follow spots to create the phantasmagorical world. Shadow play is an integral and essential element gives the characters a larger-than-life quality, while evoking a self-reflexive sense of mockery. While we are looking at the absurdity of how Shakespeare’s characters are transmuted with the development of the plot, we are also reminded that we should take time to laugh at the tough situations we sometimes go through.

Nakamura plays Richard with his feminine and yet strong physicality through his fluid and complete control of his movements and expressions grounded in kabuki techniques. Janice Koh, who plays Shylock, and Kyogen performer Doji Shigeyama, who plays Shakespeare, stand out with their hypnotic delivery of lines, and their ability to display the subtle changes in the characters.

Performed in English, Japanese and Bahasa Indonesia, with English surtitles, the different languages offer a certain musicality due to the variations of tone and rhythm of the poetic text. The occasional punctuations of live laughter, screaming, or groaning, add to the aural richness.

Multimedia images of fire appear in the beginning and towards the ending of the play, in the context of Shakespeare’s writings. It sets me thinking: in this digital age, can books really be burnt? Perhaps not. If so, does it mean that editing and re-editing; creation and re-creation; and examination and re-examination can be made possible with complete freedom? And, what would this freedom lead to?

The play ends with a whitewashed stage with wayang kulit puppeteer I Kadek Budi Setiawan’s chanting.

Emptiness.

“Chained and Connected”

Reviewer: Beverly Yuen
Performance: 30 April 2016

Dark Room, a docudrama written and directed by Edith Podesta, shares the true stories of former inmates of Changi Prison. They are based on recorded interviews which lasted an average of two hours each. The first incarnation of the play was entitled Dark Room x8 and staged as a work-in-progress in 2014.

The set, designed by Chris Chua, is symmetrical in most of its configurations. It is unbearably sharp and geometrical with its lines, edges, pointedness and rectangularity. Coupled with the harsh lighting design by Adrian Tan – which casts lines, angular shapes, and shadows – the stage is transformed into an enclosed space of castigation, control, and confinement.

The internment experienced by the prisoners is also enhanced by Darren Ng’s sound effects of metal prison doors opening and shutting, and the metallic sounds of bars and chains. However, at some points, the sound is so abrupt that it interrupts the performers delivering their texts.

Prison life is depicted as boredom, loss and fear.  The inmates play games, share meals and singing sessions to relieve the tedium. Their lives in the prison are “chained and connected to one another.” They are visited by their parents, represented by a middle-aged couple played by Lim Kay Siu and Neo Swee Lin.

Amongst the cohesive ensemble of 11, Oliver Chong and Pavan J Singh constantly engage the audience with their adroit performances. They deliver their characters convincingly with a pertinent grasp of rhythm in their actions and speech, tinted with a sense of wretchedness and dark humour.

The other six male prisoners add diversity to the spectrum of personalities.  Nelson Chia and Noor Effendy Ibrahim play the long-term inmates who orientate and give advice to the newbies; Timothy Nga plays the gay inmate who is placed in the same cell as the other straight men; Ian Tan plays a discouraged ex-convict who struggles with issues of acceptance in the society; Mohd Fared Jainal plays the melancholic inmate; and Erwin Shah Ismail plays the inmate who sheds light on the life in prison with his composed, and occasionally perceptive account.

Shafiqhah Efandi, who plays the only female prisoner in the piece, sustains her acting with a poignant inner soul-scape. She delivers her final soliloquy compellingly, with each word piercing right into the heart of the viewers.

The script is a sincere and intelligent piece of writing, especially with its use of humour amidst the intense treatment of the subject. However, the overly-dense text of the play – which clocks at 2 hours and 15 minutes – falls flat at some moments during the second half of the show. By this time, there is hardly any display of the intention and subtext behind the lines. However, this is a well-researched, earnest, and humanity-championing piece of work that should be seen by more people.

“Discipline and Diversity”

Reviewer: Beverly Yuen
Performance: 19 March 2016

Simplicity, created by Argentine director Guillermo Angelelli and ITI 2016 graduating cohort of seven students, is a highly disciplined work based on a poem of the same title by Jorge Luis Borges.

The graduating cohort comprises students from Brazil, Hong Kong, India and Singapore. Drawing songs and tales from their own culture, they reflect and construct segments based on the text of the poem.  The performers seem to have mapped their experiences onto the poem instead of being led by it. This makes the interpretation a dynamic and lively one to watch.

The piece opens with shadows cast on the faces of the actors with a huge prominent lantern centre stage, and the question of “to be or not to be?” is posed. This is enhanced by varied tones of breath sounds, dialects and languages. The sound of “dong” emits a disturbing yet ethereal sound which evokes mystery and suspense. With the other structures resembling tombstones—designed by Chris Chua—to complete the picture, the piece seems to hint at a journey of exploration through the passage of life and death.

Throughout the performance, the actions are highly structured and precise, and at the same time alive. None of the action is accidental as every move is carefully planned and dynamically executed according to a certain rhythm. Additionally, the voice work is superb. Sounds of voices, songs, and breath provide a rich sustenance to the performance. At times, the resonances of the voice work hit me right into my heart; at other times, the sounds are so subtle and yet haunting that I cannot identify the maker of the sound.

If this piece is to be viewed from the perspective of the actors’ training, it gains my utmost respect and admiration for the commitment an actor devotes to one’s craft. The actor has to drop his/her ego and contribute as a small and yet essential part to this highly cohesive ensemble piece.

However, if I do not take the background of the creators and the context of the work into consideration, I may find some incoherent segments and the lack of climax disturbing. At the same time, I am not seeking for a “storyline”, but rather, a journey that could eventually bring me to a destination. For instance, I may listen to a piece of drumming without a storyline and be brought on a voyage which arrives at an anchorage.

Despite all that, this ephemeral piece could be a representation of life too. While we do wish for an apex or a closure in our life, events of life do not appear in that way all the time. Life is unexpected and the only constant in life is impermanence. Thus, this piece could be a much truer reflection of the reality of life than any other well-made plays. No matter what you may think of this performance, it is definitely one that compels endless contemplation, introspection, and discussion.

“Walking into the forbidden world”

Reviewer: Beverly Yuen
Performance: 26 March 2016

Entering the theatre space, one draws associations of testicles, condoms, and sex. The space is filled with installations of globs hanging from ceilings and irregular platforms with four men standing on them. The shadows cast on the faces reveal intense emotions as they confess their secrets. This causes a vehement sense of uneasiness as one walks into the forbidden world of the characters.

Production designer Chris Chua, lighting designer Tai Zi Feng and sound designer Jing Ng adeptly integrate various stage elements to create the intimate world of the four gay men in Grind, which is directed by Goh Boon Teck.

Audience members are free to move around the room to listen, watch and react to the private lives of the four characters. At times, you may be detached from the characters. At others, they are up-close and personal as they could be speaking to your face or stripping right in front of you. This pulls me into the inner psyche of the characters as I experience what seems to be prohibited and yet real, sincere and powerful.

Pang (Chong Woon Yong) has found his life partner and has planned for a wedding, but the only thing which is incomplete is the lack of acceptance by his sister, his only family member. Tian (Juni Goh) is insecure about who he is in real life, and obsessively turns to social media to seek attention by hitting the gym compulsively and posting photos of his body online. Long (Mitchell Fang) actively strives for his rights as a gay man in a society where homosexuals are deprived of benefits meant only for the straight world. Gan (Stanley Seah) is a devoted Christian trapped between the condemnation of sin and embracing his sexuality. The actors sustain the piece with immense conviction, which is enhanced by a keen sense of rhythm and well-coordinated voice work. The actors also play different characters in the monologues of each lead character.

Written by Goh Boon Teck and Shar Pi’ee, the script is a commendable mix of humour, raw emotions, intelligent discourse, poetic revelation and analogies.  Biblical references highlight the agony and struggle that Gan has to go through. The cities of Gomorrah and Sodom (which gives rise to the word Sodomy) are cited as cities of sin as people indulged in sexual acts, especially the “unnatural acts” consisting of anal or oral sex. Such a reference compels one to ponder about the issue of homosexuality in today’s society. Have things changed? Perhaps things have changed. Rather than being punished, the cities of sin—from a Christian perspective—are flourishing and filled with tourists, as put forth by the playwrights in the play.

The shame of being gay eventually leads Gan to commit suicide, which can also be read as a sacrifice for the sake of those around him. While his life winds up tragically, Tian, Pang and Long seem to find liberation and hope through the symbolism of the Pink Dot celebration at Hong Lim Park, which brings the piece to its finale.