“this is my grandfather’s road…”

Reviewer: Idelle Yee
Performance: 20 April 2019

As a child born and raised in Singapore, this reviewer grew up quite familiar with this common reprimand for any kind of unruly behaviour: “eh you think this is your grandfather’s road ah!” This is not a claim to fame just anyone could make, but Neo Kim Seng certainly can: his grandfather was businessman Neo Pee Teck, for whom Neo Pee Teck Lane is named.

For multidisciplinary practitioner Kim Seng, My Grandfather’s Road is clearly a painstakingly assembled labour of love. The original street sign, revealed in the performance to have been bid for with much strategising in a 2003 auction, hangs in the entrance to the Esplanade Theatre Studio. Monochrome images, seemingly taken from the pages of beloved old haunts, family vacations and neighbours are projected on screens at appropriate junctures, accompanied by affectionate accounts of childhood exploits and idiosyncrasies.

This iteration of My Grandfather’s Road sees two different versions being staged, one in English and the other in Cantonese. This particular Sunday afternoon performance, featuring Tan Cher Kian as the voice of Neo Kim Seng himself and Gary Tang as an unnamed third-person narrator character, is in Cantonese. Tang cuts a much stronger figure in terms of stage presence and command of the stage. His control of speech and body gestures as he seamlessly plays different characters causes him to somewhat overshadow Tan’s performance. Interestingly, this results in the character of Kim Seng and the stories he tells in the first person being somewhat less convincing than those that Tang’s third-person narrator tells on Kim Seng’s behalf. Whether intended by the production or otherwise, it seems as though the character of Kim Seng requires a third-person narrator to navigate this overwhelming mess of memory, and that this externalised figure is able to access and comment on these memories with greater directness and vividity.

The audience is largely silver-haired and Cantonese-speaking. Combined with the thrust stage set-up of the studio, the conversational manner of speech employed by the actors and the humming of cicadas, one feels like a child sitting in a black-and-white Neo Pee Teck Lane, listening to an “old grandfather story” told by an alleyway elder. I do not speak Cantonese as fluently I would like to, so I have invited my father, a native Cantonese speaker from the same generation as Kim Seng, to watch with me. The response from him, as well as most of the audience, seems to be overwhelming in its resonance – whether that’s lovingly recounted tales of neighbours with politically incorrect nicknames (“Black Skin” for a dark-skinned neighbour, for instance), the places being erased, or the land and its fast-forgotten names.

My father tells me as we leave the theatre that theirs is a displaced generation, who lost their roots to the land through systemic resettlements and demolishment; there is nothing physical to hold on to. My Grandfather’s Road responds in conversation: but there are still the stories your grandfather told you. On the train ride home, I sense in my fast-ageing father a renewed determination to do just so: one cannot always hold on to the land, but one can tell its stories.