A TWISTED KINGDOM by Dark Matter Theatrics

“Twisted Tales“

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 12 November 2015

A case of being unable to shake off past demons.

“Innocence is gold in this cruel world. And we are all born rich.”

That quote comes near the end of this performance of A Twisted Kingdom, which fully lives up to its “twisted” name (and the accompanying NC16 rating).

Marcia Vanderstraaten and Christopher Fok return with frequent collaborator Lian Sutton, under the collective name Dark Matter Theatrics (formerly The Common Folk). This play, written by Fok and directed by Vanderstraaten, stars Sutton as a Fool in a royal court, tasked to retrieve the young king-to-be from an alleged kidnapping. As he gets lost in the nearby dark forest, the fear of being pursued by the monsters lurking around him begins to bleed into the trauma of childhood, in a specifically Singaporean context.

Fok interweaves the fairy tale element together with the various real-life childhood traumas in modern society. As the plot shuffles back and forth between the two worlds (a witch is rebranded, capitalist-style, as a ”peddler of children”), there is an undercurrent of terror that hovers beneath the action – from the Fool’s suggestive affection for the young prince, to the creepily visceral accounts of child molestation and self-harm.

Of course, credit should go to Sutton for an energetic performance that is as loud as it is lewd. Leaping and skittering around, Sutton is perfectly at home as the Fool as he seamlessly shifts across characters: from a play-acting storyteller, to the next moment being a trauma victim confronting his past demons.

My only gripe with this direction is that all the nightmarish elements of the Fool are fleshed out in full (pun intended) – giving little to no room for variation in storytelling. Imagine a mood palette with only one colour: gloom, and with the progress of the plot, that it only grows darker and darker.

Perhaps, then, in a bid to play up the “twisted” element of the script, the creative team resorts to effects that come off as gimmicks (I certainly feel so): the gratuitous miming of a sex act on a child (in this case a doll prop), and the turning on of the house lights during the performance to jump-start the audience’s catharsis.

Perhaps the biggest problem within the script is that it never offers a way out of these real-life crises. Yes, it talks about the difficulty of trying to get others to empathise with these victims, but the more crucial and important second step – the way out – is not touched upon.

Which makes one wonder, either this is advocacy done in an incomplete fashion, or a very self-indulgent piece of theatre. I do hope it is the former.