“An Intimate Affair”

Reviewer: Lee Shu Yu
Performance: 7 September 2019

Ask anyone for the title of an iconic Singaporean play and you are likely to hear “Emily of Emerald Hill” – with good reason. The searing monodrama was written by Stella Kon in 1982, and tells of the trials and glories of the Peranakan matriarch Emily Gan. It has been performed more than 500 times across Singapore, Malaysia, Beijing and even Mumbai.

There’s simply no other play fit for the grand opening of Wild Rice’s new theatre at Funan Mall. But what awaited me was a riotous and chaotic first act.

This production, directed by Glen Goei, takes full advantage of the intimate thrust stage. With everyone sitting close together, Heng easily calls latecomers up on stage to tease, and singles out front-row audience members to interrogate as one of Emily’s servants.

Kon’s play requires the audience to keep up with Emily’s various personalities – tender, showy and everything in between – and the meandering chronology of events. And Wild Rice’s liberal additions of audience interaction ends up further confusing the voice of Emily.

While it is thrilling and comical when an audience member is caught off-guard, Heng’s constant breaking off from the text becomes jarring to the overall flow of Emily’s story. I find myself being distracted by his own larger-than-life persona and having to deal with too much added banter. It takes me a while to get used to the fact that I am not watching a one-woman drama, but something closer to a stand-up act involving an audience ensemble.

In a sequence where Emily reveals, through various interactions with her family, just how controlling and demanding she can be, Heng deliberately propels through the montage with added flourishes, never stopping to catch a breath. The feat yields thunderous applause and cat calls, but it feels like such glee is misplaced. In between Heng lifting up Emily’s voice and drowning it with frolics, I wonder if this play could have been titled Ivan Heng of Funan Mall instead.

Yet, for such a no-holds-barred production, its design elements are surprisingly conservative. Set design by Wong Chee Wai is uninspiring; Emily’s web of control over the home is literally conveyed by strings that go across the hulking, white façade of the house. Sound design by Paul Searles is mostly functional, coming on as predictable cues for Emily but very little else.

Thankfully, as Emily grows older, Heng too pulls back. Where he shows little to no restraint in the first half, the second half of the play finally gives us some breathing room as he flaunts his versatility. This is where Heng shows he is no one-trick pony, but a force to be reckoned with when it comes to playing the icon that he has made his own.

And while Heng’s Emily is not for everyone, the endless guffaws from the audience signal that a campy and unexpected performer can indeed refresh an old text.

Alas, one last thing pricks at my experience of the play.

In the first act, amidst the playfulness, Heng confiscates a mobile phone from an audience member trying to video-record his performance. But then, during Emily’s most powerful speech, another person’s mobile phone starts to ring. Some of the audience even laugh in anticipation of what Heng would do. Disgruntled, he momentarily snaps out of character to chide the culprit into silencing their still-buzzing phone.

His recovery from the disruption is seamless and poised, but these incidents nonetheless beget the question: Wild Rice might be ready to get intimate with audiences, but are our audiences ready to be held accountable for their actions?

“No phones, just ghosts living in the moment”

Reviewer: Lee Shu Yu
Performance: 18 May 2019

I love scrolling down the social media feeds I have carefully curated to my interests. I love recognising my online friends by their handles. My fingers probably scroll and tap in my sleep.

Depending on one’s outlook, I am what people call a digital native, or a smartphone zombie. And I have to admit, I love it.

Yet, there is nothing more satisfying than surrendering my connectivity for an hour or two at the theatre. I find myself grinning at Ghost Call’s pre-show expectation to turn our phones off. What if somebody tries contacting me? Do I turn into that blue-ticking ghoul instead?

I leave the irony at the door of Room 1 and am greeted by the sterile white room ahead. A bright-eyed Adeline (Stephanie Rae Yoong) sticks pink and blue post-its on the wall. There are greetings and questions, hopes and fears, and even a game of tic-tac-toe.

Right next door in Room 2, a furtive Evan (Matthew Goh) scribbles shyly. He keeps the notes to himself.

In and out I go between rooms at Ghost Call, written by Nabilah Said in collaboration with RAW Moves. It is a self-directed experience: audience members move about and interact with each other and the dancers. Soon, we learn from a cordial voiceover that Evan and Adeline live in Clicktopia, where the sun never sets and people are always moving. It is a cheeky jab at the internet and smartphone culture that never sleeps, and it gradually tumbles toward chaos.

At one point, Adeline dances beneath a blanket in the dark. Although I am curious about the heavy breathing coming from Evan next door, the strained beauty of her understated movement keeps me watching. A voice recording detailing modern life on social media plays softly, just barely audible.

When I return to Evan, his movement has taken a drastic turn. Possessed by a sudden desperation, he careens between audience bodies and across the space. He moves with such a powerful mix of violence, grace and discipline that I am immediately pained by the sight. The same voiceover from before has become sickening in its relentless drone.

It is then I get hit by a wave of inexplicable loneliness that I may never get to know either Evan or Adeline in full.

Ghost Call is an experience designed to elicit “FOMO” – a fear of missing out – and does so to great success. The strangeness of watching only one half of a performance amplifies the disconnection of the social media age that permeates our lives.

Between guessing the happenings in the next room, watching the dancers and other participants and feeling self-conscious in return, the sensory overload overwhelms me. Word becomes noise and bodies become spectres. I find myself floating in the limbo of fiction and reality, presence and algorithms.

It is a conceptually strong piece of work that captures the bittersweet sensations of modern communication that brings us closer in a myriad of ways, but perhaps ultimately distances us from each other.

Yet, I cannot help but feel like beyond lambasting the smartphone age, Ghost Call also laments our inherent need for validation and connection. It seems like technology did not just make ghosts of us, it simply opened the doors for our own ghosts to show themselves.

“With eyes wide open”

Reviewer: Lee Shu Yu
Performance: 28 April 2019

With almost no information about the work available publicly, participants of Lemon & Koko’s immersive experiences take a leap of faith by showing up at secret locations and travelling to strange fictional worlds.

But I am no stranger to Secretive Thing’s modus operandi. It is a risk I willingly take, and I am excited for something more than yet another show in a black box. At the designated time of our appointment for Secretive Thing 11, my two companions and I are led to the third level of an old and unassuming metal works building.

Alas, I get another kind of box: a shoe box.

A guide hands us small instruction booklets. We are residents living in a small temporary shelter, waiting to be given citizenship in a post-war society. The mission? To live day-to-day and to build a home.

If this sounds simplistic, let us not forget it is precisely what many Singaporeans strive, and fail, to do.

It is said that theatre holds up a mirror to society, but Secretive Thing 11 goes further than that. The experience itself is a microcosm of society, and its mechanics are clear and effective: each participant needs to be a productive member of the district, with specific tasks to carry out. Along the way, we are fed information and required to make some difficult choices. By the end, participants are driven to reflect on our own positionality as individuals within a collective.

Without divulging too much information and spoiling the fun, it suffices to say that Lemon & Koko display a great understanding of human psychology in the design and gameplay. They skillfully graft aspects of capitalist society into the experience and turn participants into competitive, goal-oriented rats racing against time. It brings out the worst in me: unthinking and blatant selfishness. The gameplay is so sublime that I barely recognise myself and my decisions afterwards.

The most terrific part of the experience is its transparency. Time is taken to ease us into an enjoyable routine that seems simple enough, but it becomes the most insidious apparatus toward the very end. Although I entered with my eyes wide open and my guard up, Secretive Thing 11 shows how easy it is to be trapped as a sleeping member of society.

The gruffness of the experience is in itself a strong statement. It proves theatre-making does not need a loud and sleek appearance to achieve maximum impact – only strong ideas, clever execution, and good use of the active audience.

“Poetry in Motion”

Reviewer: Lee Shu Yu
Performance: 2 March 2019

Upon entering the venue for Still Life – TheatreWorks’ white box at 72-13 – I swoon. We are in an artist’s studio, designed by Petrina Dawn Tan, and it is stunning. The centerpiece is a suspended sculpture, with branches caught in a net to form a nest. With the walls covered in portraits and nude paintings, and the studio bathed in warm light, it feels like I have stepped into a loving embrace.

The subject of our study, artist and former president of AWARE, Dana Lam, is sketching. Her piercing gaze passes over the crowd and her fingers work deftly to scrape charcoal on paper. In this casual but intimate setting, I feel exposed, yet well cared for.

That is the charm of Still Life, written by Lam, who also performs alongside Jean Ng, and directed and dramaturged by Claire Wong. This play comes at the end of a year where Lam set out to make all the art she had always wanted to. It is an introspection of her passion for both art and activism, but also a journey of finding peace with her late mother.

Lam is a joy to watch on stage. She carries the audience through vignettes of her life with great energy and fervour. From wrestling back leadership of AWARE to explaining about her three fathers to school teachers, the stories she shares are fascinating and heart-breaking. And she tells them with such lucidity and sincerity that I am hooked from start to end. Lam is tenacious and unflinching, and even when vulnerable, she is self-assured.

It is an invigorating portrayal of womanhood that is so rare, I hesitate to breathe for fear of breaking the spell. A play about women, made by women, Still Life shows sensitivity and wisdom. Strength, anger, humour, age and sensuality collide in a heady mix in this play, a cocktail so different from the usual reductive and misogynistic stereotypes of women in media.

Yet, beneath the strength lies tenderness. In one scene, Ng sits atop a table, posing for Lam. In the long silence, Ng and Lam look at each other, and the audience looks at them. Something silently passes between them; I see shared honesty, and love emanating from Lam’s brush as she caresses the canvas. The connection and tenderness they share brings all the other canvases in the room to life.

Through the brush and text, Still Life presents image after stirring image. The beauty of the staging and the poignancy of the writing makes this an evocative experience. The work is poetry in motion, delicately wrought by Lam’s lyrical word, and expertly executed.

“Old shadows in new light”

Reviewer: Lee Shu Yu
Performance: 21 February 2019

There is always something novel about entering a public building after-hours. I suppose it is the excitement of gaining access to an otherwise restricted area, or perhaps it is just the unnatural silence that makes the experience more thrilling. Maybe it is the leftover energy from the day’s events that echoes like a bell through the walls.

There is even the promise of seeing something that is not quite there.

GroundZ-0 Collective’s latest work, Shadows IN the Walls, ticks all these checkboxes. In collaboration with the National Gallery of Singapore (NGS), the work is presented as part of the Light to Night Festival 2019’s Bicentennial edition. We are taken on a 60-minute night tour at the gallery, led by Qi En (Tan Weiying) and there, we run into characters from the yesteryears of Singapore.

The pristine NGS feels distant and even clinical at first. But even before our kind tour guide can finish her welcome message, the ensemble of actors flit in and out of the foyer’s balconies in a cacophony of voices and sounds. Just as it hits a crescendo, the activity disappears like a teasing apparition. It is a chilling but effective start to the night.

Tan is an enthusiastic and sincere tour guide, and her passion for the stories is infectious. She takes us through the beautiful sites in the former Supreme Court and City Hall buildings, dropping nuggets of history and of her own life. It makes the walk a little more personal, and the intimacy of the experience is its strongest point. At every turn, characters from the past tell their tales in little vignettes delivered by the competent actors. Director Zelda Tatiana Ng uses the unique venue and its acoustics to her advantage, having the ensemble leave phatasmic echoes of themselves for us to investigate as they run through the hallways. Jing Ng’s masterful sound design is also crucial in setting the mood and enlivening the massive building. By their hand, history comes alive.

The stories of the characters range from the familiar to the obscure. Johan the Journalist (Joel Low), introduces Cavaliere Rudolfo Nolli, an Italian sculptor responsible for the pediment on the building’s façade. Munsyi Abdullah (Yazid Jalil) recollects his service to Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles in the glorious “Swearing Room”. Later, the tour group runs into a forlorn Blue Samsui woman (Catherine Wong) who laid the original rubber tiles for the building.

As we walk, our guide also problematises our squeaky-clean official narratives, which is refreshing and provides much needed balance to the work. But I am unable to shake off the cliché that Shadows IN the Walls, too, perpetuates the same diluted narratives. Perhaps the point of the work is to look beyond the light, and consider what is gritty and unsaid and left in the shadows. Still, given its length and scope, Shadows IN the Walls is a successful and confident piece of work that both locals and tourists enjoy. Against the backdrop of museum displays and the polished wooden floors, the anachronism of the live actors in traditional garb is provocative. It leaves me wondering about my own relationship with history, colonialism and nation-building in modern Singapore.

But by the end of the night, one melancholic thought trumps all: here in Singapore, it seems we have stories too big for the glass cases, and yet nowhere to put them.

One can only hope for more of such collaborations to refresh our collective history in the bicentennial year and beyond.

“Late Company is just in time”

Reviewer: Lee Shu Yu
Performance: 24 February 2019

How do you come to terms with your child’s suicide?

This is the big question that looms over Victoria Theatre on a sunny Sunday afternoon. While happy families take playful photos on Empress Lawn, I find myself choked up with nervous laughter and holding back tears watching Pandemonium’s first production of the season, Late Company.

We, the audience, know what we have gotten ourselves into based on the play’s synopsis, but still, how do you break the ice with the family who bullied your son into killing himself?

Written by Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill when he was just 23, Late Company is an impassioned play about the devastating consequences of bullying. Debora and Michael (Janice Koh and Edward Choy) seek closure over their son Joel’s suicide. They invite Tamara and Bill (Karen Tan and Adrian Pang), whose son Curtis (Xander Pang) was a bully to Joel, over to clear the air.

First comes dinner, then confrontation. Cordial greetings turn into painful revelations as each family fights to preserve their own. Tannahill’s script is sublime; easy to follow and yet packed full of sadness, anger and awkward humour. Every sentence exudes delectable subtext and the mounting tension makes for compelling drama. It meanders through polarising issues surrounding Joel’s death – including mental health, victim-blaming, anti-LGBT views and toxic masculinity – remaining ever-relevant but never once didactic.

Director Tracie Pang and the team of actors are stellar, delivering Tannahill’s fervent text with precision and charm. It is a combination of ruthlessness and vulnerability that the characters and actors display that makes this play a real masterpiece to watch. Koh in particular stands out as Michael’s artist wife and grieving mother, Debora, capturing the complexity of the character well. Her range shines through Debora’s emotional highs and lows, from smearing guacamole on the pristine walls in rage to holding her own against the brash, entitled accusations of Adrian Pang’s character, Bill.

Speaking of walls, Petrina Dawn Tan’s gorgeous set design frames the action. Conceptualised and built with excruciating detail, the interior of the landed home features huge art pieces, Debora’s sculptures and even a water feature in the garden. But it is this perfect facade that hides the unimaginable pain of losing one’s own child. As the play progresses, the beauty becomes excess, and the walls start to close in and suffocate the cast and audience alike. The discomfort is palpable and the silence is thick with regret. Like the guacamole that slops to the floor helplessly, the words, too, have fallen, pointed, yet pointless.

Late Company is a must-watch play that checks all the right boxes. The text and visuals are in perfect harmony, and yet they leave a mark much deeper than can be articulated. There is no sweet treat to end this review with. It is a play that is crucial to stage in Singapore, where teen suicide and bullying has reached alarming rates. But it is more than just a public service announcement about one bully’s actions. Instead, it picks at bullying as an institution, rooted in toxic masculinity, stigma, and power to hurt and segregate those different from us – be they of a different class, sexuality or race. It is an institution that we all knowingly or unknowingly partake in. That, perhaps, is the guilt that is the hardest to stomach.

“Turn Up The Heat In Abhijeet”

Reviewer: Lee Shu Yu
Performance: 20 January 2019

In The Adventures of Abhijeet, Patch and Punnet has once again opted to use kitschy buffoonery to give audiences a fun show, this time to shed light on the ill treatment of migrant workers. Unfortunately, not all of the playfulness lands well.

The play starts off with a melodramatic but all too familiar situation: Abhijeet, or Jeet, (Jit Dastidar) prays for a way to earn money to save his ailing daughter. A cloaked wizard/narrator (Krish Natarajan) appears, and offers to send him on a quest to earn gold coins in Singaland.

Jeet finds work in Singaland stacking boxes, but when he gets injured, he is sent on a wild-goose chase for a “pink gem” to pay for his treatment. Along the way, he befriends other migrant workers, or “Flower People”. Throughout, the mechanical Singalanders, clad in pink, flit in and out of scenes as soulless bureaucrats. The witty quickfire by the cast is clever, if only one can hear them clearly and consistently.

The cast toe the line when it comes to representing the Flower People. I get a rude shock when I see Sharmaine Goh appear with face-paint as the Filipino character Gloria: in the warm light, it looks like brown-face. It really is just purple, and gets explained away with the magic that permeates the piece – Gloria’s employer is a witch who turns her purple every time she does something wrong. Following horror stories of employers abusing their domestic helpers, I appreciate the company’s choice to jolt audiences under the guise of fantasy. But when the purple-face jokes get tiresomely overused, this missed opportunity for criticism becomes mere mockery.

The Flower People also make some very questionable choices. Gloria steals from her employers before running away, and she and Jeet get high on stolen drugs. Together with their third companion, Ling Ling (Lynn Chia), they then bully a rude, wheelchair-using old lady who lives in a shoe.

Ultimately, the Flower People are nothing more than society’s stereotypes of them. They are pitiful and confused refugees who engage in vices – and we never see a firm criticism of the society that stereotypes them as such. The play also puts the onus entirely on the Flower People to make their own lives better, which renders the villainy, injustice and prejudice against them invisible. Clearly, this is not an accurate representation of migrant workers. But even so, one must ask, whose gaze has taken precedence in the piece?

The only glimmer of power reversal comes in an Oz-like fashion. The three friends meet the “Dra-Gon” (Andrew Marko) in his ivory tower, only to realise he is the half-baked leader of Singaland. It is an interesting concept, three migrant workers helping the incumbent find his wings again, but this work-in-progress ends on a deliberate cliff-hanger.

I desperately wanted to see the company succeed in dealing with social issues without using realism, but The Adventures of Abhijeet seems powerless and cursory. The team may need to reconsider their take on the migrant debate, in order to deliver a more effective farce with greater conviction in future iterations of the work.

“Hush Hush for a Harrowing Ride”

Reviewer: Lee Shu Yu
Performance: 19 August 2018

Secretive Thing 215 starts with a marketing gimmick: a suspicious email invitation with a not-so-subtle title.

There is no pertinent information available, creating some measure of suspense in this reviewer. But in this way, the performance has already begun. By the time I am at the site – an unassuming suburban neighbourhood disclosed via text only the day before – paranoia has set in.

I soon learn all this is not a mere gimmick: this experience is not for the faint-hearted.

The creators of Secretive Thing 215, “Lemon and Koko”, have created an immersive psychological thriller. The experience lasts between 30 and 60 minutes, depending on one’s own progress. Each participant roleplays with a fictional storyline and receives instructions to complete simple tasks via a Whatsapp channel. There are crucial moral decisions to make as the conflict slowly unfolds.

From automated texts to completing tasks at seemingly unmanned stations, there is hardly any direct connection with another human being.

Everything is remotely controlled and understated. It is difficult to tell where the theatre starts and real life ends.

This is Secretive Thing 215’s fear factor, and it is executed seamlessly. To passers-by, it does not look remarkable. Yet, as I receive timely instructions that accompanies each, I am very aware that I am being watched.

I tune in to a radio network that the team has created to set the context of the play, marveling at the detail. The audio quality can be clearer and more consistent, but it is an effective way to create suspense and warn of antagonists lying in wait to thwart my journey.

Weaving through shopfronts and bus-stops, I am painfully aware of how the theatrical “safe space” no longer exists.

And to be honest, I miss that security.

I catch a glimpse of an envelope similar to the one I am clutching sitting inside a suspicious black sedan and I recoil from it in fear. A passer-by brushes by me and I startle. Every element of the public space has become a threat.

But just as the plot hits its climax, the experience is over. As much as I am left slightly disappointed and wanting more, I am relieved and exhausted.

Secretive Thing 215 has used technology dramatically and theatrically, staging the tensions between information overload and virtual loneliness. The plot of the performance needs more exploration but the paranoia generated by the dramaturgy sufficiently occupies the audience not to notice the plot weaknesses.

The artful distilling of the mystery and suspense that swells into an overwhelming crescendo while the world remains oblivious is unnerving.

One exits the experience like stepping away from a dream, never to know its elusive alternative endings, or confirm it even happened.