“Economical Relief Pricing (ERP)”

Reviewer: Edward Eng
Performance: 29 September 2019

This is the sort of show where people fall in love over the course of a single song. But don’t fret: Pangdemonium’s Urinetown is the most fun you’ll have at a locally staged musical this year. It is charming and mad, and it happens to be the only American musical I’ve seen that has bothered to take on late capitalism and the government-industrial complex.

Urinetown’s premise is simple satire: the most expensive city in the world is having a water crisis and the only solution, its mayor argues, is to raise public toilet entry fees yet another time. This benefits the bribe-paying Urine Good Company (UGC), which towers over the population as the sole owner of toilets in the city. The police and custodians are in it too, enforcing the fee hike with rigid authority. The dissidents – those who pee in the bushes – are threatened with exile. The oppression becomes too much for the citizens to bear, and they come out in proletariat revolution.

The unlikely hero, played by Benjamin Chow, is toilet custodian Bobby Strong. Chow wears an archetypal charisma that can only be matched by the earnestness of co-star Mina Kaye’s character, Hope. Hope, of course, happens to be the good daughter of morally repugnant UGC magnate Caldwell. Tension between familial stability and the greater good ensues when Bobby and Hope fall in love.

But where Greg Kotis’ musical shines is in its irreverence towards its source material – most obviously, Les Misérables. Tracie Pang’s directorial hand in Urinetownis deft this time, sidestepping the question of whether the socialist ideals achieved by the show’s end were indeed the trigger for environmental collapse – Caldwell warns early on that free toilets will destroy the water table – in favour of rampant comedy. I enjoyed Pang’s lighthearted approach, as the text by itself seems too eager to accept the outcomes of Malthus’ controversial theory.

The ensemble is also mostly excellent, although it is hard to hear past the put-on accents, which sometimes dislocates Urinetownat the wrong places. In particular, the fourth-wall-breaking duo of Adrian Pang’s Officer Lockstock and Mae Elliessa’s street urchin Little Sally are welcome touches of self-referentiality to the otherwise by-the-numbers dramaturgy of the musical. Sean Ghazi as the huffing UGC tycoon and Jo Tan in the commoner-who-turns-out-to-be-a-long-lost-mother trope also provide strong support for the leading couple. On the design front, James Tan’s chameleon lighting is superlative against the more straightforward Broadway-style set by Eucien Chia.

I suppose my only real gripe with this self-referential style is that it pulls its punches on relatively serious subjects, which leaves me wondering if this could be missed opportunity for deeper satire. But to come across a big musical that has enough heart to laugh at the absurdities of late capitalism? That’s sick!

“Contemporary Class Conflict”

Reviewer: Edward Eng
Performance: 16 August 2019

Lin Meng-huan is not the first writer to suggest members of the underclass are treated like primal animals. But his portrayal of the subhuman treatment of the down-and-out using imagery from homelessness and East Asian hikikomori (adults who choose to live in complete isolation from the outside world) is very intriguing. A Dog’s House teeters on extremity, though I sometimes wished the forces in it worked more to serve the emotional narrative.

The play is set in a dumpy apartment. Between empty crisp packets and laundry, a pair of siblings is bound by an ambiguous relationship. Brother is an unemployed man who obsesses about going outside and living life, but instead watches TV all day long. Sister is slightly more functional: she goes to school and gets takeaway for Brother.

Their mother, who somehow does not live with them, is always present offstage. Several times a week, she brings Sister out for ‘afternoon tea’, which appears perfectly innocuous at first and draws Brother’s jealousy. Sister becomes uncomfortable with this arrangement. In Pinteresque rhythm, ‘afternoon tea’ turns increasingly odd – on one occasion Sister dresses in a Qing dynasty costume.

And as if the pressure is not piled on heavily enough, we are suddenly introduced to Older Brother, who has been isolating himself in his room all this while. Feral screams and the sounds of late-night sawing destabilise the two-sibling relationship.

I read the three siblings’ levels of feral-ness as an allegory of today’s class conflict. Each sub-class has a complex relationship with the one just above it. Three-bedroomers disparage four-bedroomers for being self-indulgent. They aspire to climb one rung up and are terrified of slipping one down. They are unable to recognise anyone below them as anything but animalistic: the uncivilised. The siblings in A Dog’s House even wear dog collars.

Next to them, Mother is an authority figure, her role anchored by questions her presence raises: why, for instance, has she put her three children here?

But the nagging question of where Father is is one force too many. He is mentioned sketchily, only three-quarters through the play. The lightness of his existence in the siblings’ minds imbues the mood with an unfinished, unexplained yearning, which seems too sudden a leap from the fearful tension that has been building all this while.

Then the play really topples over. The physical violence that suddenly erupts between the siblings is particularly sexual. There is little build-up between the first and second instance of it, which makes it difficult to make sense of either because the rest of the play is bound by a well-considered emotional logic.

I suspect the point A Dog’s House tries to make is something along the lines of how violence erupts when the wants and desires of the oppressed are repressed. But mining the theatrical form to excavate an understanding of how that eruption comes requires a defter pen, and certainly sharper direction. It needs to ensure the analogy between physical need and desire is precise to create meaning.

“… for the living, not the dead?”

Reviewer: Edward Eng
Performance: 29 August 2019

New writing is exciting. You enter the theatre without history, and hear language never pronounced beyond rehearsal. Checkpoint Theatre has historically supported new English-language play texts in Singapore, and Huzir Sulaiman and Claire Wong are often the first port of call for young writers.

This time, they introduce a play by Zenda Tan about family grief and grievances through the lens of a seven-day wake. The matriarch’s death has arrived, and like other Chinese-family-forced-to-come-together plays, is the impetus for an attempt at inter-generational and inter-personality empathy.

Tan’s play suggests scale: 13 characters over three generations, although Ah Ma’s attendance is only via her casket and the superstition that she is still floating nearby, spectrally. The first portrait of the family is at home, waiting on the cusp of her death. It fractures early when serious businessman and oldest son, Jerry (Hang Qian Chou), vents his frustration that the others are not taking the funeral rites seriously. This establishes a framework that pits the forces of the conservative and liberal, the old and new against each other.

The second fracture is when a grandson appears suddenly. Twenty-seven-year-old Eran (also played by Hang) is somehow estranged from his mother, turning up for the funeral only briefly with his girlfriend waiting in the car. He hands one of his uncles baijin (condolence money) instead of staying to fold joss paper. His mother is inevitably furious: the $50 notes aren’t even in an envelope. His brothers, Elijah (Adam Scott) and Eric (Chaney Chia), have feelings for him that respectively transcend and don’t transcend kinship.

But while Tan’s writing is often witty and plays lightly with meaning-making, it never reaches ingenuity. The gags stay gags, never becoming comedic critiques of characters and cultural structures. Jerry is the only character with a development arc, while the others are merely strangers with a few facts about themselves to perform.

Obviously this is true in real life, where we often only see uncurated slivers of people, but even naturalistic drama can stylise dialogue to its purposes. Characters in Alfian Sa’at’s Homesick are designed for the payoff when the truth comes out, while Florian Zeller’s The Father sketches its characters in recognisable distance so we can see ourselves in them. Because of this lack of textual direction and depth, Eat Duck falls mostly flat.

Wong’s stage direction is also odd. Transitions are bursts of discordant noises and harsh colours. Hang plays both major antagonists, one of whom only appears for about five minutes. A lot of the play is also geometrically static, with just two characters providing exposition about themselves, even though they have little impact on the direction of the plot.

Fortunately, some excellent performances are present. Karen Tan as the long-suffering arbitrator is heartrending, while Hang’s Jerry is surprisingly delicate. I wish I could say more about the other siblings, their spouses and the grandchildren, but I didn’t get a chance to know them.

“Identity?”

Reviewer: Edward Eng
Performance: 6 July 2019

Twelve years ago, Teater Ekamatra staged Mat Champion as a children’s musical about three superheroes coming together to defeat a language-stealing villain.

In that version of the musical, the superheroes fought to save citizens who were losing their language, the conceit being that languages must be physically saved from hegemonic forces in an increasingly globalised world. This starts with using the Malay language where it may not be convenient, and practising it even when it gets tedious. Without language, the citizens quite literally lose their identity and their life force.

2019’s Mat Champion brings the idea of practicing Malay to retain one’s identity offstage: the play’s programme booklet contains language exercises for children.

But the story is a lot more muddled than I thought it’d be. This time around, there are six characters split into two rival superhero teams: the all-male Mat Champion (Fir Rahman, Syaiful Ariffin, Norisham Osman) and the all-female Minah Rong Geng (Siti Maznah, Munah Bagharib, Farhana M Noor). Each character plays a specific archetype, ranging from Elvis-pakcik to flower power girl.

There is a subplot about the two teams challenging each other before coming together. Another arc focuses on Mat Ketat (Fir Rahman), whose feelings of difference from the others drive him to become a sort of classic monster-with-a-good-heart villain. Both mix in moral lessons about how friendship is more important than competition, although the adages fall flat on me.

The performance is largely enjoyable by last quarter and it is all good fun thanks to the sheer energy of the cast. Particularly exciting is the pop art scenic design, which plays briskly with the featherweight nostalgia that tinges most of director Rizman Putra’s shows. I feel too that the aesthetic value played better to the mostly young audience, the way Disney’s Mulan did to me when I was younger.

That said, as a Cantonese bereft of ability in my own mother tongue, I feel that the play could have done so much more than just entertain and chide. This staging of Mat Champion was a missed opportunity to inspire.

“In Rainbows”

Reviewer: Edward Eng
Performance: 19 May 2019

In the post-show talk after a performance of my favourite play, Simon Stephens’ Seawall, actor Andrew Scott dispenses a piece of acting advice: “Your job is to play the light; the darkness always plays itself.”

Split Theatrical Production’s latest self-funded production, Colours, chases that method aggressively. Writer-director Darryl Lim’s play is about personal meaning and the perilous journey to try and create it. It is specifically about the experience in the context of early adulthood, even though the average age of the company is well under 30.

Comprising the individual stories of its six cast members, Colours is set on a metaphorical airplane. Perhaps appropriately, we are flying on an Airbus 380, which will soon be ceasing production. The piece is also mostly told through physical theatre, which means the quarter-life crisis being brought to life is quite literally playful.

The cast starts off by singing pop songs like “Just the Way You Are” by Bruno Mars, and other cringey things. They then chat with the audience, asking us about our day and why we feel that way.

By the halfway mark – the six acts bear titles such as “the Heraclitean river of time” and “words crack” – the journey has gone completely sour. We now have red glow-sticks to hold in the dark, like emergency lamps at a crash site. They are singing “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree” as someone remembers their mother yelling, “Out! Out! Out! Out!” A birthday song becomes a private litany.

Lim treds some classic paths in fringe theatre. Personal stories, check. Work-in-progress look and feel, check. Fearlessness, check. But I feel it could have done more – the effect of sketching is only somewhat compelling, because there is little complexity by way of the questions asked.

This is something that I felt was awry with other recent productions helmed by young directors as well, such as Performing Malay Sketches by Second Breakfast Company and Faust/us by Nine Years Theatre. Why does everyone feel this way? Can we do anything about it? Should we do anything about it? What are the axioms on which our fears, expressions and joys stand?

Lim’s choreographer (Hong Guofeng) and sound designer (Te Hao Boon) also seem too busy chasing beautiful moments to let genuine tension build. Coupled with the extremely disparate sequences, this makes for choppy theatre.

That said, in Colours, there is strong evidence of daring, vivaciousness and heart. This is theatre worth watching and I will be waiting for what Lim and Split Theatre come up with next.

“The air is a vast library of books”

Reviewer: Edward Eng
Performance: 17 May 2019

Theatre loves history because it is a fuel with which all memories are made from.

Artist Ho Tzu Nyen knows this, as the eponymous character in his new work, The Mysterious Lai Teck, booms over and over: “I am the shadow of Ho Chi Minh”, each claim becoming more insistent and obsessed. But as the man loses control of power with his receding youth and the increasing number of attacks on the Malayan anti-colonialists – he is leader of the Malayan Communist Party – his voice leaks mortality salience and becomes much more pensive. The history play turns into an anxious tone poem.

It’s a slow-burner that starts with a bit of visual trickery: an infinite number of projected ‘curtains’ are drawn while the physical curtain stays closed. Eventually we catch our first glimpses of a man in the wispy light. Lai Teck, probably, although he goes by other names like Chang Hung and Mr. Wright.

Then the curtain falls away. The second and third segments further expose him while the technical wizardry focuses a single wall of light and sound that crystallises his voice. The real Lai Teck is just behind it, and he begins to narrates his exploits through the years. For all the exaggerations of his journey through colonial Indochina, the Malay peninsula and finally Singapore, it is certain that there is a real man. Lai Teck tells us, through unofficial biographers (policemen, party activists, other agents of power), that he has lived various narratives as a spy and traitor. He is a man who has led a full life.

Then comes a twist, that the ‘real’ onstage Lai Teck is completely animatronic, literally larger-than-life with his puppet-like proportions. The house lights come on suddenly, revealing that there is not even a puppeteer behind the whole thing. Everything about Lai Teck is fiction.

The Mysterious Lai Teck works well because accounts of the reconstituted Lai Teck are historically odd, and yet extremely familiar in tone. One young fellow audience member, who told me that this is one of the first few things he has watched in a theatre, observed: “It’s about the fake news bill!” I agreed, thinking about the atmosphere of distrust created by the recent Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation (POFMA) bill. Even the internet as the bogeyman is reflected in the animatronic Lai Teck.

My main gripe with The Mysterious Lai Teck is the performance-as-product framing. The one-hour runtime feels too long, and the theatre, too big. It is a rendering of the Southeast Asian psyche, bringing together climate, politicking and human strife amidst our gentle but changing landscape. The Mysterious Lai Teck is just too delicate to fit into the fashionable programme booklet.

“One Day We’ll Arrive at the Big House”

Reviewer: Edward Eng
Performance: 4 April 2019

On the back of Cake’s riotous examination of schoolyard power in Rubber Girl on the loose, The Studios now desaturates its space to bring us another study of power, this time in the earthy settings of race and the postcolonial.

But while this take on race/power is as deeply aestheticised and beautiful as any other, it is most obviously limited by its reprisal of the same devices and arguments found in recent plays and films. Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai’s Building a Character, Grace Kalaiselvi’s Goddess of Words and Sharon Frese’s Ayer Hitam all collide in this play, but nothing really new comes out of it.

Miss British is a muddy poem. Director Felipe Cervera combines live cinema, archive, personal story and rhythm to suggest how the issue of race is shaped by our own biases, as well as the biases of every author in history.

It also delves very much into the idea of jaggedness. So when Dorai, Kalaiselvi and Frese are dancing to the line, “white, brown and black”, we are aware that each iteration of the lyric is greatly inflected by the preceding scene: for instance, Dorai’s sobering encounter with a racist in the UK, or Kalaiselvi’s giggly encounter with a Sri Lankan man who asks her out.

There is live cinema, which reflects the three women’s faces on large screens. The cameras are a multi-faceted device: they make visible the women for the first time, and capture them re-performing historical tableaus with the passion of hindsight. But more than aiding reflection, they also intervene in the theatrical space, overlaying text quoted from post-colonial theory onto the images.

The scenes themselves are subtle and yet powerful – the most poignant being the incident of a washerwoman who is abused by her colonial master, played once each by the three actors. Another touching segment is the barren ritual of tea being served, whilst an infant is held by a nearby surrogate.

Which leads me to question how a theatre of struggle is felt. By some standard of judgement, Miss British is quite excellent. It is hauntingly beautiful and while not too inventive, it depicts its subject well and appropriately. At the end of the day, we want to see the three women win. Or as one character says, “arrive at the big house.”

But having seen the agency and urgent hurt in other productions that take a similar approach, there is a ‘liveness’ that Miss British is missing. Perhaps it comes from the sense of curation arising from the mishmash of theatre and live cinema. Or from the straightforwardness of the answer that racism and colonialism are always awful. Either way, I left the theatre feeling slightly empty.

“Imitation game”

Reviewer: Edward Eng
Performance: 15 March 2019

Little adds up in Edith Podesta’s staging of Complicite’s A Disappearing Number. Several ideas on mathematics and how it manifests in love, history and mortality are visited superficially but nothing more.

The play pulls together two stories: in 1913, English mathematician G. H. Hardy invites an Indian clerk named Srinivasa Ramanujan to work with him when he discovers Ramanujan has an eye for the mathematical sublime. Meanwhile, an American fund manager (Pavan Singh) falls in love with a university lecturer (Koh Wan Ching) after he attends her lecture on sequences and series in present-day Brunel University in the UK.

Fictional physicist Aninda Rao (Remesh Panicker) narrates. He draws links between the two stories, which at heart are both about love.

The interweaving narrative tinkers on rendering the invisible world through a kaleidoscope which, if handled well, would allow the burning core of the drama to shine. But Podesta’s version seems to squander most of her resources on unnecessary theatrical devices.

If it sounds complex, it sure is. Tabla drums – admittedly well-textured and often stirring – are played live (Nawaz Mirajkar) to set the scene. The good ensemble from NUS Stage, the sound samples (Teo Wee Boon) and lighting atmospherics (Suven Chan) further nudge the world into shape. Brian Gothong Tan’s projection adds something as well.

But the stagecraft is distracting to say the least. The various elements fight to say the same thing, and often end up sounding like odd imitations of each other.

It is also detrimental that the main characters are less interesting than the supporting cast from NUS Stage. This is partly because the main cast gives only serviceable performances.

I also enjoyed the little riffs on how numbers surface in everyday interactions. In one recurring scene where the fund manager talks to a BT mobile call centre staffer, for instance, numbers unravel across time, space and social condition. Scenes like this actually end up being much more fascinating than the main storyline.

They remind me of a similar story about how people see beauty in the abstract: Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises breathes life into warplane designer Jiro Horikoshi using moments that do not explicitly further the plot. The difference is that The Wind Rises folds all its dramatic elements into each other seamlessly.

Podesta’s direction, on the other hand, leaves bits and bolts sticking out. There are these huge screens that go up and down, and their sheer size makes the device clunky. Accents and intentions are also oddly chosen: some of the cast feel like they want to be Indian and they want to like maths. That disappointed me the most.

“To transition or to transit?”

Reviewer: Edward Eng
Performance: 21 February 2019

A translucent ellipse gazes like a cloud from the sky of the room. Then a mechanical buzz asks the actors to come onstage.

This is playwright-director Stanley Seah’s idea of purgatory, as billed, although the first 15 minutes of the play feel open-ended enough to suggest some sort of conceit around the idea of ‘transitioning’. Perhaps this is a play hinting at the instability of youth (as suggested by the young actors), or the idea of gender transitioning (says the clinical attire)?

Unfortunately, Toy Factory’s Transition Room carries little beyond the initial idea in terms of script. Its main character, Mike (Christer Jon Aplin), essentially repeats the question, “Why am I here?” through every phase of the Room. Sometimes he asks other questions, like “Why are HDBs so expensive?”, but the effect remains the same.

The answers given are mostly half-hearted and inconsequential. This is fine because it reflects life itself. However, it becomes a real issue when Mike barely seems to care about the answers to his questions. But if we are not meant to care about him, then why make him the sole protagonist?

But the rest of the play is not bad simply because Mike is such an unlikeable character. Dramaturgically, there is little precision in handling ideas of meaning, the self, and purpose. This results in a text that does not tease absurdly or post-dramatically. It is superficially funny because of gags, and not because of any underlying meaning-making. There are also several careless transition scenes that do not shake the metaphysics of the play, and instead elicits random laughs.

The play ends abruptly, after Mike breaks into another superficial pontification. The final point is something about how it matters little what choice he makes, because death equalises. The problem is that there are many far more humanistic plays in existence that reach the same conclusion.

Of the play’s design, Vick Low’s murmuring fridge buzz is interesting but could be put to better use in another play. Similarly, the incidental usage of Tai Zi Feng’s cool-tinged strip lighting to heighten tension does not substitute well for the lack of tension in the text itself.

All that said, the plus point for Transition Room is its supporting cast. The play has unearthed some unexpected gems in its actors by giving them character roles they have made their own. Kaykay Nizam, for instance, has reaffirmed my opinion that he can mesmerise even without having anything meaningful to say. Opposite him, Marc Valentine Chia is a rollicking good time.

Victoria Chen and Jazmine Monaz are a double-threat, shifting effortlessly between their foil roles and unguarded millennial asides. Meanwhile, Tan Hui Er wields innocence like a weapon, turning a massage scene from routine to layers of pointed examination.

I look forward to watching them elsewhere in the future.

“The chicken’s still dancing“

Reviewer: Edward Eng
Performance: 19 February 2019

You’re going to die. Every one of your friends will die. So will your crush. So will the strange man from the office across yours who give you a pat on the back sometimes.

I would be lying if I said Sarah Kane’s work doesn’t move me. Playwright Simon Stephens once said at a talk I attended that this is because Kane’s abjection emphasises her humanity, particularly in Cleansed and Crave where the tenderness between nuclear fallout and ultraviolence is quite distinct.

Her play 4.48 Psychosis, on the other hand, is a different emotional creature. It is Kane’s suicide note. Which makes adaptation odd: is it not exploitative? Why would anyone stage a suicide note?

Artist Liu Xiaoyi mostly overcomes these issues by personally reclaiming the narrative and structure. In FOUR FOUR EIGHT, he overlays the abstraction of Kane’s script on the grounded humanity of his own life. Since Liu is physically present in the production, FOUR FOUR EIGHT feels less suicidal and more existential.

It starts with Liu’s playful emails to his audience: one talks about his childhood while another snapshots a prosaic lift landing in a Workers’ Party-held constituency.

The performance itself is a sort of ‘choose your own (emotional) adventure’ through Esplanade that extends this existential-playfulness. We go to the rooftop, the waterfront, the Exciseman Bar (where Liu has set up camp), and a secret corridor that he enjoys. A little notebook is provided as a guide. It splices Kane’s original text and contains exercises inspired by it.

The places we go to feel like a jigsaw puzzle of one’s life. I am surprisingly touched by the secret corridor: I draw it as a softly-lit oasis. The sounds of the nearby escalator and plant room feel like an iron lung near the sea.

But the private room where Liu resides is strange: we get a drink from the bar and sit down to watch Liu and his belongings. The sudden jump here after pensively walking through public spaces makes this room seem almost pornographic. This is partly because the $58 ticket price, the exquisitely-bound notebook and the bar setting commodify the performance. The glass of nice whisky feels extraneous, as though it is an attempt to justify the performance, rather than the other way round. It is among the various ‘package-products’ of the performance that seem too disparate to honestly express Liu’s existentialism.

Watching Liu, I come to see how this honesty is important, because there are affecting moments in the room. Liu holds a stranger’s shoulder. Another audience member cries and he does too. One of the exercises is to mail a letter to a person of your choice, on the premise that today is the last day of your life.

4.48 Psychosis is most affecting when it is allowed to hold an audience in its spell. The author’s last moments yearning for human connection are heartbreaking. Liu captures these moments well, but if he can better limit the distractions, FOUR FOUR EIGHT has the potential for magic.