NATIONAL MEMORY PROJECT by Johnny Jon Jon

“National Memory Project”

Reviewer: Dawn Teo
Performance: 10 June 2016

Every citizen has to contribute a memory to the memory corps to facilitate organisation, research, discovery and eventually, archive. When a convicted murderer on death row is forced to share a memory, a confrontation ensues with the officer tasked with this job. In the hopes of moving towards the future, they are both forced to retrace their paths made in the past.

Written by Johnny Jon Jon and co-directed with Nadia Cheriyan, the focus of this 50-minute play is on the text as well as the individual characters.

There are more questions unearthed than answered. The result is bittersweet for me. The issues tackled reflect a part of Singapore that is seldom questioned today – the need for constant construction and upgrading, turning a blind eye to what we sacrifice in the process and leaving certain people behind.

Presented in Malay, English as well as certain Chinese dialects, National Memory Project captures the individual stories of each character and offers them to the audience to ponder. The use of surtitles ensures inclusiveness.

To exemplify inclusiveness, the team has a cue for all Muslim members of the audience to break  their fast during the show. The cue is cleverly included into the play as a sip of water made by one of their actors. The gesture is very heartwarming, especially in a multiracial country such as ours.

The team chooses to use multimedia as a clever tool to transcend space and time. Beyond the usual showings of videos and photographs to keep the story moving along, there are also portions of the play where persons appear in video-form to converse with a live actor. Using these videos as a manifestation of memory, the audience witnesses the absences and presences of memory in play. It is a slight pity that sometimes, the audio recording together with the videos are not as clear and some words are lost.

Besides two screens to present the videos and surtitles, a simple table, bench and chair is all that make up the set. The simplicity is functional and helps with directing the audiences’ focus onto the two actors on stage.

As part of The Twenty-Something Festival, National Memory Project is a play that speaks about current affairs and is unafraid to question our current societal structure. A simple yet strong work, it brings story-telling to its basic form and appeals to us in its sincerity and relevance.