“Rubber Girl on the loose”

Reviewer: Amanda Leong
Performance: 30 March 2019

The title Rubber Girl on the loose is a curious one. Who or what is a rubber girl? Can a person be made of rubber? What does it mean to have a rubber-like personality? This is my first encounter with a Cake Theatrics production, and I’m not sure what to expect based on the image conjured by the title.

The Rubber Girl, performed by Sarah Chaffey, soon makes an appearance. She is Antigone, a young woman from Thebes who defies her uncle and ruler Creon’s law to bury her brother Polynices. She walks around the space, using her body to bend and stretch a large rubber band. She is as strong and elastic as this rubber band.

This elasticity – its anxiety-inducing stretch and release – permeates the rest of this atmosphere, exciting, and tiring two-hour piece. For the first half of the performance, I am intrigued by the creativity of the stagecraft and direction. However, the sheer number of different elements occurring on the stage overwhelms me after a while, and ends up hindering my experience.

There are some elements that enhanced the piece. In one scene, a naked body lying on the side of the stage, covered with dirt, rises. This is Polynices, played truthfully and hauntingly by Nicholas Tee, and he tells us about his curse to roam as a spirit. In another scene, the projector beams a window into the underworld onto the screen, where we see the blind prophet Tiresias, and Polynices’ parents, Jocasta and Oedipus. The image of Oedipus, portrayed by Edith Podesta with blood stains on a cloth wrapped around her head where her eyes were, ingrains itself in my memory. There is an apt comparison to be drawn between the god-like realm and the worlds that we access through our computer screens –they seem distant, but are in actuality deeply entwined with our lives.

However, there are other elements that feel either excessive or underutilized. The live musician, Berlin-based Matthias Engler, is tangential at best and distracting at worst. And while West Papuan dancer Darlane Litaay’s beautiful and precise physical movement brings up the deep psychical drama, we are never fully given the space to appreciate his craft or his role, as his subtle performance is usually overshadowed by all the other loud elements in the piece.

Overall, Rubber Girl on the loose is an exciting rendition of the classic tragedy, Antigone, especially as it attempts to use various elements to express the unspoken tension that drives the piece. It is pity that they do not tie in together cohesively in the end. Instead, it floats in the shadow of the promises of what it could have been, just like Polynices’ restless ghost.

《谁是哈里斯·沙玛》

Reviewer: Neo Hai Bin | 梁海彬
Performance: 1 July 2017

该剧导演娜塔莉利用6个演员演绎哈里斯笔下的多个角色。演员们披上这些角色的外衣，在多个身份之间游走、穿梭、转换；观众也跟着演员们经历众多角色的情感与处境。在导演的处理下，连“哈里斯·沙玛”也变成了一种角色／身份。他是个公认的剧作家，但在其中一幕，导演播放当年哈里斯演出的片段。原来他也曾是个演员，这也曾是他的身份。身份的复杂性和流动性是该剧的主题之一。

导演选择呈现哈里斯的哪一部剧、她如何做选择、如何处理戏剧架构、如何做呈现—— 都意味着她如何为观众建构“哈里斯·沙玛”。哈里斯·沙玛究竟是谁？他能够被“本质化”成一个单一固定的身份和职责吗？该剧开始时，演员们念出哈里斯创作过的剧名，到了最后，甚至还把《等待戈多》和《圣经》列入哈里斯的作品行列里头。在舞台上，演员有绝对的权力为观众建构“哈里斯·沙玛”这个角色，而观众只能接受。甚至，坐在观众席的哈里斯·沙玛也只能接受。

哈里斯·沙玛笔下的角色都来自他的想像力和创造力，某种程度上而言，也是他自己的一部份。他笔下的好公民、教师、印尼女佣、议员、自杀者、政治犯、精神病患者…… 既是他的多重面貌，也是新加坡社会的多重面貌。该剧反复强调“Being ________ in Singapore”，为身份认同的议题设立了具体的语境。因为，脱离了新加坡这个语境，所有的角色和身份马上会产生另一种意义。这些角色之所以成立，恰恰因为他们在新加坡的语境下产生、变化。“哈里斯·沙玛”也必须要在新加坡的语境下才能产生，而“新加坡”这个身份、角色，又在哈里斯的笔下不断被建构、推翻、重建—— 恰如导演娜塔莉安排演员们在舞台上不断披上、脱下、调侃、投入那许许多多不同的角色。

剧末，众演员们不断数着哈里斯的剧作产量，从目前的100多部剧，一直不断地接下去数着…… 是的，哈里斯会继续把“我们”写进“他”的作品里，原来“哈里斯·沙玛”是哈里斯，是新加坡，也是我们。

“Being……Necessary“

Reviewer: Cordelia Lee
Performance: 29 June 2017

The first quarter of 2017 saw past works by local playwright Haresh Sharma return to the stage. Esplanade’s The Studios presented MARGINS, a month-long season comprising four of Sharma’s works – Fundamentally Happy, With/Out, This Chord and Others, and Hope. Additionally, Those Who Can’t, Teach was restaged by The Necessary Stage (TNS), where Sharma sits as resident playwright.

In what seems like a year of celebrating Sharma’s contribution to Singapore’s theatre scene, TNS has collaborated with director Natalie Hennedige for its 30^th anniversary season to present Sharma’s playwriting legacy in a single play.

Enter Being Haresh Sharma.

Do be prepared to discard any ideas of watching a conventional play. Unlike its predecessors, Being Haresh Sharma is a refreshing break away from the easy linear narrative and largely naturalist acting TNS has recently been comfortable with. No singular storyline exists here. The play is strung together by vignettes, each inspired by a theme or motif found in Sharma’s works. Hennedige rounds up a handful of characters, aptly extracting snippets from full-length plays and splicing them together in each scene.

In one instance, a dreamlike pastiche of recurring human relationships greets the audience. Vinod and Saloma from Sharma’s Off-Centre, share the stage with Tara and Latchmi, a female pair in afro wigs from Abuse Suxx!. Taking turns, the couples expound with emotional intensity. As couple #1 convey their struggle against the shackles of mental illness through heightened physicality, Tara and Latchmi attempt to reconcile their existential views on love as the volatility of relationships threaten to divide.

Beginnings, sickness, love, grief, detention: these are the themes projected on screen and explored in this 2 hour 10 minute retrospective.

Regardless of the scene’s overarching theme, Hennedige consistently treats her audience, through costume choice and props, to a visual feast of bold patterns and neon colours. Simultaneously, multimedia runs in the backdrop to layer the performance further. Aerial shots of Singapore’s HDB flat landscape visually establishes a scene’s setting as a familial argument erupts on stage. And as Wendy (Karen Tan) from Model Citizens mourns her dead son, we see a mother’s pain adjacently captured on screen where she searches for him silently. While the psychedelic visual palette accompanied by golden hits and discordant beats do capture our attention, prolonged exposure can become a tad trying. For those unfamiliar with Hennedige’s style, this sensory overload threatens to alienate them before the two hours ten minutes are done.

The play ends by mirroring its beginning. The ensemble number off Sharma’s published plays in the same order, counting up to a hundred and three. Yet beyond its skilful execution and poignant content, Being Haresh Sharma feels strangely like a posthumous tribute to the artist. While its content contains beautiful moments, the whole concept of journeying through and celebrating a playwright’s works seems slightly gratuitous and self-congratulatory. Perhaps Being Haresh Sharma plays best to a niche audience – the fans of both Haresh Sharma and TNS since its conception 30 years ago.

With proper funding and the right support, possibilities are aplenty when staging a play. Yet, it still begs the question whether this commemorative production by The Necessary Stage was really, truly necessary.

“House of Curiosities”

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 20 August 2016

A light-hearted carnival that celebrates the steampunk genre

In short, House of Curiosities can be described as a steampunk carnival. There is not only a stage performance, but also a fashion show, a playground set, an arts-and-crafts station, and a snacks station.

You might be wondering: what’s going on? Well, here’s a bit of useful trivia about the team behind House of Curiosities. Sweet Tooth describes itself as “the community and outreach branch” of Cake Theatrical Productions. This is the production company behind performances like Ophelia, Versus, and the Decimal Points series. In other words, the Cake aesthetic remains within the various installations in this “carnival”, but the entire setup is geared towards engaging a wider reach of the community.

I make my way past the entrance booth, and into a tunnel with walls made out of distorting mirrors – one mirror made you look short, another made you look tall, etc. And I arrive just in time for the start of the first stage performance (“The Mechanical Heart”), where as a prelude, Christopher (played by Lian Sutton), the son of eccentric inventor Professor Chambers (played by Julius Foo), introduces the characters of the performance one by one. Wheeling their bicycles/tricycles around the track surrounding the seating area, the cast also take the time to interact with the audience, which has a healthy mix of children and adults alike. The mood is cheery and festive as the cast display their elaborate costumes in close proximity to the audience, not unlike an actual carnival.

It is time for the performance – a simple tale about finding one’s humanity amidst the age of technological invention. The protagonist, Christopher, helps his father to build a time machine and is nearly stopped by the antagonist, Lady Kraken (played by Kristina Pakhomova) – who as the name suggests, has long mechanical tentacle-like weapons attached to her arms – but in the end, she reconnects with her own humanity and all is forgiven. And judging by the response from the audience, the children like it as much as the adults.

Next up is a fashion show that invites three volunteers from the audience to be guest designers, dressing models (cast members) up in steampunk-inspired costumes. But what I like best about the entire installation-slash-carnival is the relaxed and carefree mood. During the breaks in between performances, one can wander to the snacks station for free cotton candy and popcorn, or let the kids frolic in the playground, or even visit the arts-and-crafts station to decorate their own “Professor Chamber’s time travelling clock”, which is given as a door gift. It also helps that there are bubble machines pumping bubbles into the air during breaks, which the younger audience members find very enjoyable.

All in all, I find House of Curiosities to be a successful and valuable community outreach project.

“Shakespeare on steroids”

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 17 March 2016

You’ve never seen Shakespeare done this way before

In short, Ophelia is mad.

More specifically, it is a play about madness as Shakespeare’s tragic maiden, Ophelia, is plucked from the pages of Hamlet, and cast in a different light. (I mean this quite literally as well with the harsh working lights being switched on as the show begins.)

Viewers familiar with Hamlet will appreciate the added emotional complexity in this version, as well as the sly allusions to the original—the line, “mic check, 1, 2… 2… to be or not to be” earns a hearty chuckle from the audience. However, if you aren’t familiar with Hamlet – and that’s okay too – the show doesn’t beat you over the head for it (but I just might… come on, it’s the classic Shakespeare text!).

“Ophelia is madness.”

That is the basic summary of Hamlet’s Ophelia, which Cake Theatricals takes as its premise. The catch-22 that outlines Ophelia’s situation is given a feminist treatment in the play: How can she convince us that she is not insane? Through forceful articulation? Through skittish histrionics? Through silence? Through death?

Director Natalie Hennedige carefully peels away at the layers of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, and then puts her back together again by rearranging the pieces in a different order. Disjointed fragments of the script blur the line between the play and the plays-within-the-play, in typical Cake fashion, and its acerbic and irreverent edge is not lost. There is a mop masquerading as Hamlet’s father’s ghost. An actor, brandishing a knife, leaps right into the audience. And, among others, a bra on a naked male torso. A Nerf gun. A bassoon solo.

Sounds like madness to you?

Notwithstanding the eclectic mix of theatrical elements, I do feel there is a method to the madness. This makes it all the more maddening because this play shows immense potential in casting off the shackles of Shakespeare’s text, while still maintaining its bitter fatalism. The latter half of the show, which focuses more on the actor/auteur dynamic than the relationship between Ophelia and Hamlet, seems clunky and repetitive as the parody quickly degenerates into farce.

A quick note here: this piece was actually a shorter work called “Instructions for Swimming; Notes on Drowning”, shown at Cake’s 10th anniversary celebration last November. It’s a pity that what you see now is twice the length, but half the fun.

“The whole world is your five stages of grief”, Ophelia muses at one point in the play. Yet, even as she angrily struts and frets her hour(s) upon the stage, it is at her most subdued that Ophelia is most stirring. Ophelia/Ophelia: woman and word coalesce until they are indistinguishable from each other as the show invokes her corporeality that is ineffable, ineluctable, and incandescent.

Truly, Ophelia is mad.

“Ophelia”

Reviewer: Jorah Yu
Performance: 18 March 2016

To start: Ophelia is absolutely wonderful.

The story is about Shakespeare’s Ophelia – expectedly – and deliberately reconfigures the time and space of the universe belonging to Hamlet, in the context of story/play, and in relation to Hamlet the character. But without a doubt, Ophelia is the main attraction.

Placing the Hamlet/Ophelia coupling in differing circumstances on many accounts, Ophelia is a lovely taste of Contemporary Shakespeare, and an excellent example of how love and grief can either make, or destroy us.

The script, boldly and passionately written by Michelle Tan and Natalie Hennedige, has Ophelia saying “The whole world is your five stages of grief!” to Hamlet at several points which is possibly the funniest thing I’ve heard coming out of anyone for the past month. The play gives the poor girl so much character and appeal supplemented by Jo Kukathas’s fierce execution of Ophelia’s thoughts and utterances. Ophelia is so much more than the all-consuming depression that eventually led her to her death in Shakespeare’s text and I cannot express in words how much meaning the actor gives to her life and sheds light on her eventual drowning.

Many of the design choices also seems cleverly picked, with it set in a modern, yet ageless sort of world. The actors come on stage in simple clothing, black or white, most of the time, and many hints of water as an element of the show are obvious from the set, to their attire, and the overall colours.

Overall, Ophelia has been largely successful as a character study and portrayal of one of Shakespeare’s most romanticised female characters. Ophelia, unexplored but beloved, is never mentioned after her funeral in the original Shakespearean script. Cake Theatrical Production’s rendition of Ophelia in Ophelia presents to the audience the magnificence that she should have been.

“Theatre vs theatre”

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 20 August 2015

Conflictual obligation languishes in confusion.

It should be said, right off the bat, that you’re watching a Cake Theatricals production. So yes, re-tune your logic, withhold your skepticism and abandon all reason.

Versus is commissioned as part of this year’s Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA). It explores the festival’s theme of Post-Empires, with the repeated refrain of “this world is not our home”. As with any Cake production, the characters run the gamut of eclectic: from a Mao-like power-hungry dictator to a know-it-all woolly mammoth.

Within the first fifteen minutes, the tone for this show is set: abrupt amalgamations of characters, dressed in different shades of alienation, deliberated on the dilemma of being “post-”; a discombobulated ensemble locked in eternal conflict, with each other and; collectively with the present and the past.

But, the performers tackle their roles with gusto, always coursing in motion. Halfway into the show, I can see Rizman Putra’s naked torso gleaming with sweat as he clambers up and down vertical structures. (The echoes of his impeccable Lady of Soul performance three months back is worth at least a silent chuckle.) The performers’ stylized movements are backed by a throbbing soundtrack (that verged on being too loud at times) and garish multimedia visuals (photosensitive epilepsy warning!) – to call it a sensory overload is a massive understatement.

But right as the mood is sinking into Sarah Kane-depressed levels, an unexpected comedic segue brings the show back to life. Special mention must go to Edith Podesta for carrying the comedic weight of this segment, with little slapstick moments that actually feel spontaneous and inspired. Alas, this segment ends way too soon (with an appropriately comedic ending), and we are right back in depression territory.

The stream-of-consciousness text revels in its disconnected, disjunctive imagery. Words and movements juxtapose opposite meanings against each other, like when the spoken line “to live” is accompanied with a finger drawn across the throat. The plot, if it barely exists, loosely strings together themes of dictatorship, female identity, and war trauma, amidst a post-lapsarian landscape. There are glimpses of past Cake productions: ideas that resurface, and a post-modern treatment of the text, most noticeably in the recitation of a portion of the script backwards – word for word.

Post-lapsarian, post-modern, post-Empires. Anyone get the links yet? (Me neither.)

Don’t bother making sense of it all. There is no grand point to be made here – and I suspect that this is Versus’ biggest flaw: giving you all of the avant-garde, but none of the theatre.

“What is the Point of Confrontation?”

Reviewer: Isaac Tan
Performance: 21 August 2015

What goes into a Cake production?

An episodic structure, edgy music, video projections, big masks or headgear, and jarring dances. In the context of Versus, these elements are employed to explore various facets of personal and national struggles against the backdrop of the rise and fall of empires.

In the midst of it all, various characters ask various existential questions. Two women named Mary (Edith Podesta and Andrea Ang) — one of them possibly imaginary — struggle with identity and perception. A soldier (Thomas Pang) questions the point of fighting and war; a dictator (Julius Foo) questions any challenge to his power, and pseudo-mythical beings of creation and destruction (Goh Guat Kian and Julius Foo) perform their respective acts of creation and destruction responsible for all the questions in the first place.

Throw in a parodic interlude of Land Before Time meets Wizard of Oz where pre-historic animals are in search of the truth from a “surrealistic artist” and you get an acid trip sans damage to your physical health.

Amidst the torrent of questions, I have one of my own: what is the point of Versus’ confrontation?

The dense text, written by Michelle Tan, contains catchy existential phrases (“Some days are harder than others. All days come to an end”). The text is, however, complicated by the flurry of contradictory hand gestures by the actors as they deliver their lines. To top it all off, the audience is bludgeoned with video sequences, sound effects, and trippy songs sung by angels perched on ladder-like structures. All this appears to be different layers of meanings to be decoded, but the audience has no starting point or a chance to find their bearings.

The play is not interested in intellectualization or drawing its audience in emotionally. It conflates the personal and universal but hovers above dualisms. Questions are asked but it seems uninterested in getting an answer.

Such all-out confrontations may well reflect the complex post-modern condition. But do it repeatedly and it only becomes an on-stage kaleidoscope; an intriguing toy in which the audience marvel at stage pictures and continuously return merely to see how off-kilter the dramaturgy can get.

Director Natalie Hennedige mentions in the show notes that Cake’s productions are “defined by [their] own rules of play.” This reviewer is all for pushing the envelope. But to devise a game without telling the audience the rules is another thing altogether.

“Decimal Points [Infinity]”

Reviewer: Jemima Yong
Performance: 22 May 2015

We walk into the playing space, drinks in hand. The space has informal floor seating around a three-dimensional set. A large red machine, reminiscent of a lighthouse, towers in center of the performance space. There are bodies on stage , two robed, at rest on mutual desks, and one playing the electric guitar whilst hanging upside down from a skeletal cube.

The amplified noise vibrates and courses through my body. I can smell turpentine and paint. The audience immerses into this visceral environment and this sets the tone of how the following ritual is experienced: through the senses first. From on the onset, CAKE challenges the conventional expectation of accessing and reading theatre.

Decimal Points [infinity] feels like a fable about the industrial revolution. It examines linear progression, the human machine and the chaos, mindless conventions and its inevitable destruction. There are some fierce performances, urgent sequences, a mirror, a portal, a god with a shopping cart, progress through repetition. This performance is cut from a complex fabric, there is always more than one focal point, activating the agency of the audience: choose where you look. It is easy to suspend one’s senses as the sound pulses through our lungs. It is interesting how much can be said without the use of conventional speech and text: the work exists in a language fluently non-verbal.

Decimal Points [infinity] is comfortingly experimental, plural and open to interpretation. It demands we engage with its phenomenology through a baser intellect (way of knowing). It stays with me in the days that follow; arguably what the best performances do.