“Shakespeare, the writer of our discontent”

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 9 September 2016

“Who ever heard of a writer growing up happy?”

That quote comes in the middle of the performance of Sandaime Richard, written by Hideki Noda and inspired by Shakespeare’s Richard III. And when said writer is Shakespeare himself, you get a sense of the narrative complexity and comic irreverence of this play.

Directed by Ong Keng Sen (known for his other intercultural Shakespeare pieces like Lear and Lear Dreaming), Sandaime Richard uses Richard III to dive into the personal history of William Shakespeare, the author. Translated into a Japanese context, the events in Richard III is transformed into infighting within an ikebana (flower-arrangement) clan.

The Japanese context sets up an intercultural medley of performance styles: there is the rowdy and playful Takarazuka, such as when the ensembleof actors slip in and out of their roles to perform, then parody the personal drama of Shakespeare’s family. There’s a smattering of noh theatre during a particular scene in Kenzan Tower, where the dialogue oscillates between the noh style of slow, solemn chanting and a naturalistic delivery of lines. And that’s not to mention the Indonesian element, through the shadow puppetry of wayang kulit that mirrors the onstage action in some scenes.

I admit, this piece could be somewhat difficult for non-Japanese speaking audiences to follow (even with the surtitle screen on the side), given that the majority of the dialogue is in Japanese. (Oh, and I should mention that the other languages used in this play are Balinese, Bahasa Indonesia and English.) However, as with all his intercultural pieces, Ong’s dexterity with balancing different languages and performance styles not only demonstrates his deftness at constructing an intricate (or one might even say “difficult”) piece, but also challenges the audience to ponder about the frisson between the divergent elements in the performance.

And towards the end of the play, when all the different storylines (spoiler alert) converge and the story world collapses in upon itself, we are left in a dizzying spiral of delusions – the boundary between past/present, England/Japan, performance/reality is dissolved. The audience member walks out of the theatre, feeling very confused about the piece. But that’s probably the point – to throw supposedly stable elements, like the meaning of the words in Richard III, the history of Shakespeare’s life, and the authority of Shakespeare, into question.

“House of Curiosities”

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 20 August 2016

A light-hearted carnival that celebrates the steampunk genre

Photo credit: Walter Chan

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.

“Girl talk”

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 14 April 2016

A family melodrama that is more drama than mellow

Jo Kwek, Lina Yu, and Yeo Kok Siew. Photograph: The Finger Players

There’s something very grating about having a moral lesson preached to you again and again for over an hour. One, I got it the first time round. Two, what’s the point of repeating it ad infinitum? And three, just. Let. It. Go. Already.

The Finger Players return for their 2016 season with another round of their director mentorship project, Watch This Space. Under the guidance of Chong Tze Chien, the two-year programme culminates in the mentees directing a show on their own. To put it nicely, it cultivates rising talent in the local theatre scene. To put it bluntly, this might be little more than just an experimental sandbox with the motto: “It’s OK to fail.

But let’s get on to the show itself. Inheritance tells a tale about the love-hate relationship between two sisters and their mother. Girl loves Sister, but both she and Mother hate Sister’s female lover for being a threat to Sister’s marriage to her husband. Meanwhile, Girl loves Mother but Sister hates Mother for not reciprocating Girl’s love for her. Oh, and there is a recurring cat (Kuo Pao Kun, anyone?) to reinforce the idea of Girl’s child-like innocence and naïveté.

While the effort to portray an exclusive feminine domesticity is laudable, the most jarring disjuncture in the entire show is the clash between the script and the artistic direction. The internal emotional conflict within lines like “Ma can help you cut hair… be a good student… you want Ma to commit suicide ah?” is lost, with the rather puzzling directorial decision to play up a one-dimensional aggressiveness that verges on the psychotic instead.

Now I’m not saying that the script and the direction are bad. Far from it. Playwright Ellison Yuyang Tan and director Zelda Tatiana Ng both possess very strong and unique voices. Tan has a talent for depicting the quotidian with a simmering intensity, while Ng’s inspired use of discordant imagery creates a visually arresting milieu. The problem, then, is that these two strong individual voices are singing completely different tunes, which is akin to painting an impressionist piece in the style of Picasso.

The result is an extremely tiresome affair. Not only does the audience have to suffer through the constant fighting between characters, we also have to endure the conflict between the playwright’s words and the director’s heavy-handedness. What we eventually get is the same moral lesson repeatedly delivered to us in different ways: Ma is bad because of this, the sisters are bad because of that, blah blah. As if the moralistic good/bad dichotomy isn’t bad enough, we also see too much of the bad over the good.

I guess the main lesson Inheritance teaches us is that one should always start from the basics—script and direction should share the same vision.

“Shakespeare on steroids”

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 17 March 2016

You’ve never seen Shakespeare done this way before

Jo Kukathas in Ophelia. Photo: Cake Theatricals.

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.

“The shape of metaphors”

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 16 January 2016

Jean Tay gets political in her new play.

Photo credit: Wee Li Lin

“Stories have power.”

This is the essential message that Jean Tay’s The Shape of a Bird conveys. Incidentally, its title also reveals its theme of censorship – if you can’t write about a bird, you write around the shape of a bird.

Audiences familiar with Tay’s previous works like Boom and Everything but the Brain might be a little surprised with the explicit political overtones of this play that is still a work-in-progress. An imprisoned writer (Tan Kheng Hua) tries to write letters to her daughter (Jean Toh), communicating via stories, while an oppressive authority (Brendon Fernandez) tries to keep them apart.

The writing style is undeniably Tay’s. The play has a graceful and delicate charm that expertly flits between the harsh austerity of the prison cell and the magical wonder of the imagined story-world.

Yet, the plethora of theatrical elements employed to connote the differences between the two worlds make for a stifled viewing experience. We have light patterns, puppetry, noisy (not to mention trite) sound effects, masks, folding paper as props, actors playing multiple characters, and the list goes on… This makes the entire piece rather crowded, and not in a good way.

Nonetheless, this piece remains an achievement in itself. Although the combination of the theatrical elements described earlier is jarring and confusing, the individual elements are creative and inspired in their own way.

Of course, the highest praise is reserved for last. The ensemble (Tan Kheng Hua, Jean Toh, Brendon Fernandez, and Thomas Pang) deliver a brilliant and riveting performance, even for a script that Tay feared was “impossible to stage”! They showcase a sense of fluidity in shifting across characters and supple physicality in their body movements. They are also able to evoke a palpable terror that hangs over the entire play, but with tiny glimpses of hope and wonder that burst forth in rare moments.

This play joins the glut of political plays afflicting Singapore theatre at the present. Is there an unwritten rule that “you can’t call yourself a Singaporean playwright until you’ve written a political play”?

That said, Tay cleverly manages to couch the usual anti-totalitarian critique within the theatre of the fantastic, tempering politics with an epic mode of storytelling. Is Tay, then, writing around the shape of political critique? Hmm…

In sum, The Shape of a Bird is a play that poses huge technical and creative barriers to surmount. There is still a lot more work to be done before it can call itself a “finished product”. Yet, even at such a premature stage of its drafting, it brims with such immense potential and I cannot wait to see the finished product.

“Beauty Whirl”

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 13 November 2015

A tame re-staging of a classic that is more fizzle than sizzle.

Photo credit: Alfred Phang

How does that saying go again: “If it isn’t broken, -”…?

For the uninitiated, Michael Chiang’s Beauty World is a Singaporean classic. First performed in 1988 by Theatreworks, the script was updated by Chiang for its 20th anniversary production by W!ld Rice. Now, in 2015, the version being performed strongly resembles the latter, with minor tweaks to make the script “darker”, according to director Dick Lee.

The plot should be familiar to audiences, even to those who have not seen the various versions of this musical. Nineteen year-old teenager Ivy Chan from Batu Pahat crosses the Causeway to look for her father, with her only clue being a jade pendant that he left behind, engraved with the words: “Beauty World”. The script is Chiang’s homage to the Chinese soap operas of the 60s, with the plot taking numerous predictable twists and turns for melodrama and comedy. On this preview night, the theatre is packed with a distinctively mature crowd with wisps of greying hair. The atmosphere is decidedly convivial, with the audience cheering and clapping after every song and punchline. They are here to enjoy a night of nostalgia, and no one is going to stop them.

Yet, if like me, you have no memory of the 80s (let alone the 60s, which is the story’s context), with no nostalgia to bolster the show’s entertainment, the quality of the performance has to be judged for itself. Sadly, it feels like it has all the potential of spectacular performance, but it ends up being a rather subdued knockoff. Now I remember the second part of the saying…

“It it isn’t broken, don’t fix it!”

Let’s start with the elephant in the room: TV actress Jeanette Aw’s turn as Lulu is passable, but unfortunately, her voice is clearly not accustomed to carrying and projecting a melody onstage. In addition, the one-dimensional character of Lulu does little to show off Aw’s acting chops, and as a result, Aw’s “star power” can only realise itself after the show – at the post-show autograph session (please queue up in an orderly fashion, and please purchase the programme booklet first!).

In addition, the latent pessimism in the original script becomes full-blown cynicism in the 2008 rewrite (upon which the current version is based); heady 80s glamour gives way to a stupefied delirium, as the present script is firmly rooted in realism. The trials and tribulations of the Beauty World girls are brought down to earth to resemble our own –  I find this to be the biggest weakness of the show. Firstly, this iteration subverts its own escapism; secondly, the removal of the show’s timelessness makes the script plainly ordinary and dated. Yes, these characters are ultimately shown to be broken, but… so what?

Hmm… maybe I should be asking another question instead: Why break this proven formula to begin with?

“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.

“The Seed of Life“

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 29 October 2015

An intense spiritual experience that rethinks concepts of love and loss.

Credit: Tuckys Photography

As I left the theatre after the performance, I was struggling to find a word to encapsulate my feelings towards this piece by The Finger Players. I was disturbed, but not in a bad way. I was anxious for more, but I was satisfied with the length of the play.

And I think that’s the true beauty of SEED – it creates this complex emotion within you, like many different flavours coming together on one’s palate.

SEED was devised during the 2013 Asian Performing Arts Festival in Tokyo under the direction of Chong Tze Chien, and is composed of a series of loosely-linked vignettes set in a Japanese context. An old man dies in a foreign land (New York) and wishes his wife to bring his body back to Japan. A rice-farming family in Japan disintegrates after the death of the mother. A nuclear incident leads a university student to try to convince her mother to leave the house to avoid the fallout.

The soul-searching of the play draws audiences in and reveals an ironic twist to everyday situations. These include: a wife’s misplaced love for her husband by constantly cooking for him ends up inadvertently feeding him to death; a starving couple afraid of food affected by nuclear radiation travel to the area affected by the nuclear fallout and discover that the food there is delicious after all.

SEED is performed in Japanese (with English surtitles), but don’t worry if you don’t understand Japanese – it won’t detract from your enjoyment of the play. Those familiar with Chong’s unique writing style will also recognise elements from his earlier works: the web of narratives, the black humour, and the blurring of boundaries between dead and alive. Together with the influences from Noh theatre and the Japanese culture’s emphasis on interiority, the play forms a delicately-nuanced take on famine and family, consumption and copulation.

The staging setup is simple: cords are strung across the stage in different configurations, and costuming is equally minimal (save for the use of masks). The focus, then, is on the acting, which the ensemble cast pulls off brilliantly. However, I suspect the performance may have benefited from a smaller venue, to experience the intimacy suggested by the play (I also notice that there are many empty seats, on opening night, no less!).

“We need things before we understand why we need them.” This, together with several other aphorisms, are scattered throughout the play, encouraging audiences to reflect on aspects of life that are normally taken for granted.

Rice. Family. The afterlife. Beauty in destruction.

And of course, good theatre.

“Mooncakes and sexcapades“

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 15 October 2015

Our Company’s third production falters with a lackluster script.

Promotional poster. Credit: Our Company

Now it should be said, right at the outset, that I have deep-seated reservations about devised theatre. (This is a form of theatre that creates the performance through rehearsals and improvisation.) Too often, the end product falls horrifically short of the sum of all efforts.

As is this case too.

The premise for Jonathan, David & Me is deceptively simple, safe and best of all, heartwarming. The friendship of three men, charted from secondary school to adulthood.

Can’t go wrong with that, right?

Wrong.

The plot begins with Jonathan breaking the news of his engagement to his two friends (David and Mervyn, who functions as the narrator), but grinds to a halt just as Angela’s name (Mervyn’s ex) is mentioned. We then see numerous flashbacks – in non-chronological order to boot – that detail the start of their friendship in secondary school, growing apart during their time in the army, and then meeting up at different points of adulthood. The two subplots – David and Saul from the Bible, as well as The Epic of Gilgamesh, are interspersed between scenes to add more oomph to the story.

But the only thing they add is confusion. It’s hard enough to keep track of the main story between Jonathan, David and Mervyn – that plot alone has more twists than a pot of fusilli! Their version of “bro talk” jumps from mooncakes and sexcapades, to dating each other’s exes and (accidentally) calling her a “hand-me-down”.

Ouch.

Nevertheless, to have this story stand alongside the other two legends only serves to highlight its meagerness. The script somehow enjoys wallowing in its toilet humour, while the physical humour is weak at best. In addition, the anecdotes verge on being too middle-class and self-indulgent (and this is also reflected among the audience members, who are decked in office wear – you make the connection). The most fatal flaw, however, is that friendship is rationalised between the three friends as a transaction (the “I’m here for you so in the future you have to be there for me” vibe that somehow lingers throughout the entire show).

So, with a script this lackluster, there’s really no point in trying to dissect the rest of the performance in detail. The actors showed their inexperience – some even forgot their lines! – and the set design had a curious detail of having peanuts lining the perimeter of the set, serving no functional purpose to the play. Of course there’s the crude “secondary school literature analysis” reading of “peanuts as metaphor for male friendship”, but I’d like to think that the production team can assume that us viewers are a little more sophisticated than that.

Altogether, this production seemed paradoxically complicated and simplistic at the same time. Chart it down to inexperience – there is much room for improvement.