“A Dream Under The Southern Bough: Reverie”

Reviewer: Amanda Leong
Performance: 6 April 2019

A Dream Under Southern Bough: Reverie by Toy Factory is the second installment of a planned trilogy commissioned by the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA), as part of an initiative to encourage more large-scale Singapore works. It is an ambitious project, as this is the first modern stage adaptation of Tang Xian Zu’s Ming Dynasty classic.

The play comprises two worlds. The first is earthly, where we meet Chun Yu Fen (Tang Shao Wei), a disgraced naval officer who spends his days drinking and womanising. The second is the dream world of the Ant Kingdom, where we are introduced to its inhabitants, including Princess Yao Fang (Jodi Chan), and the Ant Fairies who are sent to find her a suitable husband and future king.

I am amazed by how this production integrates these two vastly different worlds. In some ways, this can also serve as an analogy for modern-day life, as technology blurs the real and imagined, the public and the private.

That said, the plot becomes predictable once it is made known to us that Yao Fang wants to find a husband, as Chun Yu Fen is the obvious candidate. It does not help that the piece plods along at such a slow pace. Furthermore, the Mandarin dialogue tends to be quite metaphorical, which makes it difficult to match what’s being spoken onstage with the translated English surtitles. This causes me to become further disengaged from this world.

Another issue I have with the play is how female characters are portrayed. While the Ant Fairies are meant to be flirtatious and feminine characters, the way they flirt with each other soon becomes grating and disingenuous, while also feeding into the male gaze. Since this is supposed to be a contemporary adaptation, it begs the question of whether such out-dated depictions still deserve a place on today’s stage.

Ultimately, though, this play is an ambitious attempt to reimagine a dream world from the past in a contemporary setting.

“remember, we are all on the same side…”

Reviewer: Idelle Yee
Performance: 26 May 2019

Checkpoint Theatre’s Displaced Persons’ Welcome Dinner has been one of the most talked about local theatre productions so far this year. Commissioned by the 2019 Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA), the play follows an international team of humanitarian workers navigating a crisis on the field.

Displaced Persons’ Welcome Dinner is at once fiercely cerebral and incandescent in unfiltered feeling. The dialogue is awash in acronyms explained only in the aftermath, situating the play firmly in the world of bureaucratic moribundity. Characters make frequent references to crises going on around the world without further explanation, assuming audience awareness of dire situations in Yemen and Sudan. The play goes into painstaking detail about sanitation processes in refugee camps, legal machinations within humanitarian organisations, and the unrelenting onslaught of paperwork that threatens the flame of compassion burning within even the saintliest of do-gooders.

Yet the play never veers far from its grounding in ardent and unmistakably human feeling. The soundscape, with hints of Gregorian and Celtic music, sets these interactions over paperwork and sanitation repairs in a world that seems almost supernatural in its fever of emotion. The characters, pushed beyond amicability or even compassion itself, consistently teeter on the brink of breakdown. At best, they are cynical, prickly, oversensitive and quite alarmingly inclined to holler expletives; at their worst, they are malicious, cruel, seemingly beyond redemption. It is occasionally difficult to remember that these people are, as Mike Miller (played by Emil Marwa) points out, “on the same side”. They are, to all intents and purposes, committed to doing good. What, then, is the character of this humanitarian work, that its workers must battle in futility to maintain some semblance of humanity?

It is a tall order to pinpoint a standout performer in this cast, given the ensemble nature of the play as well as the impressive displays of physical theatre, multiple languages and a variety of accents (although this last had its inconsistencies). It would be unseemly, however, not to mention Dawn Cheong’s performance as Sara. In a play that might have been so consistently overwhelming as to almost numb the audience to the intensity of emotion, Cheong’s performance leaves the audience reeling anew as the character grapples with sexual assault. Sara’s trajectory of trauma is perhaps the most well-explored, and Cheong is fully immersed: at one point, Sara, standing centrestage, has a breakdown so long and protracted it is quite terrible to behold. And yet it is not all brokenness — there is also courage, and perhaps even, towards the play’s end, a nascent triumph, not least of which is Cheong’s lending of an unlikely dignity to the traumatised female body.

As I leave the venue, I hear conversations of this tenor amongst some fellow theatre-goers: “I can’t believe I paid money for this. Once I heard the accents, I gave up.” This makes me sad. This production is hardly perfect, but it tells an important story with commitment and courage — not unlike the humanitarian workers in the play. Rather than dismiss the entire effort out of hand, I would urge an examination of how this work may encourage the local theatre scene to create productions that consider with even greater moral courage and artistry Singapore’s positionality in the larger currents at play internationally — humanitarianism, the currency of victimhood, and refugee crises. In a world oversaturated with exploitative portrayals of suffering, the art we make must awaken our senses anew to the truthfulness of human hurt. Let us not give up. For are we not — in the end — on the same side?

“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.