“Split Up”

Reviewer: Kei Franklin
Performance: 19 August 2016

Directed by a playcircle, a collective comprising artists from DramaBox’s youth wing ARTivate, Split Up is an exploration of family, home, loyalty, and inter-generational love. The lights go up on a young woman packing for a flight to America. She hums happily to herself while folding her life into cardboard boxes strewn precariously across the stage. Her elderly father putters about, making breakfast. The scene is overwhelmingly ordinary somehow, an unremarkable image of ‘home’ pervaded by a uniform shade of blue-grey.

The scene of domesticity quickly deteriorates into a full-fledged drama involving risks of unemployment, revealed pregnancy, and a traumatic family history. Split Up has an almost “To the Lighthouse”-esque tone, as countless relationship complexities and conflicts are brought to the surface over a bowl of porridge in a messy flat. This mundane setting contrasts sharply with the poignancy of the moment portrayed – a father losing his daughter to another country, another man, another life – and thereby reveals the baffling banality of such pivotal moments.

Split Up captures a type of affection that feels distinctly Singaporean. The characters enact a sort of downplayed love, a language of affection that comes across as begrudging or ‘naggy’ but rests upon a foundation of actions that reveal a deeply loyal love. The daughter scolds her father for his carelessness, yet calls his boss to beg for his rehire. The father offers to move to America to take care of his daughter’s baby, yet hides the offer beneath a begrudgingly casual tone. The performers embody an impressively acute understanding of this distinctly Singaporean language of love.

Despite a few minor instances of what feels like clunky acting, I find myself swept up in the flow of Split Up. Beyond the relationship dynamics and overlapping personal stories, Split Up comments upon the status of Singapore caught between nostalgia and fast-paced modernity. The characters gracefully enact the complexities of Singapore’s processes of anglicization, the brain drain, and the widening inter-generational gap. Through carefully crafted yet refreshingly commonplace dialogue, I witness inter-generational communication breakdown, and deeply conflicted identities.

I leave the theatre feeling moved, saddened, grateful, and like I should give my grandmother a call.