A FIEND’S DIARY by The Finger Players

“A Fiend’s Dairy”

Reviewer: Amanda Leong
Performance: 27 October 2019

A Fiend’s Diary by The Finger Players is a monologue depicting the inner world of a socially-isolated man (played by Oliver Chong). This man lives in an apartment alone, with only the frenzied words of his diary and the intermittent sounds (created by Darren Ng) of his body bumping against furniture to keep him company. Through the narrations in his diary, we come to understand how he sees the people that make up his social world.

The walls, floor, table of the protagonist’s room is covered with the text from the script. The orderly lines in which the words are written obscure the inherent chaos of the content. The man has just begun to reflect and grieve the passing of his closest kin – his mother. However, ‘grieving’ is an illusory word in this context, as this man does not exhibit or articulate his feelings of loss toward his mother in a way that may be recognisable as grieve. Or perhaps, this man is not grieving at all, as he spends the day of his mother’s funeral smoking and drinking with the funeral director. Over the course of the play, we see him in a range of situations that become increasingly absurd and questionable, from agreeing to marry a girl he does not care for, to ultimately a horrendous crime.

Despite how morally unredeemable the protagonist is, however, Chong’s performance still makes me feel sympathy towards him. At the court scene where the man is put on trial, I find myself taking both the side of the jury – who are horrified by his action and apathy – as well as the man, who is indignant that his defence is not truly taken into account because of the jury’s assumptions about him.

The radical empathy that this self-reflective play forces us to take on makes us question our own assumptions of morality.