“A taste of Forum Theatre”

Reviewer: Lee Min Jie
Performance: 28 July 2016

International Friendship Day (IFD) is an interactive drama targeted at primary and secondary school students by The Necessary Stage. The programme booklet even comes with an educational kit and study guide.

IFD takes the form of Forum Theatre. Forum Theatre was created by Augusto Boal with the intentions of bringing about social and political change. Usually audiences would watch actors passively and leave when the play ends. Boal prefers “spect-actors” where audiences are involved and think critically about what they are watching.

In Forum Theatre audiences can halt the performance, suggest another course of action for any character or even replace the actors themselves, in an attempt to change the outcome of that scene. This way instead of being passive spectators, audiences are active participants.

Fortunately, International Friendship Day managed to achieve this.

Actors split up and join audiences for a short but revealing pre-show discussion. A quick round of introductions followed by us putting a number to how many foreigner friends we have. It is surprising to note how some of us have none at all. Perhaps the outcome would have been different if we were asked how many foreigners we know.

The play traces a group of students in a local school as they prepare IFD. Each scene is richly packed for students to intervene. Beginning from childish bullying and name calling, to the segregation of local and foreign students, to the retrenchment of a student’s father, to the unfair treatment of a girl who does not want to attend a classmate’s party etc

In anticipation of short attention spans, IFD keeps each scene short and succinct, scene changes are smooth and swift. Yet it refrains from commenting on each scenario, leaving it to the students to unpack the misfeasance. Comfortingly, the students are perceptive and thoughtful. Kudos to those who mustered the courage to go on stage and act out a short scene.

Post-its are distributed for audiences to pen their reflection sum up the post-show activity. A walk around the display of post-its is encouraging as students suggest ways their schools can promote foreign-local student cohesion through camps and workshops etc.

Perhaps if plays like these toured workplaces, xenophobia and bigotry amongst adults can be mitigated.

“We do not fight hate with hate.”

Reviewer: Jocelyn Chng
Performance: 28 July 2016

International Friendship Day is an interactive theatre piece by The Necessary Stage, presented as part of the M1 Peer Pleasure Youth Theatre Festival by ArtsWok Collaborative. Peer Pleasure seeks to engage youths in the process of theatre-making, recognising their points of view as valuable within the larger arts scene. International Friendship Day is one of the standalone “Engagement Programmes”, but only one performance is open to the public (the rest being staged entirely for school bookings). Perhaps due to this context, the performance on the whole feels overly didactic for a general public audience.

The four actors introduce themselves as students and teachers of the fictional Marine Parade Secondary School (MPSS), following which the audience is immediately broken into groups, each led by one performer who remains in character throughout the discussion. The character tells us more about his background, and then asks questions such as whether we have friends who are not from Singapore, if we know of instances of racism directed at foreigners and so forth.

This section feels awkward, especially as the questions are too general to elicit forthcoming and meaningful responses from an audience used to sitting quietly in the dark. Although I can see its usefulness for a showing aimed at school students, such a pre-show discussion is perhaps unnecessary for the public showing as the relevant issues will become apparent through the play itself.

The scripted play, however, seems to me a little simplistic in its treatment of the scenarios portrayed – foreign students feeling left out of or not wanting to participate in activities with local students, being pressured to do things that they do not wish to, or facing bullying and name-calling. However, the time constraint perhaps accounts for the simplified presentation of issues (the scripted play lasts only about an hour or less). This is so that more time can be allocated for the interactive section that follows, in which audience members are encouraged to come on stage to try out different ways of managing or resolving a tricky situation presented in the play.

However, even this latter section begins to feel draggy after a while, reminding me of role-playing exercises at conflict resolution workshops, with participants who lack the experience or confidence to really carry their intentions through. This often results in contrived resolutions to the problems, which I doubt are an accurate enough approximation of real-life conflict situations to offer genuine learning points for a general public audience.

Regardless, the actors deserve commendation for their performance in a play that is demanding enough in its scripted part (each actor plays multiple roles), let alone the interactive section. The challenge of an interactive piece lies in its unpredictability, and the intense focus and responsiveness of the cast certainly helps them rise to it.