DEAR ELENA by Nine Years Theatre

“Dear Elena: the sun still rises”

Reviewer: Idelle Yee
Performance: 20 October 2019

One does not come to a Nine Years Theatre (NYT) production without a certain expectancy. In the span of only seven years, NYT has effectively created a brand of performance that resonates viscerally with its largely Chinese-Singaporean audience: foreign classics familiar to English-educated theatregoers reimagined in Mandarin. NYT, negotiating this diasporic, post-colonial confluence of identities alongside its audience, provides one vision of a Chinese-Singaporean intellectual and artistic voice.

An excellent example of a manifestation of this vision is NYT’s Dear Elena, an adaptation of the Soviet-era play Dear Yelena Sergeyevna. Four students pay a visit to their teacher Miss Elena, ostensibly to celebrate her birthday; in fact, they are intent on coercing her to hand over the key to the safe where their exam papers are kept. Within this carefully choreographed dance of persuasion, Dear Elena negotiates the timeless struggles of morality and the human capacity for manipulation of power.

These high ideals can translate on stage as distant, elevated declamations, or worse, high-brow berating of the audience — if delivered poorly. Fortunately, delivery of dialogue is one area in which the strength of the ensemble comes through most strongly. The cast brings carefully calibrated synchronicity and a wonderfully balanced, pulsating energy dynamic to their performance. There is an utter inhabitation of dialogue on the part of the actors, bringing a believability to their characters.

The factor of time becomes a character in itself. Dear Elena takes place in the night, extending into the wee hours of the morning. As a result, the performance always seems to be on the precipice of something — an imminent implosion of anarchic violence, perhaps. It seems also a contemplation of youth: on the cusp of evil and darkness, goodness and light, and seeking something like the compromise of the two in their lives.

Sound designer Jing Ng has crafted a soundscape very much conscious of temporality — the ticking of the clock is often heard, giving the production a nervous energy, racing ever forward into uncertainty. A cheerful waltz tune that begins as the music for a youthful dance ends up as the soundtrack for the horrific attempted rape of Lyalya (played with great sensitivity by Shu Yi Ching). There is a sense that any stability, safety, or established understanding between people is highly fragile. The clock ticks away, and takes certainty with it. Lighting designer Liu Yong Huay’s carefully constructed chiaroscuro lays upon this the anxiety of night awaiting the hope of daylight — will the sun ever rise? When will this nightmare of human manipulation end?

Yet it seems the sun still rises. At the end of the play, the key is almost, but not handed over to the students. Lyalya is almost, but not raped. Yet there is a sense of the irreparable. All teacher-student relationships and the innocence of youthful friendships seem broken.

But then the trembling Lyalya, left alone in Elena’s living room, lifts the key aloft as a torch, and declares to the emptiness a quivering goodness: “They didn’t take the key!” Behind her, the other three youths lift their right arms in a “like” fashion. Gazing down at this stage picture, one feels — however unreasonably — that despite the irreversibility of events elapsed and words exchanged, there is still hope for them, and also for all of us.

After all, the sun — however waveringly — still rises.