“Ties That Did Not Quite Bind”

Reviewer: Jeremiah Choy
Performance: 14 April 2016

Inheritance is touted as an exploration of the tender ties between two sisters and their mother, written by Ellison Yuyang Tan a graduate of NUS’s TS programme.

Entering the black box, I am immediately confronted by the dimly-lit stark set consisting of a dramatic staircase framing a few platforms and an entrance. Designed by Wong Chee Wai, the set is breathtakingly haunting. Lim Woan Wen’s sparse lighting continues into the performance and creates a mindscape of possibilities.  Darren Ng’s masterful sound design transports me into another world. The trio’s minimalistic designs suit the play well and help suspend disbelief.

I applaud and enjoy director Zelda Tatiana Ng’s bold, courageous and highly stylistic take on a paper-thin plot of two sisters arguing, bickering and bonding over a domineering mother. Zelda’s gamble of using a male actor to play a mental mother is both clever and strategic.

Actor Yeo Kok Siew plays Mother in a black suit with great restrain and understatement and equally sustained competence and commitment.

His artful and emotional voice transcends the histrionic overtones written. He does not give in to a highly-strung overly imaginative mental patient but gives a complex multi-layered mother that is at once cruel, yet pitiful (all this with a straight face and no movement). His presence also highlights the absence of the father figure who had abandoned the three women sometime ago. His clarity in other roles does not detract from his the ever-menacing presence as mother.

However, the same cannot be said of both daughters played by Lina Yu and Jo Kwek. Although both young performers give credible performances, the refreshing directorial concept of having both actresses play out their characters and scenes in marionette-like gestures is not matched by the actresses’ commitment to direction. The actresses do not inhabit the strange and estranged world created by the three designers as envisioned by the director.

The bizarreness of this world is one of wonderment and bewilderment suspended in time and almost “Murakmi” in nature. The shadows speak louder than the light. The dream-like soundscape heightens the real and the unreal.

I am puzzled by why in certain scenes, the mother is using a handphone (prop) and two daughters are miming the handphones.

Why are the sisters not talking to each other directly in some scenes and why they do in another?

What is real and what is not?

Perhaps the director Zelda is manipulating us like mother, like she is manipulating the daughters in the production?

Throughout the performance, I am trying to make sense of this world, waiting for the final piece of puzzle that will make sense.

And then the final piece comes in the penultimate scene.

Still, the sense of disentanglement did not come for me (as an audience) at the end. It is definitely not the fault of the director, designers nor the performers.

Perhaps the ties came undone by the very cleverness in its writing?

“Girl talk”

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 14 April 2016

A family melodrama that is more drama than mellow

There’s something very grating about having a moral lesson preached to you again and again for over an hour. One, I got it the first time round. Two, what’s the point of repeating it ad infinitum? And three, just. Let. It. Go. Already.

The Finger Players return for their 2016 season with another round of their director mentorship project, Watch This Space. Under the guidance of Chong Tze Chien, the two-year programme culminates in the mentees directing a show on their own. To put it nicely, it cultivates rising talent in the local theatre scene. To put it bluntly, this might be little more than just an experimental sandbox with the motto: “It’s OK to fail.

But let’s get on to the show itself. Inheritance tells a tale about the love-hate relationship between two sisters and their mother. Girl loves Sister, but both she and Mother hate Sister’s female lover for being a threat to Sister’s marriage to her husband. Meanwhile, Girl loves Mother but Sister hates Mother for not reciprocating Girl’s love for her. Oh, and there is a recurring cat (Kuo Pao Kun, anyone?) to reinforce the idea of Girl’s child-like innocence and naïveté.

While the effort to portray an exclusive feminine domesticity is laudable, the most jarring disjuncture in the entire show is the clash between the script and the artistic direction. The internal emotional conflict within lines like “Ma can help you cut hair… be a good student… you want Ma to commit suicide ah?” is lost, with the rather puzzling directorial decision to play up a one-dimensional aggressiveness that verges on the psychotic instead.

Now I’m not saying that the script and the direction are bad. Far from it. Playwright Ellison Yuyang Tan and director Zelda Tatiana Ng both possess very strong and unique voices. Tan has a talent for depicting the quotidian with a simmering intensity, while Ng’s inspired use of discordant imagery creates a visually arresting milieu. The problem, then, is that these two strong individual voices are singing completely different tunes, which is akin to painting an impressionist piece in the style of Picasso.

The result is an extremely tiresome affair. Not only does the audience have to suffer through the constant fighting between characters, we also have to endure the conflict between the playwright’s words and the director’s heavy-handedness. What we eventually get is the same moral lesson repeatedly delivered to us in different ways: Ma is bad because of this, the sisters are bad because of that, blah blah. As if the moralistic good/bad dichotomy isn’t bad enough, we also see too much of the bad over the good.

I guess the main lesson Inheritance teaches us is that one should always start from the basics—script and direction should share the same vision.