“无可避免的轮回”

Reviewer: Neo Hai Bin | 梁海彬
Performance: 23 July 2016

2016年的“HOTEL”继2015年后再度与观众见面。全剧长达5小时，述说了新加坡百年来历史脉络下的11个小故事，感觉像看情景喜剧（sitcom）。14位演员诠释近50多个角色，颇像在历史中不断投胎转世。

“HOTEL”全剧以一家酒店套房作为全剧的中心点，所有的故事都发生在那间酒店套房。“酒店”作为超级清晰的意象，让这部戏变得易看、易懂、也易阅读。百年来不同的住客在酒店套房进出，对照新加坡这个地方从古至今都没有真正的“住客”，只有过客，谁都不曾“拥有”过这块土地。酒店不乏鬼故事，演员们扮演一个个历史人物，正像历史的鬼魂如实搬演曾经发生过的事件。入住酒店，就有退房的期限，本地历史的改朝换代，让我们看到每一代统治者的“入住”和“退房”，循环重复。酒店作为一个公共空间，却也是用钱就能买到的私人空间，隐藏着最私密、最不可告人的行径。光怪陆离的人类行为，在酒店里一览无遗—— 而“国家”正也是如此具阈限性的空间（liminal space）。

“酒店”的确是一个特别强烈且鲜明的比喻。观众看懂了这个剧，可惜也因此少了其他阅读的可能性。

在精辟的台词和令人捧腹大笑的情节中，我看到了历史无可避免的轮回。这也许才是该剧的最成功之处—— 借鉴历史，却对照现实。该剧选择的故事让我在看戏的同时也看到近年来的新闻报导：小印度骚乱事件、同性恋者遭受的歧视、恐怖氛围下对弱势族群的憎恨…… 原来这几年看到的新闻都不“新”，竟然都是历史长河中不断发生过的事。这让观众在观看“HOTEL”时，尽管获得了“窥看”住客隐私的绝对权利，却也加倍觉得无力与无助。观众只能被动地看戏，就像酒店员工们只能隔岸观火看住客的命运，或国家的命运。

如何超脱轮回，避免重蹈历史的覆辙？“HOTEL”没有提供答案，也没有义务提供答案。但我们需要的是属于自己的故事—— 国家论述之外的故事，小人物们的故事。而本地艺术家们所挖掘与想想的“野史”，能够让观众反思，自省—— 这也许才是新加坡人能够携手走向未来的关隘所在。

“Hotel”

Reviewer: Dawn Teo
Performance: 14 & 15 July 2016

First staged in 2015, Hotel is a five-hour long epic that still manages to touch the audiences. Having caught the show last year and now at Lasalle’s SIA Theatre, I find myself going home with new perspectives of my identity and homeland.

Hotel captures the various narratives from Singapore as a colony till today, and even into the possible future. As chambermaids clear the room for the next guest to enter, a new story unfolds. The multiple stories reveal the perspectives of different individuals as we follow the journey of the room, nation and its people through time and history

With all the action centering on the same hotel room, the set is the constant – two walls and two doors to resemble an entrance, washroom exit as well as the layout of the room. The walls have multimedia projections to illustrate the movement of time periods – from patterned wallpaper to iconic events displayed through video.  It is simple and functional.  The scene changes are done quickly because of how well-practiced the chambermaids are. It is quite a delight to witness the room morphing in front of our eyes

But the stars of the show are the actors. An ensemble of 14 actors play characters of multiple ethnicities in different scenes of the play and at other times working the transitions. I enjoyed the use of different languages, accents that add to the authentic portrayal of these characters. Humour is used to underpin issues we as a nation wallpaper over. Propositions are declared but I am allowed to make up my own mind.

Hotel is one play that traverses time and space and is a piece of brilliant story-telling about ourselves and our home. Perhaps it challenges the common perception that we are too young a nation to have memories and histories to call our own.

“A Richly-Coloured History Of Singapore”

Reviewer: Meera Nair
Performance: 3 July 2016

There is a lot that can go wrong in four and a half hours, but Hotel isn’t one of them.

It is impossible not to be impressed when you come face-to-face with the richly-coloured set and costumes, or when you hear the cast effortlessly going through nine languages with perfect accents. The backbone of their performances is a script by Alfian Sa’at and Marcia Vanderstraaten, which remains witty even while dealing with sensitive historical material.

In short, Hotel manages to keep its historical re-telling current. Take the opening sketch about the 1915 Sepoy Mutiny. A mention of the need for alcohol control despite the mutineers being sober draws parallels with the events in Little India in 2013. Another running thread is the critique against essentialising race. The play challenges assumptions of race, most heart-wrenchingly through the barbarism inflicted by the police onto Hakim (Ghafir Akbar), an innocent trader who is suspected of being a potential terrorist threat to the country.

Hotel starts off as a series of unrelated sketches, but these come together in the second half to show. For example, the love child of a Japanese officer (Moo Siew Keh) and a local Malay woman (Sharda Harrison), whom we meet in 1945, returns 40 years later to find his mother. Azizah (Siti Khalijah Zainal), who meets P Ramlee (Ghafir Akbar) in 1955, makes an appearance in 2005 with her son Hakim (Ghafir Akbar). While the play mostly finds a balance between serious and amusing, the second half of the play appears sombre and darker, in part weighed down by the sketch of 2005. It raises the question of whether this play too may have fallen victim to our tendency of romanticising the past and vilifying they present.

While Hotel takes a journey through time, it remains confined within the physical space of one hotel suite. The setting is eminently suitable. Like guests in a hotel, the stories fleetingly occupy the stage, some leaving a stronger mark on their surroundings than others, some returning in the future, all unique in their own way.

If the hotel room be Singapore and Singapore be home, then it is worth observing that in the final scene, we are told that the notion of home could be an illusion, that we are all just travellers passing through it. Sobering as the thought may be, Hotel reminds us that it is the travellers that breathe life into the physical space of the room, through the lives they lead and the stories they create. For a country born of immigration, there cannot be a greater truth.

“You never quite want to check out of this Hotel”

Reviewer: Isaac Lim
Performance: 29 August 2015, 3pm & 8pm

A grand, prestigious hotel, welcomes its guests from all over, to help tell a story spanning a century. People come and go but it is the traces they leave behind that adds charm to the hotel’s history. And it all unfolds in room 308.

Welcome to the epic Hotel, a Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) 2015 commission, by W!ld Rice.

Unfolding in two parts, Hotel is a series of 11 short plays lasting almost 5 hours long. Co-directed by Ivan Heng and Glen Goei, and co-written by award-winning playwright Alfian Sa’at with Marcia Vanderstraaten, Hotel navigates through Singapore’s history, fifty years before and after independence.

We see a pair of long-lost cousins reuniting in Room 308 in 1925: one a laundry room staff in the hotel, and the other a servant who’s followed her employers to Singapore. Their story is no different from the lonely and abused maids today.

In 1965, a room service manager has an affair with the television repairman. They are embroiled in a relationship that is filled with love and hate, and ends with the declaration of Singapore’s independence.

It is especially heart-warming, or maybe heartbreaking, to see certain characters that reappear over time. There is the bellboy Daut, who rises through the ranks in the hotel. Then there are the two Malay women, Sharifah, who is forced to part with her Japanese lover and son at the end of the Japanese occupation, and then meets her son forty years later in a bittersweet reunion.

That said, it is Part 2 that is more palatable to this reviewer, perhaps due to the fact that the scenes in this installment are more light-hearted. The stories in Part 1 appear as independent and disparate vignettes and as such, lack the coherence of a performance entity.

It is also in part 2 that we see a bunch of larger-than-life, over-the-top characters dealing with contemporary issues that, because of their historical currency, feel more real. In 1975, near the end of Bugis Street’s heydays, we meet a drag queen negotiating his identity with his mother. In 1995, we witness the on-goings in the bride’s room as a multiracial couple prepares for their second banquet entrance.

The wow-factor of this production lies in the use of languages, especially the colloquial languages of the time. We hear the characters speaking in rather impressive Japanese in 1945, and very fluent Cantonese conversed between the two Chinese maids in 1925. Weirdly, there was a wave of gasps and wows from the audience when actor Dwayne Lau, who plays the Indian groom in 1995, spoke in clear Mandarin.

At the end of the evening, one may feel drained by the Hotel experience, but because it is such a unique and epic Singapore experience, you never quite feel like checking out.

“Hotel dissatisfaction”

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 29 August 2015, 3pm & 8pm

A mixed bag of tricks from W!ld Rice’s finest.

Singapore. 100 years: 1915-2015. How do you tell a story to account for an entire century?

W!ld Rice’s answer: You tell ten stories, each representing one decade.

And not only that, but to set all ten stories in the SAME hotel room.

And not only that, but to have the entire show split into Parts 1 and 2, for a total run-time of FIVE hours.

If you thought that setup sounds shaky, you are correct. However, with a cast and production roster to rival last year’s staging of The House of Bernada Alba (also produced by W!ld Rice), expectations run high for this two-part epic.

Way …Too … High!

The show opens with more fizzle than bang – the backdrop of the set looks like it will collapse if an audience member accidentally sneezes in their seat. The choreographed movements of the ensemble cast to signal the change of scenes, coupled with the flagrantly twee soundscape, makes one feel as if one is watching “Singapore: the Pantomime”. As if those aren’t offensive enough (and don’t even get me started on the abysmal acoustics of the over-cramped venue), from my viewing position all the way at the top of the Circle-Circle (yes, it was a circle on top of another circle), I can see ALL the stage markings onstage.

Cue the cringes.

Onto the plot then. Part 1, from year 1915 to 1965, flits from topic to topic, briefly touching on colonialism, the Japanese Occupation, P. Ramlee films, to feminism. Interestingly, these scenes take their cue from other theatrical genres, from Genet to Bollywood – a small but nonetheless inspired idea to trace the history of theatre alongside Singapore’s own history. Part 2, from year 1975 to 2015, demonstrates a maturity of plot development that coherently weaves together different languages, save for a shaky start with a dream sequence that features LSD and – get this – walking penis mascots.

Cue the “WTF??”.

Now don’t get me wrong here – Hotel isn’t completely rubbish. The cast execute their roles competently, and at its best, the comedy is ridiculously funny yet socially incisive. However, no matter how much the creative team puts their creative spin on setting the stories in the same hotel room over an entire century, the premise remains uninspired to me. Anything can happen in the privacy of a hotel room – this seems far too easy for two experienced playwrights (Alfian and Vanderstraaten). There are times when these side stories of the Other Singapore meander into wish-fulfillment territory, which makes it even more of a creative cop-out.

I guess this is one of those times where a production looks good on paper, but turns out otherwise.

Cue the sighs.