“Entanglement of Intimacy”

Reviewer: Beverly Yuen
Performance: 1 October 2016

What happens when your family member is your love, your burden, sanctuary, and hatred all at the same time?

The Malay Man and His Chinese Father, directed by Noor Effendy Ibrahim, and staged at Goodman Arts Centre Black Box, was first presented at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2015[1].

In this staging, the Chinese father (Michael Tan) and Malay son (Yazid Jalil) are played by the same actors as the first. However, one prominent element which is missing is Asnida Daud vocally accentuating the helpless states of the characters, and suggesting the presence of the wife’s “ghost”. The presence of this “ghost” throws the contrast in ethnicity into sharper relief.

While the character development and psychological narrative of the father and son are much more detailed and layered in this realistic rendering, the contrasting ethnicity is downplayed in this staging. Nonetheless, I am not suggesting this piece is any less enjoyable.

I savour this work with disconcerting relish. The speechless and cyclic representation of life reminds me of film director’s Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’Amour. But this show is much more repressed and dysfunctional, as the world of the father and son is contained within a two-room flat.

The play opens with the father and son in their briefs, and going about their daily household chores in a routine manner. This immediately establishes an intimate space, with audience seated as close as 50cm from the actors.

Through realistic actions of the son serving the father porridge and coffee, bathing him, and movements of tussling and cuddling, the conflicts of the intimate relationship between the two are portrayed— embrace versus struggle; support versus resistance. The son feels the need to help the father relive the memory of his wife by dressing in his mother’s kebaya, and experiences sexual abuse from his father thinking that the son is his wife.

The recurring action of opening and closing of windows also has great symbolic significance in the piece. The son is finding a way to escape from the household to seek a way to live, but he seems to be trapped in the pleasure of torture while being confined with the father. The simple act surrounding the windows also signifies the secrets within the household which risk exposure.

With suppressed frustration, the son wants to help his father find strength through the latter’s reminiscence of his wife, but he grapples to let go of his father. This too, hurts for the audience.

[1] Beverly Yuen’s review of the first staging of the production can be found here.

“The Malay Man and His Chinese Father”

Reviewer: Beverly Yuen
Performance: 17 January 2015

As the audience step into the theatre, the two protagonists—the Chinese father (played by Michael Tan) and the Malay son (played by Yazid Jalil)—are already standing on the t-shaped stage in their briefs, with audience placed on both sides of the stage. As the performance begins, they started to touch each other: at times resembling an embrace, at times a wrestle, at times a struggle to arrive at a common understanding. The father and son then went into a sequence of taking turns to carry each other. Gradually, another character, the Malay wife/mother is mentioned by the two. The father missed the lost wife and sees her in the son. He rekindles the memory of the beloved wife by dressing the son in the wife’s kebaya. The son could only reenact his mother through his father’s gaze and touch.

Silence plays a major role in creating tension and the sense of repressed anger between father and son while recovering their lost memory of a wife and a mother. The protagonists do not speak other than the repeated humming of the Chinese childhood song “Mom is the Best in the World” by the father. There is a very powerful image of the father resting on the son’s laps. Traditionally, we often see the depiction of a son on a mother’s laps—from folk drawings to religious depiction of Mother Mary and her dying son. The image of a father on the son’s laps questions the identity of the two. Who is the parent and who is the child? Director Noor Effendy interrogates gender and traditional familial roles here.

Vocal artist Asnida Daud generated an array of vocal displays—from chant-like singing to low-pitched alaryngeal voice to soothing sounds to coarse and cracking voice. All this accentuates the helplessness and aching state of reminiscences that the characters are experiencing; and form concrete images of the return of the “ghost” of the wife and the physical manifestation of the hysterical state of search and loss.

The lighting designer Mohd Fita Helmi plays with shadows in a simple and yet intelligent manner. Shadows of the performers were constantly cast on the walls, which suggests that there was something darker and deeper beyond the physical appearance of the two characters. At times, the shadows of the performers were magnified on the walls, as if there was a higher being or a third party observing their lives.

Both the performers were able to sustain the one-hour performance with intensity: from excellent control of their physical movement to the portrayal of inner emotions. The haunting and overwhelming impact of the memory that returns to them escalates as the play progresses. The son, who knows almost nothing about his mother, eventually tires of the game. The father, obsessed with the memory of the wife, persists in finding a door to the wife through the son.

Overall, the intimate stories of the father and son are communicated strongly without words. It is a powerful piece about the search of identity, lost memory and sacrifice. However, I wish that there were some lighter moments in the process of the search.