“Is it fun?”

Reviewer: Myle Yan Tay
Performance: 21 October 2018

Bullying is the focus of the first production by The Fool Theatre, a new company that aims to promote social issues and multilingual theatre. Despite the timely topic, however, the show fails to create an emotional investment in the audience, despite some strong performances and well-crafted set and light design.

At the core of the production is the relationship between Ms. Lim, a teacher played by Audrey Luo, and Wei Cheng, a student played by Terry Tan. When Wei Cheng is accused of a crime, the school administration and other students turn on him, and Ms. Lim ends up being his sole support. Luo delivers several powerful monologues, and creates some genuine laughs. Tan brings a schoolboy charm to Wei Cheng, the otherwise unlikable class clown. But after a key point half way through the play, the two characters start to disappear, and are replaced by scenes between a faceless chorus of students and the school staff.

When this happens, Because It’s Fun loses its emotional potential. The faceless students are flat caricatures that are neither interesting nor engaging. The scenes between them sound monotonous, with little variation in cadence or rhythm. The principal and another teacher, Mr. Tan, provide large chunks of exposition, laying out arguments clunkily through thin sections of dialogue. And as an artistic choice, the adults never look at each other during their scenes, and instead look directly at the audience. If these characters were more well-rounded or complex, this could have been an effective technique to force the audience to contend with their ideas. Instead, the actors become talking heads, releasing information with little to no connection between them.

The choice to demonize most of the students and the school’s teaching staff makes them unlikable, which is an understandable instinct. But it makes them simple. They become unsympathetic villains who are driven by convenience, rather than by character. Only Wei Cheng’s character is given that complexity, as we examine his motives as a bully and learn that his anger stems from very human desires.

The music in the production consistently feels instructional, telling the audience how we should feel. There is hardly a monologue that is not accompanied by music, which signifies that the production does not trust the actor to hold our attention. The set and lights, designed by Petrina Tan, are much more delicately done. They never distract from the action, and only enhance what occurs onstage.

But the most egregious error committed in this production is the execution of the subtitles. If the company aims to promote multilingualism in theatre, it needs to pay keener attention to the speed of the subtitles and their consistency. Certain segments would have no translation and as far this reviewer can tell, it was not out of any artistic choice.