THE SHAPE OF A BIRD by Jean Tay | Saga Seed Theatre

“The shape of metaphors”

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 16 January 2016

Jean Tay gets political in her new play.

Photo credit: Wee Li Lin

“Stories have power.”

This is the essential message that Jean Tay’s The Shape of a Bird conveys. Incidentally, its title also reveals its theme of censorship – if you can’t write about a bird, you write around the shape of a bird.

Audiences familiar with Tay’s previous works like Boom and Everything but the Brain might be a little surprised with the explicit political overtones of this play that is still a work-in-progress. An imprisoned writer (Tan Kheng Hua) tries to write letters to her daughter (Jean Toh), communicating via stories, while an oppressive authority (Brendon Fernandez) tries to keep them apart.

The writing style is undeniably Tay’s. The play has a graceful and delicate charm that expertly flits between the harsh austerity of the prison cell and the magical wonder of the imagined story-world.

Yet, the plethora of theatrical elements employed to connote the differences between the two worlds make for a stifled viewing experience. We have light patterns, puppetry, noisy (not to mention trite) sound effects, masks, folding paper as props, actors playing multiple characters, and the list goes on… This makes the entire piece rather crowded, and not in a good way.

Nonetheless, this piece remains an achievement in itself. Although the combination of the theatrical elements described earlier is jarring and confusing, the individual elements are creative and inspired in their own way.

Of course, the highest praise is reserved for last. The ensemble (Tan Kheng Hua, Jean Toh, Brendon Fernandez, and Thomas Pang) deliver a brilliant and riveting performance, even for a script that Tay feared was “impossible to stage”! They showcase a sense of fluidity in shifting across characters and supple physicality in their body movements. They are also able to evoke a palpable terror that hangs over the entire play, but with tiny glimpses of hope and wonder that burst forth in rare moments.

This play joins the glut of political plays afflicting Singapore theatre at the present. Is there an unwritten rule that “you can’t call yourself a Singaporean playwright until you’ve written a political play”?

That said, Tay cleverly manages to couch the usual anti-totalitarian critique within the theatre of the fantastic, tempering politics with an epic mode of storytelling. Is Tay, then, writing around the shape of political critique? Hmm…

In sum, The Shape of a Bird is a play that poses huge technical and creative barriers to surmount. There is still a lot more work to be done before it can call itself a “finished product”. Yet, even at such a premature stage of its drafting, it brims with such immense potential and I cannot wait to see the finished product.