DISPLACED PERSONS’ WELCOME DINNER by Checkpoint Theatre

“remember, we are all on the same side…”

Reviewer: Idelle Yee
Performance: 26 May 2019

Checkpoint Theatre’s Displaced Persons’ Welcome Dinner has been one of the most talked about local theatre productions so far this year. Commissioned by the 2019 Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA), the play follows an international team of humanitarian workers navigating a crisis on the field.

Displaced Persons’ Welcome Dinner is at once fiercely cerebral and incandescent in unfiltered feeling. The dialogue is awash in acronyms explained only in the aftermath, situating the play firmly in the world of bureaucratic moribundity. Characters make frequent references to crises going on around the world without further explanation, assuming audience awareness of dire situations in Yemen and Sudan. The play goes into painstaking detail about sanitation processes in refugee camps, legal machinations within humanitarian organisations, and the unrelenting onslaught of paperwork that threatens the flame of compassion burning within even the saintliest of do-gooders.

Yet the play never veers far from its grounding in ardent and unmistakably human feeling. The soundscape, with hints of Gregorian and Celtic music, sets these interactions over paperwork and sanitation repairs in a world that seems almost supernatural in its fever of emotion. The characters, pushed beyond amicability or even compassion itself, consistently teeter on the brink of breakdown. At best, they are cynical, prickly, oversensitive and quite alarmingly inclined to holler expletives; at their worst, they are malicious, cruel, seemingly beyond redemption. It is occasionally difficult to remember that these people are, as Mike Miller (played by Emil Marwa) points out, “on the same side”. They are, to all intents and purposes, committed to doing good. What, then, is the character of this humanitarian work, that its workers must battle in futility to maintain some semblance of humanity?

It is a tall order to pinpoint a standout performer in this cast, given the ensemble nature of the play as well as the impressive displays of physical theatre, multiple languages and a variety of accents (although this last had its inconsistencies). It would be unseemly, however, not to mention Dawn Cheong’s performance as Sara. In a play that might have been so consistently overwhelming as to almost numb the audience to the intensity of emotion, Cheong’s performance leaves the audience reeling anew as the character grapples with sexual assault. Sara’s trajectory of trauma is perhaps the most well-explored, and Cheong is fully immersed: at one point, Sara, standing centrestage, has a breakdown so long and protracted it is quite terrible to behold. And yet it is not all brokenness — there is also courage, and perhaps even, towards the play’s end, a nascent triumph, not least of which is Cheong’s lending of an unlikely dignity to the traumatised female body.

As I leave the venue, I hear conversations of this tenor amongst some fellow theatre-goers: “I can’t believe I paid money for this. Once I heard the accents, I gave up.” This makes me sad. This production is hardly perfect, but it tells an important story with commitment and courage — not unlike the humanitarian workers in the play. Rather than dismiss the entire effort out of hand, I would urge an examination of how this work may encourage the local theatre scene to create productions that consider with even greater moral courage and artistry Singapore’s positionality in the larger currents at play internationally — humanitarianism, the currency of victimhood, and refugee crises. In a world oversaturated with exploitative portrayals of suffering, the art we make must awaken our senses anew to the truthfulness of human hurt. Let us not give up. For are we not — in the end — on the same side?