EAT DUCK by Checkpoint Theatre

“… for the living, not the dead?”

Reviewer: Edward Eng
Performance: 29 August 2019

New writing is exciting. You enter the theatre without history, and hear language never pronounced beyond rehearsal. Checkpoint Theatre has historically supported new English-language play texts in Singapore, and Huzir Sulaiman and Claire Wong are often the first port of call for young writers.

This time, they introduce a play by Zenda Tan about family grief and grievances through the lens of a seven-day wake. The matriarch’s death has arrived, and like other Chinese-family-forced-to-come-together plays, is the impetus for an attempt at inter-generational and inter-personality empathy.

Tan’s play suggests scale: 13 characters over three generations, although Ah Ma’s attendance is only via her casket and the superstition that she is still floating nearby, spectrally. The first portrait of the family is at home, waiting on the cusp of her death. It fractures early when serious businessman and oldest son, Jerry (Hang Qian Chou), vents his frustration that the others are not taking the funeral rites seriously. This establishes a framework that pits the forces of the conservative and liberal, the old and new against each other.

The second fracture is when a grandson appears suddenly. Twenty-seven-year-old Eran (also played by Hang) is somehow estranged from his mother, turning up for the funeral only briefly with his girlfriend waiting in the car. He hands one of his uncles baijin (condolence money) instead of staying to fold joss paper. His mother is inevitably furious: the $50 notes aren’t even in an envelope. His brothers, Elijah (Adam Scott) and Eric (Chaney Chia), have feelings for him that respectively transcend and don’t transcend kinship.

But while Tan’s writing is often witty and plays lightly with meaning-making, it never reaches ingenuity. The gags stay gags, never becoming comedic critiques of characters and cultural structures. Jerry is the only character with a development arc, while the others are merely strangers with a few facts about themselves to perform.

Obviously this is true in real life, where we often only see uncurated slivers of people, but even naturalistic drama can stylise dialogue to its purposes. Characters in Alfian Sa’at’s Homesick are designed for the payoff when the truth comes out, while Florian Zeller’s The Father sketches its characters in recognisable distance so we can see ourselves in them. Because of this lack of textual direction and depth, Eat Duck falls mostly flat.

Wong’s stage direction is also odd. Transitions are bursts of discordant noises and harsh colours. Hang plays both major antagonists, one of whom only appears for about five minutes. A lot of the play is also geometrically static, with just two characters providing exposition about themselves, even though they have little impact on the direction of the plot.

Fortunately, some excellent performances are present. Karen Tan as the long-suffering arbitrator is heartrending, while Hang’s Jerry is surprisingly delicate. I wish I could say more about the other siblings, their spouses and the grandchildren, but I didn’t get a chance to know them.