THE GHOST IN YOUR HEAD by Global Cultural Alliance

“One need not be a chamber to be haunted.”

Reviewer: Christian W. Huber
Performance: 8 November 2018, 9.30pm

As part of the Singapore Writer’s Festival’s Late Night series, The Ghost in your Head is a multi-sensorial encounter with dead writers, literary villains and heroines. It invites viewers to immerse themselves in the experience at The Arts House, a wonderful venue for a piece like this: nothing screams eerie more than when you’re one of a few people wandering the halls of a historical house in the dead of night.

The established thespians in this play are more than capable of engaging the attention of the travelling audience members in the various rooms of the space, and inhabit their characters’ quirky mannerisms well. But for this immersive experience to work, it requires the audience to have at least some knowledge of the texts featured. Moreover, the production should make clear the role it expects the audience to take.

As we are ushered into the Blue Room for a scene titled “Miss Havisham and the Mad Tea Party”, we are enticed to partake in delectable sweets – ranging from muffins, macarons, cupcakes, and tea – while waiting for the arrival of the hostess. Once Miss Havisham arrives, dressed in a veiled wedding gown, the audience hushes up, expecting some form of performance. She walks around, plays some music on a gramophone, offers sweets to some of the audience members, and from time to time sprouts out quotes from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (where her character belongs), and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Apart from these sporadic quotes, she waits. As do we. For Godot? One is not sure.

We are eventually told by the roving staff that we can ask the “ghost” questions. Complete cluelessness ensues, as audience members scramble to come up with something to ask, or wait in anticipation for something else to happen. After a smattering of vague questions – and more awkwardness from both camps – the doors open, and we’re free to exit the room.

Fortunately, some of other scenes fare better. The art installation piece in The Chamber, titled “Soundtracks of the Unseen”, invites audience members to speak lines from Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Tang Xianyu’s The Peony Pavilion into microphones, which are then looped and manipulated to become otherworldly sounds. This is played as a soundtrack to an ongoing video of abstract scenes. Kudos to sonic alchemist – Mervin Wong – in helping to send the message that some lines can get caught in your head.

Perhaps a more restricted audience count (the crowded rooms lose intimacy with the spirits) and better organisation (the pre-briefing caused delays in some of the installation start times and inevitably delayed the end times) would have made The Ghost in Your Head a smoother and more rewarding experience, rather than just an eerie waste of time.