THE ADVENTURES OF ABHIJEET by Patch and Punnet

“Turn Up The Heat In Abhijeet”

Reviewer: Lee Shu Yu
Performance: 20 January 2019

In The Adventures of Abhijeet, Patch and Punnet has once again opted to use kitschy buffoonery to give audiences a fun show, this time to shed light on the ill treatment of migrant workers. Unfortunately, not all of the playfulness lands well.

The play starts off with a melodramatic but all too familiar situation: Abhijeet, or Jeet, (Jit Dastidar) prays for a way to earn money to save his ailing daughter. A cloaked wizard/narrator (Krish Natarajan) appears, and offers to send him on a quest to earn gold coins in Singaland.

Jeet finds work in Singaland stacking boxes, but when he gets injured, he is sent on a wild-goose chase for a “pink gem” to pay for his treatment. Along the way, he befriends other migrant workers, or “Flower People”. Throughout, the mechanical Singalanders, clad in pink, flit in and out of scenes as soulless bureaucrats. The witty quickfire by the cast is clever, if only one can hear them clearly and consistently.

The cast toe the line when it comes to representing the Flower People. I get a rude shock when I see Sharmaine Goh appear with face-paint as the Filipino character Gloria: in the warm light, it looks like brown-face. It really is just purple, and gets explained away with the magic that permeates the piece – Gloria’s employer is a witch who turns her purple every time she does something wrong. Following horror stories of employers abusing their domestic helpers, I appreciate the company’s choice to jolt audiences under the guise of fantasy. But when the purple-face jokes get tiresomely overused, this missed opportunity for criticism becomes mere mockery.

The Flower People also make some very questionable choices. Gloria steals from her employers before running away, and she and Jeet get high on stolen drugs. Together with their third companion, Ling Ling (Lynn Chia), they then bully a rude, wheelchair-using old lady who lives in a shoe.

Ultimately, the Flower People are nothing more than society’s stereotypes of them. They are pitiful and confused refugees who engage in vices – and we never see a firm criticism of the society that stereotypes them as such. The play also puts the onus entirely on the Flower People to make their own lives better, which renders the villainy, injustice and prejudice against them invisible. Clearly, this is not an accurate representation of migrant workers. But even so, one must ask, whose gaze has taken precedence in the piece?

The only glimmer of power reversal comes in an Oz-like fashion. The three friends meet the “Dra-Gon” (Andrew Marko) in his ivory tower, only to realise he is the half-baked leader of Singaland. It is an interesting concept, three migrant workers helping the incumbent find his wings again, but this work-in-progress ends on a deliberate cliff-hanger.

I desperately wanted to see the company succeed in dealing with social issues without using realism, but The Adventures of Abhijeet seems powerless and cursory. The team may need to reconsider their take on the migrant debate, in order to deliver a more effective farce with greater conviction in future iterations of the work.