ALWAYS EVERY TIME by GroundZ-0

“Always Every Time: transcending language, gender, time”

Reviewer: Liana Gurung
Performance: 28 March 2019

Always Every Time is an amalgamation of the names of its double-billed performances, Tiap Kali Aku… (“Every Time I…”) and <<我在你左右>> (“Always on my Mind”). Staged by Ground Z-0, an up-and-coming theatre collective devoted to the celebration of Singaporean narratives and multilingual theatre, Always Every Time makes an interesting decision to bring two seemingly disparate performances, told in two different languages, together.

Directed and written by Adib Kosnan, who performs the piece together with Saiful Amri, Every Time I… is a meditation on fatherhood that takes place in the ponderous 20 minutes before Saiful’s child is born. Saiful’s character wonders at the importance of fatherhood – and whether he can even become a father without having one of his own to emulate. Adib provides a sometimes sympathetic, sometimes challenging backdrop to Saiful’s brooding with a colourful rotisserie of characters.

Always on my Mind… features Liow Shi Suen and Lina Yu as a mother-daughter duo in another imaginary space: a metaphysical bus interchange, where Liow has been given three chances to board a specific bus. As the buses come and go, the exchange gets increasingly heated as Liow and Yu try to navigate a past rife with the limited time they have left.

I appreciate the intellectual challenge both plays offer, as they invited us to consider parent-child interactions – universal human experiences that transcend language, race, gender and time. The plays’ other similarities are also embedded quite elegantly in their structures, such as each narrative being hemmed tightly into finite amounts of time. In Every Time I… it is the 20-minute timer that counts Amri down to his child’s birth, and in Always on my Mind it is the three mysterious chances Liow is given to “board the bus”. The contrast of the universality of struggling parent-child relationships against the minute amount of time each protagonist is given to iron them out sharpens the performance’s sophisticated, collective argument about the complications that come in-hand with familial ties. This is what melds two distinct performances into one holistic production.

That said, the melodrama of Always on my Mind becomes almost corny against the minimalist musings of Every Time I… The former’s attempts to incorporate Chinese mythology and nostalgic golden age songs into the dramatic narrative results in a stilted and jarring storyline.

Beyond Every Time I…’s simplicity, which sought to show rather than tell, I also feel that more care was taken with the its stage direction and lighting sequences. Its final tableau is particularly striking, as Saiful faces away from the audience, and the harsh light throws his long shadow against the wall behind him. The Play Den at the Arts House is a challenging location to conduct a performance, being without a traditional stage and with the audience bordering three sides of the central performance space, but Every Time I… demonstrates what can be achieved with care: a performance that transforms into a shifting kaleidoscope, which changes from each angle and perspective.