THE FALL by The Young Company

“The Fall”

Reviewer: Liana Gurung
Performance: 24 August 2018

Short and punchy, British playwright James Fritz’ The Fall is a timely production for the ageing population of Singapore. Young, loud and irreverent, Singapore Repertory Theatre’s (SRT) youth wing injects the greying set with energy and verve. At once a meditation on dying and a celebration of youth, The Fall flattens any age differences by having the young cast embody the old.

Beneath the absurd, dark and ironic humour, The Fall asks urgent questions about dignified dying – and living. Our muted reactions to the process of aging are magnified by Act 1’s A (Koh Hejian Benjamin) as he wretches and gags over the thought – and later reality – of dying. Thoughts about death emerge from characters but these are stretched slightly beyond belief as scenes grow increasingly fantastic through the course of the play. The set mimics a parallel descent into the decrepit – the prop of the bed, present across all three acts, grows increasingly bare as the play moves towards an antiseptic, dystopian future.

Act 3’s Nicholas Kyle Papayoanou stands out in a convincingly vulnerable portrayal of the play’s emotional heart. Bolstered by the warmly winning Kiara Pillai, Papayoanou makes an earnest case for living meaningfully in one’s twilight years as A makes an unlikely connection in his cell-like nursing home. Battling the disgust of another roommate, and the restrictions in place that rule out love between residents (“hygiene” is the crisp and vague reasoning), the overarching assertion is that the illness that accompanies old age is not infirmity, but isolation.

Ultimately, The Fall makes the strongest impression in what it leaves unsaid, though one might point out an inbuilt irony in its continued erasure of an aged voice and presence due to its framing as a youth production. Still, it is clear that The Young Company is a collection of bright and exciting individuals, whose stars I am interested to see stud future stages.