CAFE by Joel Tan

“Being and Nothingness”

Reviewer: Alex Foo
Performance: 18 June 2016

The manager in Café (Erwin Shah Ismail) exclaims on more than one occasion that “this is a crisis!”. The real crisis, however, is having to sit through this agonizing play, which is as tepid as a latte left to sit for too long and as slow as service in the café.

But I think that’s precisely the point here: that nothing happens.

Percolating through the script are observations on a very contemporary sense of entitlement and lack of compassion. The play contrasts a wide range of population demographics and juxtaposes them. These include the office worker with First World Problems (deliberating between a mocha and a macchiato) complaining about an ex-convict’s poor service (half-convincingly played by Joshua Lim). Zee Wong delivers a riveting portrayal of a mercurial, judgmental and blithely self-obsessed narcissist. The showdown in the final scene is ugly, carnivorous and searing.

The playwright, Joel Tan, has a remarkable ear for dialogue and a mordant sense of humour. That much comes through here, capturing what is pretty much the ‘if it’s not on Instagram, it didn’t happen’ zeitgeist to hilarious effect.

The bigger question is what Tan is trying to achieve with his play.

What is new in Café is Tan’s experiment with absurdism. Audience anticipation and expectations demands that something is about to happen, especially when every character is desperate to leave. Yet there is no dénouement, and the exit door is nothing but an empty symbol. There is no follow up as to what happens to these characters after they leave, nor, I suspect, do any of us really care.

As a dissection of society’s ills and neuroses, Café is incisive. Ryann Othniel Seng’s atmospheric sound design – crackling thunder, the hissing of the milk steamer, and thunderous plops of water – echoes much of the characters themselves, all sound and fury, signifying nothing.  Instead, a rankling sense of emptiness in the play pervades in all five characters, and hollers at the heart of the play.