RECALLING MOTHER by Checkpoint Theatre

“The Mother We Share”

Reviewer: Alex Foo
Performance: 25 March 2016

Checkpoint Theatre’s latest production, Recalling Mother, is, as its title suggests, an exercise in constructing autobiographies. Much like a home cooked meal, it is written, performed simply and sincerely by Claire Wong and Noorlinah Mohamed. There is no fourth wall, no hagiography, just simple and powerful storytelling – the very atom of theatre making – at its core. And what tender and touching stories we hear!

The two leads walk us through their childhood, the gradual aging of their mothers and the performance history of the piece (this is its fourth staging). They slip into their characters effortlessly, modulating their tones, speaking solely in their mother tongue and altering their physical gait, right down to the sallow droop of a weather-beaten face. In this parade of characters, the audience meets Madam Wong, the transparently emotional passive-aggressive Cantonese-speaking mother, and Cik Bee Bee, the endless spring of supportive love with a smile that conceals all. Crackling with tension and bravura, the play renegotiates the evolving giving and receiving dynamics between a mother and daughter in light of physical deterioration and dementia. The result is heartbreaking at times, but always humming with infinite tenderness.

At some points, portrayals of Madam Wong and Cik Bee Bee border on caricature – the mother obsessed with whether her daughter has eaten or the mother who keeps getting non-Chinese names wrong – but these moments are deliberately comic and comment on how nostalgia and the passing of time distorts of memories. For Wong and Noorlinah, memory acquires auditory, kinaesthetic and gustatory textures – Noorlinah assiduously romanising the Arabic script for her mother’s Hajj and Wong looking doe-eyed at her mother cooking up a storm.

At times, I found the lighting a tad jarring, especially in the sharp demarcations of scenes. Yet, some of the best scenes are achieved through the intelligent use of lighting, such as front lighting Noorlinah and Wong as they twirl around on stage to strains of Cantonese opera, producing enlarged silhouettes on the cyclorama, the telling presence of a larger, maternal figure as they yearn to be a child again and drink from the milk of maternal goodness.

What makes this such a compelling production is the well-paced direction and sensitive script, flowing with the natural cadences of everyday speech. When playing their mothers, there are long tracts of Cantonese and Malay, delivered without any surtitles. By the end of the play, when Wong and Noorlinah finally introduce the names of their mothers to us, whilst their mothers’ recorded voices play in the background, we feel like we have already met these wonderful women.