FIGS by Make Space

“Figs: Challenging what you think you know about love, life and reality”

Reviewer: Alisa Maya Ravindran
Performance: 30 June 2016

Figs disorientates from the get-go and asks more questions than it answers. The play charts two main narratives, a body in a video trying to tell a story of pain, love and loss as well as a man in love with a tree who travels to four planets and meets several unusual characters along the way. Figs experiments with sounds and lights. Music intersperses the play and the lights go on and off, at times to mark transitions, but also to highlight important points of a character’s speech. In this way, Figs demands that the audience engages it at a very knowing and fast-paced manner as one is always trying to figure out what has happened just a few moments before, before the next scene begins.

Nigel Choo, who plays the man in love with the tree, gives an impressive performance in his earnest and believable portrayal of an individual struggling to figure out what love looks like to other people. Anthea Chua’s powerful performance as the body trapped in a video, especially the raw emotions she conveys when expressing her loneliness, leaves the audience in silence. Louise Lee’s performance as God adds a rare moment of comedy to the play. She plays the almighty tongue-firmly-in-cheek lines. The characters are all very self-aware of the transience of their own lives, and this is translated in either the urgency with which they try to convey their message or their heavy sense of resignation at the futility of their lives. Either way, the audience feels that there is unfinished business vis-à-vis the characters. It is precisely this sense of incompleteness that makes the play inaccessible.

In the final analysis, Figs succeeds in introducing the themes of love, loss and gender. However, the multiple ways in which the play is experimental obfuscate many of the deeper insights to these pertinent issues. Overall, it is a commendable effort for a sophomore original production.