SEED by The Finger Players

“Thin Lines“

Reviewer: Beverly Yuen
Performance: 31 October 2015

Audience is greeted by a stark white stage after entering the theatre, hinting at a minimalist production. The actors, dressed in all white, play multiple roles in various stories that surround an Asian staple, rice. From there, it springboards into themes of living and dying; separation and reunion; fleetingness and rootedness. White, which is the colour of rice, is the colour of purity and hope. Paradoxically, it is also the colour that can be most easily soiled.

Seed, produced by The Finger Players in association with the Asian Performing Arts Festival and Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, is directed and written by Chong Tze Chien and presented by a group of 7 Japanese performers. It surrounds the stories of Japanese families and their reaction to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.  While most people are looking for ways to escape from the affected areas, a Japanese wife and her dead husband make their way to Fukushima from New York in search of the dead husband’s origins. The communication between the dead and living in the play seems to suggest that the lines between life and death; opportunity and danger; tradition and modernity are thin. This is further represented by the display of red, green and white threads on the bare stage, which are also used to signify telephone line, television screen, rice field and radiation in the play.

The performers handled the philosophy-heavy ideas embedded in their domestic dialogue well. The references to rice and these ideas were supported by their engaging, focused, believable and precise acting. Performance style is a mix of stylised and realist acting. Rice links one who works in the field to his land, roots and tradition. A family tradition, as the play implies, is alike the rice field that is passed down from one generation to the next; and this has to be sustained with right values such as diligence and commitment.

While the play has its surreal and humorous elements which made me laugh and reflect on the existence of being at times, the overly philosophical subtexts that are carried by the characters drained me half way through the play. These philosophical connotations could perhaps be conveyed to the audience better if the surrealist and stylistic elements of the piece are pushed further, beyond the comfort zone of watching a relatively well-made play crossed with essentially, a domestic drama.