MOTHER I : AMMA NAAN : IBU AKU by Kalaiselvi Grace and Suhaili Safari

“Listen to your mother”

Reviewer: Lee Min Jie
Performance: 5 May 2016

For a play innocuously titled Mother, the choice of lighting and set is gritty and garish. As you enter the space, an uncharacteristically giant baby hammock greets you. It steals your attention because it is a shade of red, almost like blood. A harsh spotlight envelops the rest of the space in an eerie fuchsia afterglow. This play celebrates motherhood in a different light, literally. Although I am unsure if the intentions of this creative decision is brought to fruition.

Ironically it is another long red stole that stole the show. In the hands of the nifty and nimble actresses, a simple cloth morphs metaphorically into a wedding veil, an umbilical cord, and an infant that they cradle in their arms.

Otherwise Grace Kalaiselvi and Nur Suhaili Safari Wijaya stand out only because they are clad in white against a dark backdrop. They hurry through their lines a lot of the time. This impacts the overall pacing and makes obvious the absence of pauses which can allow for the gravitas to sink in. Biting off each other’s lines also throws the subtitle coordinator into a frenzy, and at times what they are saying in their mother tongue can be completely lost on audiences who depend on the surtitles.

In the short span of an hour, it bites off more than it can chew. It runs a gamut of many issues, including abortion, adoption, conceiving, delivering, to infertility, and miscarriage. All these heavy topics whiz pass so quickly that the depth in each discussion is compromised. This touch-and-go approach has the effect of making the play appear like a rant or a comprehensive textbook that lists issues plaguing motherhood in methodical order.

As the play progresses, my eye invariably wonders around the space and the nondescript baby essentials hanging from the ceiling start to morph into portentous objects. Imagine looking at a one-piece baby romper hanging limply after hearing a recount of a miscarriage…

Towards the beginning and end, a recording of a series of voices in different languages are played on loop. I suspect that these are the voices of the twelve women who were interviewed for the play.  This is particularly thoughtful as an homage to the women who shared such intimate and personal material. It also allows audiences to “hear” these women first-hand and that is the allure of verbatim theatre.

Given that it’s the Mother’s Day weekend, this play timely foregrounds the challenges of motherhood and reminds audiences to not forget to show our appreciation to the women around us.