WE ARE LIKE THIS ONLY 2 by HuM Theatre

“When ‘Indian’ means cultural differences”

Reviewer: Meera Nair
Performance: 10 September 2016

We Are Like This Only 2 is a comedy that casts its eye on the cultural clashes that ensue when an “old” Singaporean Indian family gets tied to a “new” Indian expatriate family after their children fall in love.

Seasoned performers Daisy Irani (also director) and Subin Subaiah (also writer) steal the show with their impeccable comic timing and Bollywood-worthy performances, complete with singing, dancing and over-the-top acting, deliberately calculated to bring about the desired laughs. In the midst of her portrayals of more sedate older women, Irani particularly impresses with her versatility in a sketch as a sprightly event planner decked out in a cool jacket and a bob wig, looking completely at home in that outlandish role.

While the production is tied together by the impending wedding of the aforementioned children, there are sketches randomly inserted that are hard to place in the overarching narrative. These are historical sketches involving a Sepoy and his wife, a Chettiar and his wife, and an Indian prisoner and his wife. Indeed, it might be that these sketches are intentionally obtuse. After all, Subaiah states in the programme’s foreword that the production is not intended to stick to a strict structure, jesting that Indians “love to go off on a tangent”.

This ambiguity as to what is deliberate also comes up in Sharul Channa’s portrayal of a “old” Indian Singaporean Tamil woman. Speaking with an Indian accent peppered with Singlish, her character comes across more as an assimilating (or assimilated) “new” Indian rather than “old” Indian. I wonder if her character is meant to question the old/new Indian binary, or if it is just an unintentional effect of the acting.

The production is rife with cultural references that can be quite specific; yet it manages to find its way to a common ground often enough that its audience does not get too lost. However, the production’s progress as a comedy is hindered by the lengthy monologues that fall to the characters played by Rishi Budhrani.  These texts border on the didactic and while they may be useful and informative to those unfamiliar with the dynamics of an Indian community, the monologues drags out the pacing of the performance.

Having said that, the production does have moments where it successfully marries observation without letting comedy down. In a particularly poignant illustration, Irani (as the “new” Indian) and Channa (as the “old” Indian) sing a popular song simultaneously, the former in Hindi and the latter in Tamil. While the production examines different facets of the cultural clashes between the “new” and “old” Indians, it is ironic that this brief moment is goes to the core of the issue, illustrating that beneath that superficial similarity lies a deep difference that is both cultural and linguistic.