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>>>>>SQUEEZED DRY
If
you like a good squeeze, ACTION Theatre has always been the place to go.
Since 1993, the Actioners have been dishing up regular rations of bite-sized
plays to hungry audiences, and have secured a regular supply of playlets
through their 10-Minute Play Contest, which has attracted scripts from
all around the world. This latest instalment once again blends local fare
with foreign cuisine and, like most fusion food, is always odd and often
revolting, but is occasionally delicious.
>
'Whatever That Is': **1/2
I had high
hopes of 'Whatever That Is' by Huzir Sulaiman. The still-fresh
memory of his masterful, lyrical Arts Fest commission, 'Occupation',
and Claire Wong's equally commanding performance in it had put any
of their future team-ups right at the top of my "to see" list.
Sadly, I
was served rather meagre portions - which is not to say that 'Whatever
That Is' was bad, just that it was in no way exceptional. To begin
with, the piece was essentially a radio play - a ten-minute filler,
perhaps, on the BBC World Service. A middle-aged couple talk about their
son, the husband's work and the repercussions of his earlier affair.
Everything is civilised; static. Indeed, save for a little contrived pacing
around on the part of Wong, the actors never moved, having no earthly
reason to do so. They were plainly there just to facilitate the dialogue.
Which was
another problem, because while the script was perfectly serviceable and
in some places clever, it never sparkled or glowed. Sulaiman's occasional
attempts at more poetic speech rhythms, which had been so striking and
beautiful in 'Occupation', were simply patterned prose here,
and he hid beneath forced urbanity the fact that he had little to say.
It did not
help that the actors could not provide the 'natural' conversation
that the piece required, indeed, consisted of. Wong's presence and
theatricality, an asset in many forms of theatre, proved a handicap here,
and Chew treated his part like a particularly tricky elocution exercise
and was audibly uncomfortable when called on to swear.
Nonetheless,
if one closed one's eyes and listened, the words and conceits were
appealing enough, and perhaps the greatest problem with 'Whatever
That Is' was that it was not the potted masterpiece I had been expecting.
>
'Dinner for Two': *
Two people
at a restaurant. One is smarmy, the other is smug. One shits and doesn't
eat, the other eats and obsesses about orchids. One wants to go home,
so do I. This is dinner for two, which means that motivation, context
and all forms of meaning are distinctly uninvited.
If the point
of this impenetrable, charmless playlet by Malaysian writer Leow Puay
Tin was to make two decent actors (Jean Ng and Loong Seng Onn) look bad,
then consider it a roaring success, but if it was supposed to do anything
else, then I'm clueless as to what. The script was an oddments box
of random, ugly lines, identically and gratingly delivered. Obsessions
were raised and dropped unexplored, sex was suggested without chemistry
and violence was invoked without bite - if this was stream-of-consciousness
writing, then we'd all be better off asleep.
Meanwhile,
the direction managed the impressive feat of being both arbitrary and
obvious. The actors' faces were forced into glassy-eyed smirks,
their voices into acid syrup and neither was allowed to waver. They were
allowed to jump around and generally caress or attack each other, but
it was not clear why, especially since it made them look like teenagers
when they were theoretically supposed to be middle-aged.
If the play's
rambling had any kind of focus, I suppose it was the difficulty of eating
and the appeal defecation, and this is quite apt, because it made me lose
my appetite and want to get it out of my system. |
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>>'Two
people at a restaurant. One is smarmy, the other is smug. One shits and
doesn't eat, the other eats and obsesses about orchids. One wants
to go home, so do I.'
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> 'MRT': *1/2
Shortly after
its publication, Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' was criticised
for its over-reliance on coincidence; Desmond Sim has created a monster.
Two people
who would never normally talk to each other (an old grandmother and a
young professional) end up talking to each other because… well,
they just do, okay? They continue talking and we discover that the grandmother's
eccentricities can be explained by her blaming herself for her grandson's
death. How do we discover this? In a moment of silence, the professional
takes out a pre-folded paper boat from his laptop case and floats it on
a puddle of urine on the MRT seat, and then the grandmother says, "I
taught him to fold his first paper boat." Naturally. And of course,
it later transpires that the professional has just been made redundant
and so is in the market for a wise but slightly mad old lady to tell him
that everything will work out regardless.
In his recent
award-winning 'Autumn Tomyam', Sim's penchant for cliché
was redeemed by an interesting premise and viable characters. There are
no such saviours here: the grandmother is a bag of tricks and ticks, the
professional is hollow, and both are simply the devices of a very iffy
plot. Wong and Chua Enlai try to fill in the gaps, but Wong looks like
she needs a bigger stage while Chua has little room for manoeuvre.
According
to the play's timing, a journey from Tanjong Pagar to Raffles Place
takes about eight minutes. The journey should have been much shorter.
So should the play.
>
'Trying to Find Chinatown': **
Chua is back
in the next item, David Henry Hwang's 'Trying to Find Chinatown'.
He has much more scope here and seems to enjoy it. But he is oddly cast
as an angry young street violinist, and his is an attitude far more feline
than feral. He is joined by Mark Waite, playing to the groundlings with
an accent many leagues east of his character's supposed Wisconsin
origin and only slightly less odd than Chua's trans-Pacific drawl.
Hwang furnishes
the pair with a clever little script that gift-wraps its racial polemic
in light entertainment, but Chua is not an NY busker and Waite is not
a Midwest backpacker and that, as they say, is that. Moreover, Waite whines
his way through a solo coda that must have looked great on the page but
hurts the ears in the telling. The direction does not get in the way,
but this one is probably better off read.
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> 'Old Man and the Seed': *
How very,
very strange. Believing that the Ng-Loong pairing could not possibly produce
anything worse than 'Dinner for Two', I was to be unpleasantly
surprised - although here the problem was less with the script than
with direction that was visionary in its awfulness. Jit treated what is
essentially a Middle-American bucolic (an old woman plants seeds; an old
man complains; the sun sets) to lashings of silver tinsel, melodramatic
shouting and choreography that would send its geriatric protagonists off
looking for hip replacements. The words fabulous and fantastic may be
synonyms, but fable and fantasy are not, and this production seemed to
confuse the two. A lasting image lingers: after a supposedly touching
dénouement, Ng and Loong wade off into the sunset with half a metre
of the accumulated tinsel grasping at their legs like the creature from
the glitter lagoon. Avoid.
>
'The Office': ****1/2
But at last,
there was a reward. About thirty seconds into 'The Office'
by American Kate Hoffower, it became clear that everything that was so
desperately missing from the earlier plays was to be found here in abundance.
Thoranisorn Pitikul's wire grid and metal set - which had
been a touch too impersonal for some of the earlier plays - caught
the mood of professional sterility with both hands; Jit's direction
achieved a focus while maintaining its energy; Wong's larger-than-life
approach got the kind of role it was begging for; and Ng's mime
skills were given appropriate and glorious rein.
There is
no point in trying to communicate how funny this play was, save to say
that I started laughing in the first minute and only stopped, along with
the rest of the audience, well after the last. And what is particularly
satisfying is that the laughter came not only from the script - well paced,
insightful and quirky - it also came from some inspired direction and
three impeccable performances.
Throwing
pencils around may not seem like the world's most captivating spectator
sport, but Wong, Ng and Amber Simon as terminally bored office workers
managed this ingenious directorial conceit with such desperate élan
that one could not look away or keep from laughing. Their faces, too,
were perfect: Wong's a harried, hysterical dormouse; Simon's
a frenzied Barbie doll and Ng's a puckish genie.
If there
was any flaw in this remarkable vignette, it was that the controlled chaos
of the onstage action was so funny it was difficult to concentrate on
the equally brilliant words - though they were very clearly delivered
- meaning that perhaps a little of the script's potential
for poignancy was lost - but this is akin to saying that the menu
looks so good, it's a shame you can't eat all of it.
And look,
I've managed to get back to my original food analogy. If this were a restaurant
review, I'd be advising people to turn up only for dessert, but since
there is no interval, that's not an option. As it is, the earlier courses
just aren't worth the tedious chewing, and it remains a puzzle how the
ACTION crew, usually reliable for good, wholesome fare, could serve up
so much stuff half-baked.
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