I was first
introduced to playback theatre when I was invited to contribute to the
devising process of The Necessary Stage's Sing
Song in 2004. Friends of the company became guest storytellers
during rehearsals: we shared personal stories (in this case, about the
impact of music on our lives) and these were then translated into short
improvised scenes by the actors; some of these fragments were then used
as the inspiration for the various vignettes in the show.
In my eyes, therefore, playback theatre is a creative process that
leads to a product rather than an outcome in itself. A different perspective
is taken by Tapestry Playback Theatre. The short scenes of poetry, music
and drama performed by the actors are not being used as material for
a future work. Instead, they are meant to be entertaining in their own
right and, perhaps more crucially, to help create a sense of community
because of the closeness that comes when a group of people share personal
stories. The audience members who volunteer to become storytellers are
said to be gifting the actors and the rest of the audience with their
stories and likewise, as facilitator Anne Chua says before and after
each scene, the scenes being devised are meant as gifts for the people
who have shared the story. At one point, Chua says that we are gathered
here to simply "honour the moments in our lives".
If this all sounds very earnest and much like free therapy, that's
because it is. A couple of the storytellers and audience members actually
cried as the various stories were being re-imagined onstage: a wife
surprises her husband with passes to an EPL football match and round-trip
plane tickets; a lady's father loses his dog, only to find new happiness
with a puppy she buys for him despite his protestations; a teenage boy
leaves his home in India and receives an elaborate scrapbook filled
with photographs and messages of love from dear friends ("guys don't
normally write") and the girlfriend of just three months who had put
it all together.
It is to the team's credit that they were able to draw such intimate
stories from the audience in the first place as this is not an easy
feat. Although I personally found facilitator Anne Chua's constant prompting
of the storytellers to be a little intrusive and leading, clearly the
storytellers themselves did not think so: many audience members happily
volunteered to share their tales and proceeded to do so at great length
and in much detail. Chua's warm and unassuming character clearly helped
to put people at ease and made them feel safe and comfortable enough
to share their stories, a few of which I thought were surprisingly close
to the bone - for example, a boy talking about how he felt like he didn't
fit in in school.
I was a less impressed, however, with the actual scenes developed by
the four actors. Don't get me wrong, what they were doing was difficult
and the playful and enthusiastic cast certainly gave it a good go. However,
I just did not feel that the scenes added all that much to the stories
themselves, despite the arsenal of theatre devices, costumes and props
at hand. Often, the actors simply enacted what had been described, essentially
playing out the narrative if not literally, then predictably.
I thought the potential to go from good to great was not being realised:
with more imagination and dramatic flair, these scenes could have explored
more fully the complexity of human emotion that is at the core of any
good anecdote. The cast's blunter and more straightforward approach
clearly helped a couple of the storytellers to achieve a cathartic experience
but I was left constantly wondering if the emotional reach of the pieces
could have been even greater in both depth and breadth if the scenes
had fleshed out the subtleties of the situations more intricately.
There were moments of inspiration though. One I particularly remember
is a scene where actor Gabriel Lee used pieces of cloth to construct
a metaphor for a long-distance relationship. He laid a blue piece of
cloth across the stage and crossed it with a red one, with one end of
the red cloth encircling some gold cloth. What was striking was the
way he then crouched beside the opposite end of the red cloth and then
so gently, so quietly pulled at it. This little tugging from across
the ocean was a moment I found immensely poignant because it captured
not only the longing but also the loneliness and desperation of a long-distance
relationship.
There were little spontaneous comic touches that had me laughing out
loud as well - when a mother is told that her son has graduated from
university, her immediate response is a dry, "Which lecturer did you
pay money to?" - and I also found Hannah Barden's use of simple musical
instruments throughout the performance to be well-timed and suitably
evocative of the production's wistful mood.
All in all, I thought that That Thing You Do was an interesting
show because interactive theatre is hard to come by in Singapore - but
I must admit that I remained unsure of its ultimate purpose. Tapestry
had previously performed playback theatre for groups of friends or for
communities of people living together, for example, in Cambodia. This
was their first time performing to a public audience composed of random
people who bought tickets. If one of the objectives of playback theatre
is to build a sense of community, then what was its specific goal in
this case? What is the value of bonding a group of people through the
sharing of intimate moments when everyone is just going to disperse
again afterwards?
And if it was meant purely as a piece of entertainment, I would suggest
that, in future, more of the production be focused on the telling of
the longer, more substantial stories. That Thing You Do often
seemed like an introductory workshop on playback theatre rather than
a performance because of the use of a string of different playback theatre
tools (e.g. Three-Sentence Stories, Four Elements, Pairs) in a series
of very short fragments. This touch-and-go approach made That Thing
You Do seem disjointed and unsatisfying, whereas the telling of
a greater number of sustained stories (rather than the current two or
three) would have anchored the production and given it the weight it
needed. |
"The cast's blunter and more straightforward approach clearly helped
a couple of the storytellers to achieve a cathartic experience but I
was left constantly wondering if the emotional reach of the pieces could
have been greater"
Credits
Cast: Anne Chua, Hannah Barden, Gabriel Lee, Michael
Cheng and Renee Chua
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