The Collector at Greenwich Theatre

An edited version of this review was first published on Everything Theatre. The Collector, which won a Scotsman Fringe First Award at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, was an arresting look at torture in the US-run prisons of war-torn Iraq in 2003-2004 from three different vantage points.

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The Collector opens with an encounter with a ghost. Kasprowicz (William Reay), a captain in the US military, is visibly shaken, and there’s a quiver in his comfortable Southern drawl. It’s not the presence of the ghost in the Iraqi military prison that unnerves him, it’s the absence that it stands for – the facelessness, the shadows in the dark. 

This spectral metaphor carries through the play, with three characters taking turns to tell the story of Nassir, a charming Iraqi interpreter who loves American music and has high hopes for a future Iraqi democracy after what he thinks will be a brief war. We know he’s wrong, of course, but his optimism is infectious – despite the fact that Nassir doesn’t have a physical presence on stage. He’s the ghost in the room, the present absence. Through the stories of his fiancee, Zoya (Anna Riding), his American colleague, Sergeant Foster (Olivia Beardsley), and his superior, Captain Kasprowicz, we get both the story of an individual with conflicted loyalties – as well as a war gone horribly wrong. Nassir may be the crucial interpreter for the American army, the pivot on which interrogations and negotiations rest, but because he isn’t present on stage, his actions and decisions must, in a sense, be interpreted by the rest. It’s a clever device, allowing us several varying but complementary points of view as the three performers piece together and translate his every move.

Dissecting the US war in Iraq is an ambitious undertaking, and playwright Henry Naylor chooses to focus on the intimate interactions between this tightly knit group of characters. We get equal insight into Nassir’s domestic life and his working life, how he must navigate his initially unquestioning loyalty to the Americans for a freedom hoped for, but also confront the eventual realisation that the American war machine and its facade of heroism is really not what it seems. Nassir is a cultural intermediary: a “compatriot” to his newfound American community but a blacklisted “collaborator” to the Iraqi insurgents; and the titular “collector” – of music, hopes and dreams – to his wife-to-be. Naylor juggles these three identities with a great deal of skill character-wise, but plot-wise he’s forced to turn to a few obvious devices to propel the story along, including a romantic tryst that feels forced and doesn’t give the emotional payoff that’s needed later on.

Actors Riding, Reay and Beardsley are a well-oiled ensemble and play off each other’s energy comfortably. Their characters speak as they would in a documentary piece, directly to the audience, and this act of confiding their hopes and fears gives the play a strong sense of intimacy. The spare set design, three incandescent light bulbs suspended over three stools, mirrors the austerity of a prison cell – or perhaps the figurative prison cell that Nassir finds himself in as his three identities become increasingly at odds with one another. In the cavernous Greenwich Theatre, however, the wider distance between the audience and the storytellers sacrifices some of the action's immediacy and edge as the actors struggle to evoke the confines of either a jail cell – or the initial refuge of a civilian home that quickly begins to feel like a prison.

As the 75-minute play speeds to a close, Naylor’s carefully crafted critique of America’s wartime atrocities changes tracks abruptly, losing its sting when it becomes a generic critique of the darkness of the human heart, and the depths to which it will descend in order to survive. There is truth in this Conradian “heart of darkness”, but I wonder if The Collector might have been more powerful still had Naylor pursued that thread right to the end. But the production remains a rare theatrical examination of torture during the war in Iraq that benefits from a documentarian’s eye and historical hindsight. This may be a play investigating torture, but it’s one that wisely chooses not to depict or glorify a single act of graphic torture on stage. The Collector is a haunting reminder of a recent past that many have been all too quick to forget.

Playwright: Henry Naylor
Director: Michael Cabot
Presented by: Kathryn Barker in association with London Classic Theatre
Box Office: 020 8858 7755
Booking Link: http://ticketing.greenwichtheatre.org.uk/single/PSDetail.aspx?psn=60689
Booking Until: 21 January 2017

Abigail at The Bunker

Pardon the long break. Here's my review of Abigail at The Bunker, first published on Everything Theatre.

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Who is Abigail, really? Her name is never spoken throughout this hour-long play, but it hangs in the air like a gift and a curse. Abigail pieces together the relationship between a 20-something young Woman (Tia Bannon) and a 40-something older Man (Mark Rose), both unnamed. There’s an echo of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) here, the similarly mononymous novel where a naive younger woman is quickly enchanted by an older man when they meet on holiday. But this is where the contemporary homage ends. This time, it’s the Man who’s enchanted by a nubile young thing, but whose romantic ideals will soon be dashed. And the ghost that haunts this play’s relationship isn’t a female paragon of perfection, but an Oedipal shadow from the Woman’s past.

Abigail feels like the darker, angstier foil to Jason Robert Brown’s musical The Last Five Years, where a sense of optimism tends to linger even if we know the relationship doesn’t. As the timelines of the two lovers in the musical converge and then unspool, there’s still a latent cheerfulness as one half of the duo gazes, rosy-eyed, at all the love waiting for her in the future. There’s no such hopefulness in Abigail, where, to quote one of the characters, it’s ‘one or two months of nice stuff followed by ten months of shit’.

Playwright Fiona Doyle presents a fractured series of vignettes from different moments in the couple’s time together, leaping back and forth from the wake of a bitter argument, to a chance first encounter at an airport, to a vacation taken together abroad. There are some frank, refreshing discussions about relationships and some amusingly authentic moments of awkwardness, but these tend to get washed out as Woman evolves rapidly from the Pixie to the Manic of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and this transformation wipes out any sharp observations that might have been drawn about a couple struggling to make a relationship work (or deliberately sabotaging it). The temporality of this relationship is also evoked through the set, a veritable mountain of makeshift cardboard boxes, with symbols for fragile objects printed on the sides, and a suitcase in a corner. Throughout the course of the play, the set is increasingly littered with clothing, a beer bottle or two, and the detritus of emotional baggage strewn across the stage.

We aren’t sure who Abigail is, but Abigail doesn’t seem too sure about what it is, either. If it’s meant to be a close study of a relationship falling apart at the seams, the shifting timeline of the storytelling means that there are a lot of large gaps – some of which work in giving the play a sense of intrigue and unpredictability; others mean that we are left with a lot of gaping holes as to the characters’ motivations and intentions. Bannon and Rose do their best with what they’re given, with Rose turning in a sturdy, believable performance as a man first entranced, then quickly disillusioned as what once was a spark of magic turns into the ashes of frustration and denial. Or is Abigail meant to be a study of one woman’s dark streak that poisons a promising relationship? There are strange, unresolved hints of a larger mystery at play here that may very well be red herrings, thrown out as quickly as the play ends. The couple’s age gap is hinted at, but never interrogated, in what I felt was a lost opportunity.

The weather cooperated marvellously the night I watched this play in The Bunker’s subterranean space – a night where miserable sleet pelted London and dark, glittering ice covered the streets. In one scene, the couple sits at a lookout point on a mountain and are disappointed by the thick fog covering what was supposed to be a sumptuous, ‘bucket-list’ view. They then pick up a spray of buttercups, where the Man points out that the beautiful buds are poisonous. In Abigail, like Rebecca, one thing is for certain: what is beautiful might just kill you – or, worse still, disappoint you.

Playwright: Fiona Doyle
Director: Joshua McTaggart
Producers: Zoe Robinson and Joel Fisher
Designer: Max Dorey
Sound Designer: Andy Josephs
Lighting Designer: Christopher Nairne
Box Office: 0207 234 0486
Booking Link: https://www.bunkertheatre.com/whats-on/abigail
Booking Until: 4 February 2017

A quick update

A very quick round-up of what I've been up to:

• Here in London, I'm writing for Everything Theatre and Exeunt Magazine as a contributing reviewer. So far I've reviewed A Wonderful Town at Ye Olde Rose & Crown Theatre Pub, and Tomorrow I Was Always A Lion by the Belarus Free Theatre. I'll be reviewing about 2-4 shows a month.
• Come for the Battersea Arts Centre's upcoming production, London Stories: Made By Migrants (Nov 4-26). I'm a volunteer and you might be in one of the small groups I'll be bringing around their lovely space.
• Back home in Singapore, my translation of Wu I-Wei's short story The Mountain Road is part of BooksActually's Gold Standard 2016, an anthology of short fiction previously unpublished in English edited by the wonderful Julie Koh. You can go for the launch on Nov 13 at the Singapore Writers Festival.

If you're in London and would like to meet up, do drop me a line.

SoftMachine: Yuya x Rianto by Choy Ka Fai

What a treat to see the work of Singaporean artist Choy Ka Fai on a London stage. I'd caught an earlier incarnation of SoftMachine: Yuya / Xiaoke x Zihan at the Esplanade's da:ns festival in Singapore last year, but was looking forward to a different pairing this time, of Yuya Tsukahara's Contact Gonzo (Japan) and lengger dancer Rianto (Indonesia), presented as part of Sadler's Wells' Out Of Asia series.

Photo by me, taken outside the Lilian Baylis studio.

(As a quick preface, we've been wrestling with Bourdieu, Durkheim and Nietzsche a fair amount in my cultural theory module at the moment, and I couldn't help but bring some of those theoretical lenses into the production with me...)

When Nietzsche attempted to reconcile the Dionysian and Apollonian halves of art and performance in The Birth Of Tragedy, he lamented that the intoxicating, the excessive, the visceral, collective and communal feel of Dionysus in Greek Tragedy had ultimately been sacrificed for the rational, measured, logical and representational aspect of Apollo. I'd argue that Ka Fai revels in the spirits of both Dionysus and Apollo in this pairing of SoftMachine, at once a celebration of that collective act of watching a group of performers and empathising with their ecstasy and pain, but also an individual act of marvelling at the architecture of the human body, the way one might regard the beauty of Michelangelo's sculpture of David, every sinew and muscle chiselled to perfection. 

Through SoftMachine, Ka Fai, a visual artist and performance maker, has created a work that both presents dance and archives it. Intimate video interviews with the performers punctuate dance excerpts that showcase not just a breathtaking range of genre-breaking work, but also the body as repository and the body as memory. It's a moving, long-exposure snapshot of a rapidly-evolving Asia, where traditional dance forms are simultaneously revered and discarded, and where there is a kaleidoscopic approach to dance as a shifting, hybrid form that draws from and transcends theatre, movement, performance art, installation, multimedia and religion. 

We start off with Contact Gonzo, a contemporary dance group from Japan that takes elements of contact improvisation to the extreme through their "philosophy of pain". Yuya and Ka Fai embark on a wary improvised duet with each other; Ka Fai attempts to interview Yuya about the company and its process while being punched, slapped, stroked, slammed into, sat on, thrown about. Every action begets a reaction and Ka Fai trips, falls, and becomes increasingly red-faced and contorted. "There's no emotion," Yuya emphasises of their work, "if you put emotion in, then it's just a fight." He quips that his favourite artist is Eric Cantona, an answer that once baffled a Korean art magazine who did not know who the footballer was. What makes every movement by Contact Gonzo so urgent and effective is how pain – so often an imagined pain that is represented, but not real, in theatre or dance productions – transforms into visible pain. That hollow impact of flesh on flesh, or flesh against the ground, the thud of a body's weight against the unyielding studio floor – everything ups the stakes as perceived pain becomes palpable pain. Eventually, another member of Contact Gonzo (Takuya Matsumi) joins the duo and the trio roll about on the stage, a fluid, brutal beast that has every single audience member wincing and gasping in a collective experience of pain. And as the audience members scramble to find a way to interpret this pain, it becomes a source of playfulness and mischief as the performers stretch it out or delight in moments of random comic timing with props that don't work as they should or fall in the "wrong" place. The humour is awkward, but it's also a relief, a valve for the pressure building up in the room. Just as an audience might have cheered on a charismatic gladiator in a sporting arena thousands of years ago, so has the dancer become the sportsman in the ring.

The performance by Indonesian artist Rianto is a different creature altogether, which begins as a controlled, precise and highly-codified presentation of lengger, a traditional erotic dance from Java. Rianto is performing as female, emphasising every coquettish curl of his arm and every arch of a come-hither eyebrow. As he invites the audience into the illusion, he subsequently breaks it completely when he transforms from the character of a princess into that of a prince, signified not just by a change of masks but by an entire shift in movement vocabulary. The sensual hips vanish; here come the wide-legged stances, the angular limbs, the scything arms. It's a gorgeous shift that takes time to register because of the chasm that yawns between presenting as masculine and presenting as feminine. And then he sheds his elaborate lengger makeup and, bare-faced, performs the modern choreographic practice he's embarked on since relocating to Japan with his Japanese wife. The style feels familiar, a series of movements that would not be out of place in a modern dance studio – a movement lexicon that, he says, has "no gender". The possibilities of the body are endless, unmarked territory. The final image that Ka Fai gives to us in the shimmering half-darkness, with Rianto barely lit by a dim spotlight, half-shadow and half-real, every muscle rippling, elevates dance from the earthly to the sublime. It's a transcendental several minutes, where we seem to have been lifted into a purgatorial space, where only the dance and the individual exists, and nothing else. 

A friend of mine described the evening as two perfect halves of pain and pleasure. Can we ever experience one without the other? They seem to heighten in each other's presence. Ka Fai didn't mean to combine Yuya and Rianto into the same production; it was a result of difficult scheduling. Yet the two halves cohered wonderfully, a layered interrogation of what movement in Asia is but also how it is perceived. Certain expected tropes are suggested – e.g. Yuya brings up Zen Buddhism, largely associated with a 'stoic' Japan – but then are immediately subverted – Yuya proceeds to rubbish any possibility of Zen in his work. We assume that Rianto's presentation will explore some sort of token Asian spirituality, but it morphs into a study of gender identity and the lenses we rely on to frame movement.

When I was at the Singapore Festival in France last year, a journalist friend of mine asked a Parisian museum director if a particular Asian exhibition, with its overtones of ritual and tradition, was cheap-shot, easy programming for a "spiritually bankrupt" West. The museum director looked very uncomfortable and tried to dispute it, citing a blend of "tradition and modernity". I'm tired of this binary, and I'm glad Ka Fai turns it on its head with the kind of copious performance research that brings a tapestry of diversity to the fore, with deep currents of history and memory layered beneath mould-breaking movement. SoftMachine is part of the "Out Of Asia" platform, and while I understand the desire for an "Out Of Asia" tagline as a sort of instant handle for a European audience, it leaves the production instantly framed by stereotyped mystique and exotica, evoking the sense that the dancers and performers had to somehow hack their way out of a dense eastern jungle to be liberated upon a western stage. An Asian artist's trajectory should not be marked by how much he/she embraces a 'fusion tradition' to make it palatable to a contemporary audience. SoftMachine presents its performers as they are, without easy handles or categories, and our experience of their work is the richer for it. It sheds that Dionysian-Apollonian dialectic, where the fight between the individual and collective ceases to matter (with apologies to Nietzsche) – because, well, why be one when you can be both?

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Ka Fai and SoftMachine dramaturge Tang Fu Kuen will both be speaking at this upcoming talk, The Persistence of Exoticism, on November 22 at Sadler's Wells. The title of the talk draws from Ka Fai's directorial notes to SoftMachine, written in 2013:

On 7th of September 2011, London dance powerhouse Sadler's Wells uploaded a 5-minute promotional video titled "Out Of Asia – The Future of Contemporary Dance" for their new season preview. I was intrigued and disturbed at the same time by the video. As an Asian artist, my immediate response was: "Who are you to tell us what the future of contemporary dance is and what is coming out of Asia?"

From my personal perspective, the curatorial concern was superficial. Asia is extremely diverse culturally, it is difficult to access local knowledge and tradition without investing time for research or first-hand experience. There is a recurring sense of mystification put upon the cultural production from the East for the cultural consumption market of the West. The persistence of exoticism is sadly evident in the institutional promotion of contemporary dance from Asia.

My initial research revealed to me that it is clear that the discussion of contemporary dance in Asia is still in an embryonic state and has been mostly conducted through academic research under immense influence from the West. With this revelation as a starting point, I thought someone from Asia should create new spaces for such discourse. From the naive idea of "From Asia For Asians", I started an 18-month journey across 13 Asian cities in my search for what is "Inside Asia".

P.S. The programme booklet was beautiful. Here's an image of Rianto in it:

In conversation with playwright Alfian Sa'at

This is belated, but I thought I'd share the video recordings of the cozy Q&A session I had with prolific and popular Singapore playwright Alfian Sa'at last month (August 17). It was organised and hosted by Centre 42, Singapore's centre for text-based work for the stage. This is the write-up that accompanied the videos on the Centre 42 website:

Part 1: Corrie gets Alfian to talk about his childhood as a “Mendaki kid”, singled out for his strong academic performance. The pair then move on to Alfian’s mentorship under The Necessary Stage’s Resident Playwright Haresh Sharma, and how it actually spurred him to move away from English play-writing towards poetry, short stories and Malay plays, all in a bid to differentiate himself from his prolific mentor. Corrie also brings up Alfian’s shortlived career as a theatre reviewer for the Straits Times.
[*Due to technical difficulties, audio quality temporarily drops from 02:32 to 05:34.]

Part 2: Alfian and Corrie talk about censorship in the arts; telling alternative histories; verbatim theatre; developing memorable characters; intertextuality; and using social media as a public platform for discourse. Plays mentioned include “sex.violence.blood.gore” (1999), “Asian Boys Vol. 1: Dreamplay” (2000), “Asian Boys Vol. 3: Happy Endings”, “Cooling-Off Day” (2011), “To Cook a Pot of Curry” (2013), “Hotel” (2015), and “GRC” (2015).

Part 3: Alfian fields questions from the audience.