The Esplanade's Asian Theatremakers series

The Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay commissioned two essays from me recently as part of their Asian Theatremakers series.

The first looks at the work of the late Yukio Ninagawa, known for his stunning reinterpretations of the Western theatre canon with a strong Japanese sensibility, notably from Shakespeare and Ancient Greek tragedy.

Yukio Ninagawa. Image: Courtesy of Ninagawa Company (Japan)

The most recent essay tracks the artistic trajectory of Singaporean theatre company Nine Years Theatre and its co-founder, Nelson Chia.

Nelson Chia (far right) in Offending the Audience at the Esplanade's Huayi – Chinese Festival of Arts in 2017. Image: Courtesy of the Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay

Rosnah by The Necessary Stage

I sat in on the first iteration of The Necessary Stage's Orange Playground laboratory series about two years ago as an 'observer'; the lab was meant to give artists an open space to experiment with new material. I signed up to follow Alin Mosbit and Siti Khalijah as they created their own work over the course of several months, culminating in a sort of work-in-progress performance lecture. It was very new and exciting to me, to be there in the rehearsal room, that intimate, boundless space, with two powerful actors. About halfway into their creative process, Alin and Siti embarked on a segment they nicknamed "Haresh's Heroines", a revisitation of various characters from Haresh Sharma's plays in new contexts and new pairings.

There was one improvisation in particular that has stayed with me. The Necessary Stage artistic director Alvin Tan, with a measure of glee, told Siti to perform two characters in conversation – Saloma from The Necessary Stage's seminal Off Centre (1993), who struggles with schizophrenia, and a new character Siti had just devised, a feisty fashion entrepreneur running her own plus-sized clothing label. Siti paused to think for about fifteen seconds. And then she stepped into the playing area and did just that. Those magical ten minutes where she embodied two wildly different characters – having a real time conversation, each with their own physical and verbal tics, lexicon and emotional landscapes – proved to me that she is truly one of the most gifted actors of her generation.

The Necessary Stage's revisitation of Rosnah (1995) at the Esplanade's Pesta Raya festival was a loud echo of "Haresh's Heroines". (MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD.) Rosnah (2016) really isn't a "restaging" by any means. It's an interrogation, deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction of a defining monodrama. Siti sweeps onto the stage with a pink suitcase and red coat – ah, here's Rosnah, I think to myself – and then she immediately proceeds to tear away at that illusion. I'm Siti K, she says, after a selfie and some banter with a delighted audience, and I'll be playing Rosnah.

And this take on Rosnah is really hers to own. It's a thoughtful look at what it means to be a modern Malay-Muslim woman in today's world, a world of Brexit and Islamophobia, as Siti reflects on the original text of a young woman's journey to London and the deep cultural differences she encounters, and how she might have responded in the same situations as the character she's playing. (She is accompanied by the consistently excellent sound artist-musician-extraordinaire Bani Haykal, who has the ability to both blend into the audience and be the centre of attention all at once, through a few soaring musical interludes that give that extra tenderness and emotional heft to the main narrative.)

A friend of mine, who was weighing if she ought to watch this incarnation of Rosnah, had admitted that she'd found the original script dated and prescriptive. Rosnah of the mid-1990s inhabited a largely different world, where the term "brain drain" had only just entered the national lexicon and Dick Lee's national day anthem Home (1998) cajoled overseas Singaporeans into returning to, or at the very least thinking nostalgically of, their island home. Singapore's cosmopolitan, globalised identity was not yet in full bloom, and Siti, in this version and as "herself", comments strongly on the insularity and parochialism that deters Rosnah as the fictional character makes hesitant decisions on interracial relationships and slut-shames a fellow Malay Singaporean in London. "Siti" makes some solid insights about the work, but I found myself craving more depth to her commentary instead of her short, pithy statements, even if they were sharp and well-observed. Rosnah's character is achingly vulnerable, unburdening herself to the audience to the point of melodrama, but endearing nonetheless; in contrast, Siti's on-stage character seemed to always have her guard up, only letting slip glimpses of her personal life that allow the audience in at arm's length, often by way of comedy rather than tragedy. 

There is a breath-taking scene in which Siti inserts herself into two characters' ongoing conversation with perfect clarity, an even trickier three-way permutation of her Orange Playground feat. But I paused to wonder – are we marvelling at the way in which these characters interlock, and the self-reflexivity that The Necessary Stage is able to bring to its rich canon of work; or are we distracted by the loud statement of Siti's technical virtuosity? I suppose either could work, depending on what you're more intrigued by as an audience member, but I wonder if anything might be lost in choosing to focus on one over the other.

But there is absolutely no doubt as to Siti's ability to pull off the conceit of this deconstructed Rosnah. She's had some superb monodrama showings in Best Of (2013), Rosnah (2006), and How Did The Cat Get So Fat (2006), but this meta-monodrama takes it a step further in giving the performer the agency to be a sort of revisionist theatre historian. The Necessary Stage, as it approaches its 30th anniversary next year, has been putting the magnifying glass to its previous works, whether it's Best Of (His Story) (a new male-centered version of the original female-led monodrama to be staged later this year) or untitled women (which revised Haresh's abstract short plays untitled cow and untitled women) or Ghost Writer (a reincarnation of Gitanjali). As the company has evolved artistically over the years, its remakes, revivals and reconstructions of productions reflect a deep awareness of how its works fit into Singapore's artistic trajectory, but also how the ephemera of past work can continue to live and grow today.

• You can download the programme for Rosnah here.
• Incidentally, Alin Mosbit – the original Rosnah – translated this version into Malay.
• Before the show, I asked how long it would be. 1 hour and 10 minutes, one of the TNS staff told me. I checked my watch the moment I stepped out of the theatre – 1 hour and 9 minutes. Siti's timing is that impeccable.

Ghost Writer by The Necessary Stage

I struggled with The Necessary Stage's Gitanjali when I reviewed it in 2014. It was a sweeping but disparate production, each element straining in a different direction in an attempt to grasp or portray something cosmic and transcendental. Who, or what, did Tagore symbolise? How did his poetry fit into the story of a family struggling with carrying on the tradition of Indian classical dance? And what of his muse, Kadambari? The attempt to bring multiple disciplines together - dance, multimedia, theatre, a lush soundscape of the experimental and the classical - felt rough at the seams.

Ghost Writer isn't quite a reworking of Gitanjali as it is a reincarnation – the same but different, echoes and excavated memories of a past life given an entirely new body. It's a pared-down, intimate 75 minutes in a black box that manages to articulate a great deal more than its former, unwieldier incarnation. I'm not sure if those who haven't seen Gitanjali might find Ghost Writer baffling or liberating (to quote a friend with whom I discussed the show after), but as someone familiar with Gitanjali's characters, I found aspects of their personality already shaded into my mind and now given flesh.

Ghost Writer is, in a sense, about ghosts. It is about how one generation of a family haunts the next, but also about how an artist's inspiration and muse can turn into a spectre that haunts her every sentence or dance move. Tagore is haunted by Kadambari, his sister-in-law, who died tragically. Star bharatanatyam teacher Savitri (Sukania Venugopal) haunts her protege, Priya (Ruby Jayaseelan), as the younger woman moves to Canada to pursue new forms of dance, but ends up exotifying herself, "becoming more Indian than India", to become a prominent choreographer. But Priya haunts Savitri, too, even in her absence, as Savitri struggles to find a successor to lead her dance institution. Savitri's son, Shankara (Ebi Shankara), is haunted by his mother's inspiration, Tagore, so much so that he devotes his PhD to the study of the writer. And Shankara's wife, Nandini (Sharda Harrison), is haunted by the death of her sister - and the parallels between that death and the death of Kadambari. Who dictates the life we choose to lead? Do we choose our own path, or do others nudge us onto it? Is the dance a divine one, or is it the artist's own?

The production starts out slowly, with a few clunky exchanges, but it is the second half that brings the play home. The character of Jeremy (Jereh Leong), the Canadian dancer whom Priya finds alluring, feels significantly shallower than the rest, an arc I honestly felt could have been done away with or played as a non-speaking role. (Correlation: He's not in the stronger second half.) Once the play is done laying out its exposition, it mines the complex relationships that orbit each character, and that is the richest part of the performance.

I think Ghost Writer continues the journey The Necessary Stage has taken, in this chapter of their output, into what a truly collaborative, interdisciplinary production looks like, giving a creative team from all backgrounds equal voices throughout rehearsal and development, and giving a prominent platform to typically 'design' elements (multimedia, sound, spatial design). From Gitanjali (2014) to untitled women (2015) to Manifesto (2016). It brings out some surprising and intriguing results. What I appreciated much more fully in Ghost Writer was its strides to make the production truly multidisciplinary, where a conversation could be begun in speech but concluded in dance and still have its narrative arc remain completely clear. Actresses Sukania Venugopal as the stubborn Savitri and Ruby Jayaseelan as her star pupil Priya are twin revelations in this aspect and throughout the production. Their opening conversation, from Priya's growing success in the school to her sudden departure, is exquisitely portrayed through Indian classical dance, particularly in that single, pivotal moment where Savitri realises that her student has, she believes, betrayed her. 

While dance blends marvellously into the mix, the multimedia element of the production is less consistent. Some of the visuals are stunning to behold, particularly in a scene where Priya, reflected in a mirror and projected on several screens through some clever camera work and choreography (I'm still bending my head over how they pulled that off), dances a solo that is at once vulnerable and powerful. But some of the video work over-informs, the way a melodrama might overdo its nudge-wink when the audience already understands a plot point. I get the sense that the creative team is playing with that tension between film and stage here, the same way that Ghost Writer's multimedia artist Brian Gothong Tan explored that tension in 2012's Decimal Points 4.44, where he challenged an audience to watch both film and theatrical versions of a story simultaneously. That works if both elements are equally strong. Here, some of the film feels redundant, e.g. a short that lingers over Priya and Jeremy's intimate relationship (and then he recedes into the background for the rest of the show, so I don't understand any of his influence over her), or another that portrays what happened to Nandini's sister (the beauty, I felt, was in the agony of the mystery - the way we will never know why Kadambari killed herself). 

But Ghost Writer, unlike the ambivalence I felt after Gitanjali, emphasises redemption. Nandini's storyline comes to the fore as the production unfolds. She starts out a lonely and bereaved 'expat wife' in an arranged marriage, not unlike Kadambari, but then finds her voice in writing. She creates her own agency (and by agency I mean her capacity to act of her own free will). The characters of Ghost Writer exorcise their ghosts not through violence or defiance, but through letting go. I think Tagore's beautiful poem, revealed close to the end, embodies it best:

THE FIRST GREAT SORROW

I was walking along a path over-grown with grass, when suddenly I heard from some one behind, “See if you know me?”
I turned round and looked at her and said, “I cannot remember your name.”
She said, “I am that first great Sorrow whom you met when you were young.”
Her eyes looked like a morning whose dew is still in the air.
I stood silent for some time till I said, “Have you lost all the great burden of your tears?”
She smiled and said nothing. I felt that her tears had had time to learn the language of smiles.
“Once you said,” she whispered, “that you would cherish your grief for ever.”
I blushed and said, “Yes, but years have passed and I forget.”
Then I took her hand in mine and said, “But you have changed.”
“What was sorrow once has now become peace,” she said.

Stray thoughts:

• I realise I didn't mention the fantastic sound artist Bani Haykal and vocalist Namita Mehta, the sonic backbone on which the piece hinges. They are the rhythm to the narrative, carrying the push and pull, the dramatic tension of the plot. Bani won the 2015 Life Theatre Award for Sound Design for his work on Gitanjali.
• French-Laotian dancer and choreographer Ole Khamchanla drifts through the production as a sort of representation of Tagore. The piece concludes with what feels like a dance-meditation on what it means to be a part of this path of life, a hypnotic, entrancing epilogue that compelled me to sway, in my seat, to the beat.

Dark Room by Edith Podesta at The Studios

I watched the first incarnation of Edith Podesta's Dark Room two years ago (then titled Dark Room x8). It was part of the Esplanade's RAW series, the developmental platform of their Studios season, and I was completely taken by the intimate, stripped down production - in need of a much tighter edit, but a focused piece that was deliberately non-judgmental about the experiences of these men in the Singapore prison system, leaving it to the audience to draw their own conclusions about punitive systems and the efficacy of corporal punishment and rehabilitation in Singapore.

It followed eight men as they made their way from sentencing through jail to eventual release, eight men from markedly different backgrounds (different socio-economic groups, education levels, sexualities, ethnicities, religions, countries) who responded to their incarceration in various ways. These were real stories, extracted from hours of interviews with former inmates - who remained anonymous, both in name and in terms of the crimes they committed. The stage was bare, the use of sound and light was minimal - used to lightly demarcate certain physical spaces and emotional conditions - which meant that the black box space itself became a kind of imaginary prison and that the focus was solely on the performers, who went through cycles of guilt, redemption and unexpected companionship, a darkness lightened by surprising and affecting moments of levity. 

After the showcase, I asked Edith if she planned on expanding the work into a full production. At that point, she wasn't sure; she had some ideas about interviewing a group of women who had been through the prison system in Singapore as a parallel piece, but noted that it was extremely difficult to find willing interviewees. 

So I was very pleased to hear that Dark Room had evolved into a full-scale production as part of The Studios, retaining most of the same ensemble and adding a few more verbatim interviews. Some of these additions complement the existing material seamlessly, such as the voices of the parents of a former offender (played by real-life husband and wife Lim Kay Siu and Neo Swee Lin, both conveying the perfect, aching amount of fragility and regret). But others - which I will get into - didn't quite work for me. (Spoilers ahead.)

The heart of the piece - which I loved - remains the same. The play is still a journey, as it was before, of self-discovery and of great, touching humanity. There are hilarious segments about attempts to improve the food and the limited 'yard time' juxtaposed against harrowing segments on caning and crushing loneliness. Edith sets out the various elements of imprisonment: schedules, visit times, confinement, etc, in a methodical, even-handed way, allowing us an aerial view of the prisons process while allowing us to become acquainted, in an intimate way, with the people in it.

But that arm's length, documentarian's eye that I had admired so much in the earlier work in process seems to have diminished somewhat. This work wanders into issues of innocence when it is unclear if the narrator is unreliable, and the treacly strains of 'Amazing Grace' worm their way into a preachy ending, playing on repeat to a chorus of 'I still don't think what I did was wrong' or 'I don't understand why so-and-so had to be imprisoned'. While these questions are pertinent, they seem tacked on as a conclusion from an entirely different discussion and validated without due process, which would have been a rigorous examination of the criminal justice system (a la perhaps the first season of the Serial podcast or Netflix's Making A Murderer) rather than the prisons/rehabilitation system, which the piece is dissecting. 

Another strand I cannot quite reconcile is that of the sole female inmate, running parallel to the stories of the eight male inmates as what I'm guessing was meant to be a counterweight to the maleness of the main thread and/or a deeper look at solitary confinement (as opposed to group confinement among the men). Her story is a powerful, necessary one, but in this context feels frustratingly tokenistic; whenever the character appears - often at abrupt times - she scrambles the cohesion of the piece, coming across as an afterthought rather than a companion narrative because she is responding to an entirely different set of stimuli in an entirely different environment. I think her story would have been better framed in a production of its own, rather than drowned out by an ensemble of men who are on a united, interlocking journey leavened by their diversity. The male ensemble, who had the benefit of performing together previously, also share a compelling chemistry that tends to overwhelm the presence of the lone female actor.

This does not make Dark Room any less profound, however. I think testimonial/documentary theatre lends itself especially well to the need for anonymity in this production. We know these people are real, but the distance between us and them, mediated by the performers, provokes empathy and discourse over a temporary emotional rise of sympathy or pity. The audience is constantly navigating the tension between reality and representation, made to view the production with a more journalistic lens, weighing the information being presented to them and the reliability of each narrator.

This genre works exceptionally well in unpacking contentious current affairs - take for instance Drama Box's dissection of urban redevelopment and the Bukit Brown affair in It Won't Be Too Long: Dusk during last year's Singapore International Festival of Arts, presenting the audience with a wide variety of views but also knitting them into a coherent narrative; some of the performers played interviewees of a different gender, and I think that cognitive dissonance worked well to give audience members a different perspective on recognisable interviewees and public figures. Then there's the film version, Tom McCarthy's Oscar-winning Spotlight, which deliberately avoids "tidy moral takeaways". And often there are no tidy solutions to the problems presented: land scarcity in Singapore, sexual abuse in the Catholic church, the consequences of imprisonment. I think a question mark at the end of productions is more constructively provocative than finality. It prompts us to continue the conversation.

(Stray thoughts will come after if/when I have them...)

Stray thoughts:

• Chris Chua's modular set was clever and versatile and Darren Ng (sound design) and Adrian Tan (lighting design) do great work, but I missed the minimalism of the first incarnation where the prison had to be imagined and there were fewer cues designed to evoke specific types of emotion.
• You can view the full house programme online here.

The Shape of a Bird by Jean Tay

I thought I might start a new, informal series tagged "stream of consciousness" for my immediate (and raw) responses to plays after I've seen them. 

I caught Jean Tay's new play, The Shape of a Bird, at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival on January 16. It's a blend of actual history and fable in the vein of her recent work, Sisters – The Untold Stories of the Sisters Islands (2013), which revisits the infamous Sunny Ang murder case that took place at Sisters Islands; and Senang (2014), which draws parallels between Milton's Paradise Lost, the Chinese classic The Water Margin, and the fatal prison riots on Pulau Senang. Tay's recent fascination with how we reinterpret history through myth and metaphor is apparent, and she's also demonstrated a strong pull towards the use of puppetry; in Sisters, the actresses transformed simple lengths of printed fabric into living, breathing characters.

Bird is a spiritual sequel of sorts to the previous two plays, except this time Tay moves away from Singapore history to a story inspired by repression under China's Cultural Revolution, in a play blending censorship, oppression, familial bonds, fable and plenty of puppetry and object work. It's a tall order, and she has confessed in interviews that she believed the play to be her "impossible play", one incredibly difficult to stage. Essentially, a woman (Tan Kheng Hua) has been imprisoned due to her incendiary writings (which we find out later are children's books with a darker undercurrent), and she is separated from her 18-year-old daughter Ann (Jean Toh), who is learning to live without her. They live under the rule of a legion of Cicadas where there is only one official narrative and the rest are deemed subversive. There is also a mysterious prison warden-interrogator (Brendon Fernandez) and a possible love interest for Ann (Thomas Pang), both of whom are aligned with the Cicadas. The production is set against three white fabric screens, on which bursts of shadow puppetry are projected, and newspaper puppets flit across the stage.

This is an intriguing premise in a country where words are often denied due to the power they wield, but one sadly squandered. Tay seems to be more interested in poetics than politics, and her characters move about in a haze of repetitive moral dilemmas. Should they... Sign a false confession? Sleep with the enemy? Stop writing? Any propulsive action that takes the narrative forward is shoehorned in-between these repeated dilemmas, which means that any sort of emotional revelation is played on fast-forward and over in an instant, rid of all its potential impact. Director Mei Ann Teo curiously lengthens some heavy, repetitive scenes but skips over other emotional pivots (e.g. key revelations about Ann's family and a mysterious newspaper puppet that has been following her around), and young actors Jean Toh and Thomas Pang also falter in these emotionally charged moments, often reacting too quickly to what should have been a slow burn. Tay's stylised, lyrical prose works during some monologues but comes off as stilted and clumsy in other quick exchanges of dialogue.

Tay also takes a simplistic view of the power of the written word; her characters might very well have been yelling "the pen is mightier than the sword!" throughout the play. Instead of demonstrating the power of said words, she instead chooses for her characters to repeat the slogan "your words are powerful!" or "write your stories!" or "only you can tell your stories!", ironically depriving the slogan of any power whatsoever, because we have no idea what these words are, and why they would move the people to such an extent. It sometimes feels like a (unfortunately) diluted version of The Necessary Stage's Gemuk Girls (2008), which dealt with a similar context with great poignancy and precision – a photographer is detained by the Internal Security Department who try to force him to sign a false confession about his links with communism; it spans three generations within the same family and lays bare their struggles as they react to his incarceration. Gemuk Girls had a gutting specificity and political impulse that Bird lacks.

The problem with fantasy and myth is often how it can make itself relevant to reality. Audiences will quickly pick out metaphors that feel heavy-handed and obvious, but can also be alienated by metaphors that are too abstract to connect to everyday life. When I think of a cicada, I don't really think of much else. It's an insect a little like a cricket, that much I know, and at a stretch I would ponder how it only surfaces after many years underground. But the symbol of the cicada feels incongruent with the play. There's a missing anchor in here somewhere, and the play drifts around untethered the way its characters are forced fold invisible cicada origami, their fingers moving nimbly across empty air. Because we cannot witness what they are creating, we feel less for what is being destroyed.