Pop Aye, directed by Kirsten Tan

POP AYE made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January, so I'm a little late to the party, but I finally watched this textured charmer of a film at its UK premiere at the London Film Festival about an hour ago. I'm not sure how much I'm adding to the discussion of Singaporean filmmaker Kirsten Tan's incredibly assured first full-length feature, but here goes.

---

The brisk pace of urban development and buried grief over the loss of nature isn't a new theme in Singapore art-making. In fact, it's not just a preoccupation – it borders on an obsession. I'm more familiar with how this manifests in theatre-making: Jean Tay's play Boom is a ready example of a eulogy for what is lost with redevelopment, as is Haresh Sharma's Still Building, and the theatre company Drama Box has looked at land contestation from a variety of standpoints, with its It Won't Be Too Long trilogy centered around the state's reclamation of a sizeable swathe the 18th-century municipal cemetery Bukit Brown, or its IgnorLAND series focusing each time on a different displaced or overlooked community. Artists have held many farewell events in spaces soon to be demolished, including the cluster of Rochor Centre apartment blocks and an artist takeover at Eminent Plaza. We are always saying goodbye, steeped in a sort of premature nostalgia for what we didn't even have time to love and mourn.

Most of the reviews emerging in the wake of POP AYE's Sundance premiere style the film as a sort of sweet, sentimental buddy road trip between the unlikely pairing of a fading architect and a former circus elephant. It's set in Thailand, where Tan lived for several years, leaping between the thick metropolis of Bangkok and the open idyll of the Thai countryside. Its protagonist Thana, a one-time star architect whose protege seems keen on ousting him, drifts aimlessly between the frustrations of work and the dissatisfactions of domestic life. He's stuck in a long marriage that has come undone over time, but is still caught by surprise when it implodes overnight. He finds his wife's purple vibrator in the bottom of a box on the top shelf of her wardrobe, and sets it down on the coffee table in front of her. She eyes it with both guilt and disdain. And then, after a bitter encounter at work, he takes off early – and instantly recognises Popeye, an elephant with a connection to his childhood, lumbering down a narrow Bangkok alleyway in full circus regalia. Is it guilt that prompts him to buy the elephant back, or is it nostalgia? Is it the innocence of village life he craves, the uncontaminated joy of a childhood he's constructed from memory? Is he trying to reclaim something long lost in the thicket of city life?

As the adorable pair of misfits leave the city and begin their long journey into the countryside on foot, Tan leaves these questions hanging in the air. I think POP AYE isn't a road trip. It's a pilgrimage. It's also a mid-life crisis. It is Tan's homage, from a distance, to a home country that is always changing, that always changes when you leave and return. There is no empty space, no purgatory. Every inch of land has its purpose; if it has no purpose, it is given one. Every Singaporean has a story of a large, overgrown field, once the site of soccer games and kites, parcelled out to make room for multiple sets of condominiums. Tan's camera lingers lovingly on Thailand's lush rural spaces, its rolling fields and pink sunsets. And Thana clings to Popeye, who's either chained or relegated to a multitude of objects in quick succession (a set of shopping carts, a tree, the back of several trucks, followed by a police car, and of course, Thana himself), afraid to let go of the one thing that reminds him that life can still be what it used to be, when it was shinier, and happier. But things fall apart and the centre cannot hold, and as Thana embarks on his kora to look for a home he forgot he lost, he finds that memory can also be a tricky, tricking thing.

POP AYE is Tan's allegory for a Singapore aged 52 and unsure about its history. Setting the story in Thailand – a safe distance away, but close enough to home – makes it feel like more of a parable for Singapore's faulty nostalgia, its unreliable memory of a 'better' past and the meaning it over-invests in symbols and kitsch memorabilia. But POP AYE is also a reminder of Singapore's desperation for the new and the cutting-edge at the expense of everything else. Close to the end of the film, there's an ad for a snazzy new skyscraper by Thana's architectural firm, a showy phallus towering over the rest of the city – not unlike the purple dildo on Thana's coffee table. What is Singapore constantly trying to prove? There's no moralising here, and the film's conclusion is open enough for wide-ranging interpretations.

So much is packed into this warm, meditative film. There are some moments of stasis, but Tan keeps the pair's (mis)adventure moving smoothly as they encounter other misfits who have fallen between the cracks, forgotten as the rest of the country – or anyone younger, prettier, smarter, richer, hungrier – has swept along. Despite some heavy-handed imagery, with the elephant an obvious metaphor for everything from lost innocence to adult loneliness to urban alienation, it's hard not to feel a deep affection for Bong the elephant, seduced by bananas and durians to play the part of Popeye, and his palpable bond with lead actor Thaneth Warakulnukroh (turning in a wonderful, understated performance). POP AYE invites us to take time for ourselves and make time for others, to take detours when we can, to make mistakes and circle back on them, to keep walking.

• POP AYE is showing today (October 6, ICA London) and tomorrow (October 7, VUE Leicester Square) as part of the London Film Festival. Tickets available here. 

Snow in Midsummer at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

(Disclaimer: this is one of my stream-of-consciousness reviews, stuffed with rambly excitement and tangents.)

I recently made the trek up to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Snow in Midsummer, the 13th-century Chinese classic by Guan Hanqing also known as The Injustice to Dou E, in a radical new adaptation by playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig and directed by Justin Audibert. Audience members filtering into the velvety Swan Theatre may have been enchanted by a large tapestry in the style of a Chinese ink painting draped over the stage, or the trill of birds, lutes and flutes. Scottish actress Katie Leung, girlish and coy, is trying to sell her weavings to those sitting in the front row. But this is all clever misdirection that relies on certain expectations of “the Oriental play”. Leung scampers off stage and – bam! – the chintzy tapestry falls, neon lights set the stage ablaze, a DJ on the overhang above the stage is dropping some heavy beats, and we’ve been transported to what looks like the heart of present-day Hong Kong.

It’s a gritty urban space called New Harmony, where the well-heeled industrialist Tian Yun (Wendy Kweh) is set to purchase a large factory from the young tycoon Handsome (Colin Ryan), who’s excited to finally embark on a round-the-world vacation with his boyfriend Rocket (Andrew Leung). But what would Snow in Midsummer be without a festering family secret and a delightfully vengeful spirit? Katie Leung’s Dou Yi claws her way out of the grave to haunt Tianyun’s seven-year-old daughter, Fei-Fei (Zoe Lim), and a dark curse begins to spread across the ailing town.

Seeing this slick, sexy production at the Swan Theatre had me imagining what it would be like if the posh Beijing People’s Art Theatre did a contemporary adaptation of Cao Yu’s hyper-incestuous plot-twisty Thunderstorm (1934) in Kardashian reality TV style. (They would never, but a girl can dream.) Audibert’s flamboyant, confident take on Snow in Midsummer blends the tropes of popular Hong Kong television serials – the kind that knows exactly how to whet and sate the appetites of millions of viewers – with high classical drama. The Yuan Dynasty play pre-dates Shakespeare by about 200 years, but through a Western lens there’s inevitably a touch of the Shakespearean about it, and Snow in Midsummer is a veritable feast of big, meaty dramatic arcs. The emphatic, flickering neon signs on stage are emblazoned with the themes of the play, including 正义 (zheng yi; justice), 冤枉 (yuan wang; usually translated as being falsely or wrongly accused of something, but loaded with a particularly potent sense of bitterness), and 无辜 (wu gu; innocence) – obvious to a Chinese-speaking audience but a nice touch of subliminal messaging to those who don’t understand the language.

This production is showy and grand, utterly horrifying but also very funny – a vivid, violent death in one scene may immediately be followed by a bawdy, debauched one (my favourite scene might have been the three People’s Army soldiers exchanging advice on flirty text messaging), a nod to the fact that Shakespeare isn't the only one blending epic deaths, buffoons and the use of comic relief. Sure, the second half drags its feet with the technical exposition required to set up a series of “oh no they didn't!” plot twists. But, oh, these outrageous, juicy plot twists, they had my Hong Kong drama serial loving heart. And they would probably have your heart too, if you gasped when Darth Vader declared to Luke Skywalker: “No, I am your father!”

And then there are the homages to Asia’s particular genre specialty – the genuinely terrifying horror film. Did I spy the long-haired Sadako from The Ring (1998) in one of Dou Yi’s appearances? The ghost’s relentless desire for revenge immediately brings up Ju-On (2000), the grudge that keeps on giving – and there are strong echoes of the Pang Brothers’ The Eye (2002), in which a cornea transplant goes horribly wrong. Of note to those who have already seen the play – in Singapore, the Human Organ Transplant Act was only passed in 1987, and huge debate across members of all religions surrounded its amendments in 2004; the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore issued a fatwa in 2007 so that Muslims could also come under the Act. Even as a secular nation where there’s a strong separation of religion and state, the connection between organ donation and the afterlife was something that we, as a country, wrestled with well into the late 20th and early 21st century.

Which leads me to one of my favourite things about this contemporary update of Guan’s play: its matter-of-fact inclusion of the supernatural as part of a daily lived experience. “Chinese scholars” don’t need to tell you that strong beliefs in the supernatural still exist in the East – the same way Western/English scholars don’t need to tell you that strong beliefs in the supernatural do still exist in the West. Whether you have deep convictions and roots in Christianity or Taoism, one thing is for certain – both religions and cultures are tied to a strong belief in the spiritual and supernatural. And these everyday beliefs are everyday fixtures in Snow in Midsummer, woven into the play and normalised beautifully and generously. In several scenes, there’s a meticulous altar to the Goddess of Mercy and, later on, an instantly recognizable funeral altar laden with food and gifts to the deceased. None of these cultural traditions are “a curiosity” – in the play, a routine visit to a temple is part of the fabric of everyday living the way one might go for weekly mass or a bible study. Superstition and science not only rub up against each other – they coexist.

Snow in Midsummer is a good exemplar of how a complicated Chinese classic can become a pacy contemporary adaptation – one that’s reverent in its treatment of Asian work and translation, but also deliciously irreverent when it comes to playing with tropes and conventions, whether it’s melodrama or horror. This production marks the beginning of the RSC’s Chinese Translations Project, and – permit me this Asian stereotype – it looks like a downright auspicious one.

Stray thoughts, including mild spoilers:

• I’m pretty sure there are people in Hong Kong whose names are indeed Handsome and Rocket. (Names I’ve come across: Virus, Bubbles, Drizzle, Apple, you get the idea.)

• This could have been completely arbitrary, but I loved how the various UK accents mapped relatively well onto their Chinese counterparts. Katie Leung has a Scottish lilt, and her character Dou Yi is also from the north. Wendy Kweh is from Singapore, and I definitely mapped my archetype of the affluent, practical Singaporean businesswoman onto Tianyun. Like I said, it was probably unintentional, but so much fun to imagine.

• I totally called the death by rat poison. I KNEW IT.

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?

---

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:

Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts I, II & III) by Suzan-Lori Parks

Hello from London, my home for the next year or so. I've been getting myself acquainted with the sprawling theatre industry here, and in-between the tangle of bureaucracy and settling into the city I managed to get reasonably-priced tickets for a few shows. One of them was Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks' Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts I, II & III) at the Royal Court Theatre, a show I'd been longing to see when I first heard it had opened in New York two years ago. I'd given up all hope of seeing it – until I realised to my delight that it was in fact playing in London. 

Set against the turbulent American Civil War in 1862, Father Comes Home From The Wars unpacks one man's agonising choice. A slave, known to all as Hero, must decide between two terrible things: to stay home and be a slave and servant forever, or to go to war with his master on the "wrong side", fighting for the pro-slavery Confederates, with the tantalising possibility of gaining his freedom at the end. It's the sort of play that gnaws at you, slowly but insistently, and then leaves you gasping at the end.

We hear about Hero first before seeing him, as a chorus of farmhands on the same Texas property bicker and bet precious items as to whether he will fight or stay. And when he does stride onto the stage, he stands, quite literally, head and shoulders above everyone else, a veritable Greek demigod of a man ("Hero is as he was born: Big, brave, smart, honest and strong"). And there is a strong sense of the Greek epic in this three-hour, three-act play, with its nod to a Sophocles-type performing structure with a core of three actors in every scene and a chorus that comments on the unfurling action, not to mention that our hero is Hero and has a dog named Odd-See (a sly nod to The Odyssey, in case you were wondering), and that our Hero goes on a journey to fight a war and gains a name he has chosen for himself, Ulysses – after the Union general Ulysses S. Grant, but also the Latin name for Odysseus, he of Homer's epic poem of adventure and loss that is set during the Trojan War. There is also, incidentally, a character named Homer, and a Cassandra-like figure in Hero's lover Penny (named for Odysseus' lover Penelope), who sees signs and portents, and dreams of him. Parks sets up this structural metaphor skilfully, reclaiming a trampled, trodden-down history and elevating it to the same plane as the plays that were once created for an audience of the gods. 

I don't think this production, which could be considered by all means an historical play, can be dissected as a separate entity from the present-day #BlackLivesMatter movement and ongoing police brutality protests that have taken shape and also shaken America over the past two years. Parks has been remarkably prescient in her ability to negotiate and navigate the concept of "freedom" – both a collective freedom and an individual freedom – and how it applies to a wide swathe of a country's population. From the domestic setting of the first act, to the war-time chaos of the second, and then to the post-war uncertainty of the final act, Hero-Ulysses must make crucial decisions about his personal freedom, and the lengths to which he will go to attain it. What is the price of freedom – and what are the sacrifices made when one has been conditioned to live without it?

I found myself initially chafing at Steve Toussaint's portrayal of a mild, ambivalent Hero in the first act: Why so ineffectual, so indecisive? I thought. You're supposed to be a hero! But Hero was never meant to be a hero, even if he may look the part and even if everyone else deems him so. And in the same way, Parks gradually reveals that the concept of freedom isn't defined by one person; it depends on the majority's definitions and expectations of freedom. This also extends to perceptions of a man's worth – first debated baldly and uncomfortably in dollar and cents as it applies to the price of a slave, and then on a deeper level as the characters grapple with what it means to be a free man and to "own one's self". There's also some very, very clever and striking use of Confederate and Union uniforms as a visual metaphor to contrast between man's interior convictions, what he believes to be true, and his exterior facade, how he conforms to society. In the second act, Hero encounters a captured Union soldier on the battlefield, who tries to explain what freedom means. Hero cannot comprehend it. 

HERO: Who will I belong to?

SMITH: You'll belong to yourself.

HERO: So – when a Patroller comes up to me, when I'm walking down the road to work or what-have-you and a Patroller comes up to me and says, 'Whose n***** are you, N*****?' I'm gonna say, 'I belong to myself'? (...) 'I belong to the Colonel', I says now. That's how come they don't beat me. But when Freedom comes and they stop me and ask and I say, 'I'm my own. I'm on my own and I own my ownself,' you think they'll leave me be?

SMITH: I don't know. 

HERO: Seems like the worth of a Colored man, once he's made Free, is less than his worth when he's a slave.

And just as the choice of Freedom hangs over Hero's head like the sword of Damocles, so does his idea (or his ideated idea) of home. During the second act, the house in which he lives is suspended over the stage to, on a practical level, clear the stage for a battlefield scene, but to me personally, on a metaphorical level, felt like the ever-present and looming fixation on a warm, familiar home that exists, somewhere on the horizon. But by the time that home is lowered back onto the ground, everything has already changed, irrevocably. Odysseus returns home from the Trojan War, triumphant, to his beloved Penelope, but Parks isn't as optimistic about her faux-Ulysses. The civil war is over, but the larger, longer, and harder war has only just begun.

Stray thoughts:

• What an astonishing cast. The Royal Court run featured: Steve Toussaint (Hero), Leo Wringer (The Oldest Old Man), Jimmy Akingbola (Homer), Nadine Marshall (Penny), John Stahl (Colonel), Tom Bateman (Smith), Dex Lee (Odyssey Dog – personally my favourite character), Sibusiso Mamba (Chorus Leader/First Runaway), Jason Pennycooke (Second/Second Runaway), Sarah Niles (Third/Third Runaway). And not to mention the masterful music director and arranger Steven Bargonetti, who plays a narrative role of sorts as he accompanies the action on banjo and guitar, with songs written by Parks.
• Hovering in my mind, what Toni Morrison said many years ago: “What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.” (Emphasis my own.)
• The play runs till Oct 22, tickets from £12 here.

The exterior of the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square.

Hotel by Wild Rice

I watched Wild Rice’s Hotel for the second time over the weekend, and spent the next two days wondering what to write about it. You may have read my delighted review of it here, where I gave it five stars; you may also have read Ng Yi-Sheng’s excellent thematic/literary analysis of it last year, or his more recent (and equally excellent) take on its political significance.

For this year’s edition of Hotel, I bought tickets – the moment they went on sale – for most of my immediate family, and convinced another two good friends to come along (one of them brought her brother). Last year, I’d watched Hotel utterly alone, wearing my “Straits Times Critic” hat, spending my 4.5 hours laughing and crying solo; this year, I spent an entire week prior to the show assaulted by insomnia because I was simply too excited about what would now be a communal experience. 

Hotel premiered at the Singapore International Festival of Arts last year over a single weekend. It fit perfectly into the festival’s Post-Empires theme, a sprawling, ambitious production that takes place over 100 years in a single hotel room in Singapore, marking the time with one scene per decade from 1915 to 2015. From colonialism to the Japanese occupation to the country’s 80s economic boom to the present day, Hotel’s guests range from plantation owners to amahs to Japanese soldiers to famed auteur P. Ramlee to Bugis Street sex workers to an entire interracial wedding party – the list goes on. It was a staggering, astonishing achievement with uniformly excellent performance from its tireless cast (speaking a multitude of languages), turning the tables on the ‘official’ narrative of Singapore’s birth and rise as a nation, fleshing it out with characters so convincing I’m assured they existed in some form or another and whose descendants we are today.

And I think the reason for my sleeplessness and excitement was because I was so desperate to share this history with others. We’ve been marked so often as “cultural orphans”, as immigrants who have discarded our “native cultures” for a shallower faux hybridity, for a “one-size-fits-all” attempt at multiculturalism that sands away complexity instead of encouraging diversity. Hotel mourns what we have lost, but celebrates what we’ve held on to and ponders what we may yet become. And theatre, like history, flourishes where there are a spectrum of views. Some of the best theatre experiences I’ve had were enriched by fierce, excited debate after, where friends and colleagues pointed out moments and shared insights that I’d missed from my narrow vantage point. Hotel, I’d argue, does the same for Singapore history. Who does history belong to? Which side of the story you tell depends on where you’re standing when you look back. And how you respond to history depends on the baggage you bring with you.

In-between Parts 1 & 2, and after the show concluded, my friends, family and I dissected each scene and pored over connections we interpreted and reinterpreted; some scenes (particularly 2005 and 2015) resonated much more strongly with me this year, a year of police brutality, deeply heightened Islamophobia, and jagged fault lines between “the immigrant” and “the native”. Hotel has proved to be as fresh and relevant in SG51 as it was in SG50, because it trumps everything with its SG100. With its longer arc of history, in which history then repeats itself, Hotel reminds us that we cannot take the myopic, short-term view of our past. 4.5 hours, as does 100 years, sounds dreadfully long. But I assure you that Hotel, and history itself, will sprint and pass you by – before you even realise it.

Stray thoughts: 

• Ivan Heng, Lee Chee Keng and Lina Yu replace Lim Kay Siu and Neo Swee Lin in several roles for this year’s edition, with Julie Wee and Pam Oei (from the original cast) chipping in with some reshuffling of the roles. I loved Ivan’s caustic Henry Yao from 2015, an acid-tongued old man reflecting on his final days; Chee Keng excels as a gruff Japanese general from 1945; and Lina’s bubbly Keiko-san, also from 1945, was very endearing.

• Actually, I’m going to go ahead and cite every single cast member, because they were absolutely stunning: Jo Kukathas, Ghafir Akbar, Brendon Fernandez, Moo Siew Keh, Dwayne Lau, Yap Yi Kai, Sharda Harrison, Siti Khalijah Zainal, Ben Cutler.

• Of course, direction by Ivan Heng and Glen Goei, script by Alfian Sa’at and Marcia Vanderstraaten. You floored me last year, you floored me again this year.

• I went home that night and had the most wonderful, deep sleep.