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.

Manifesto by Drama Box & The Necessary Stage

Three years ago, I attended a press conference on the top floor of Drama Box's narrow shophouse premises in Chinatown. A group of arts practitioners had come together to unveil their Manifesto For The Arts (page here), what they hoped would be a call, a rallying cry, that artists and arts lovers would be able to align themselves with. I was a younger reporter at the time, only just beginning to understand my beat, and the sound of a 'manifesto' was at once empowering and intimidating to me.

This was their manifesto:

1. Do not attempt to define Art for others.
2. Art is fundamental.
3. Art unifies and divides.
4. Art is about possibilities.
5. Art can be challenged but not censored.
6. Art is political.

I wrote about it in the paper, as did several other journalists, but as time went on and other arts policy issues came to the fore – censorship, term licensing, grants structures, changes of leadership at the various ministries and statutory boards – the sound of that rallying cry got fainter. Until The Necessary Stage (TNS) and Drama Box announced that they would be doing a collaborative production titled Manifesto. 

Manifesto, I have come to realise, is all of the above. 

1. It does not attempt to define itself. When TNS and Drama Box said that this would be a 'challenging' play, they were putting it lightly. It ignores genre and convention. It is an epic but also a series of vignettes. It blends film with 'liveness' and more static audio and visual installations. It is a meta-play – you see the actors preparing to enter the stage, their costume changes, the actors playing an actor playing another actor, it presents a genre of theatre (e.g. forum theatre) within another genre of theatre (e.g. naturalism). Actors and designers – who would often take a more behind-the-scenes role in a production, such as the sound designer or the multimedia designer – were all on an equal, open footing, all visible on stage. All of them had speaking roles. 
2. It is fundamental. Manifesto depicts artists at their most elemental, creating work and examining why they create what they create, and how they respond to reactions to their work and who they are.
3. It unifies and divides. There has been an outpouring of support and critical acclaim for the production, but there have also been some detractors. 
4. It is about possibilities. Or perhaps finding possibility in impossibility. Artists are hemmed in by cycles of history that seem to repeat themselves. One theatre group with a cause is spawned, only to struggle, collapse, and then birth another theatre group half a century later out of its ashes – but is it a birth or just a moment before death? Forum theatre – where audience members are allowed to stop a scene and replace any of the actors to see how they might resolve a conflict better – is used heavily as a device of possibility. How can these narratives, these tragic personal histories, be altered? What knowledge and foresight can we draw from counterfactual history?
5. It can be challenged, but not censored. It was certainly challenged (see: 'Singapore play about role of artists gets R18 rating', The Straits Times; and Alfian's response to the rating), but we can debate whether it was subject to censorship or not. The play often depicts self-censorship as endemic of Singapore of the 1980s, where practitioners censor themselves by dropping key words at the end of each sentence, e.g.
   BT: "We can all speak—"
   Roslan: "All our plays have been—"
   Sheila: "I can write anything I—" 
6. It is political. Manifesto traces the struggles of a group of artists as they come up against the machinery of the state, be it detention or censorship. But it also looks at ideology, guiding principles and convictions, and purpose, and what it means to be not simply a political actor but a political being.

Manifesto was, in that sense, an artistic manifestation of the set of principles that a group of artists in Singapore had set out to be united by. It is the sort of ambitious, unflinching, chaotic and confrontational art that artists here have struggled, for decades on end, to defend. 

The linear timeline in Manifesto is often interrupted and most of the actors play multiple roles and speak a hodgepodge of several languages (English, Chinese, Malay, Hokkien), which might take some time to get a firm handle on (the disorientation is very deliberate and the production does not hand-hold the inexperienced theatregoer).

But in a nutshell, a group of artist-activists come together in 1956, during the tumultuous development of a national identity in pre-independence Singapore. Their establishment of a company lays the path for another group of artist-activists in 1986, who are swept up in the McCarthyistic Marxist arrests of the late 1980s. In the present day, 2015-2016, artists try to make sense of the industry's dark history and grapple with the ghosts of their past, while in the future, 2024, questions of artistic and political succession in Singapore (Who will be the next MP? Who will be the next artistic director?) come to the fore, placed on equal footing. The characters are sometimes very thinly sketched out, with a few feeling less like people and more like devices to move the narrative forward and throw some dramatic tension into the mix, but the actors do an absolutely stunning job within the confines of their short sketches to flesh out as much as they can of their talking heads, particularly the characters who are composites of real-life artists and detainees.

But, dare I say it, I don't think Manifesto will be remembered for its lack of characterisation, but for what it managed to condense and portray in a very short period of time. 

Manifesto draws from TNS and Drama Box's previous work: they were pioneering groups in promoting forum theatre in Singapore, and detention without trial and political choice are large themes in productions such as Gemuk Girls (2008) and Model Citizens (2010). But I think this marks the first time that they have turned their focus so strongly to the Singaporean creator of art. This self-reflexivity ties in with a tide of artwork that has also put the Singapore artist in the spotlight – some in more powerful ways than others – such as Sonny Liew's graphic novel The Art Of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015), which reimagines what Singapore might have been like if Lim Chin Siong had taken the reins instead of Lee Kuan Yew; Toy Factory Production's Upstage (2015), a measured, careful tribute to the origins of Singapore's Chinese-language theatre; or (to a, well, much less effective extent) Nanyang – The Musical (2015), which looked at the lives of the Nanyang-style painters in Singapore in the 1930s-50s. Then there has also been a swell of productions that look at alternative histories and narratives that don't completely align with the 'official narrative' that the Singapore authorities are fond of using as the definitive Singapore history. That official narrative is a valid take on the country's past – as are many of other narratives, told from different perspectives. Teater Ekamatra's Geng Rebut Cabinet (GRC; 2015) and Wild Rice's Hotel (2015), as well as Tan Pin Pin's documentary about political exiles To Singapore, With Love (2013) are some instances of productions that interrogate the political narratives that are often taken as fact, rather than a matter of perspective.

Taken together, Manifesto fits in well with this movement of artwork that seeks to overturn historical and cultural amnesia in Singapore. And if not to overturn, perhaps to introduce a few cracks in the armour. It is very bald, and very ballsy, about its agenda to expose the inordinate struggles of art-making in Singapore, and its manifesto for the arts is in full, showy, obvious view. This, as opposed to the opacity of the state's manifesto, e.g. it promotes a certain brand of art, but not others, without explaining why. (Case in point: The MDA's R18 rating of Manifesto for 'mature content', with very little elaboration.) I don't think it proclaims that artists should get away with murder, but that the role of the artist is to provoke, to confront, to challenge, to delight, and to dismay, that the artist is as equally prone to bouts of debilitating humanity as the rest of us: spying on and betraying their peers, hands tied by bureaucracy, self-censoring, sometimes incredibly entitled and bratty. 

Manifesto ends on an ambivalent, ambiguous note. A stage/production manager and an actress-director shake hands, having decided that they will start their own theatre company with their own manifesto to abide by. Yes, we all think, this is it. This is the moment where the cycle begins anew and they can strike out on their own, and make a difference.

Or is it? Will the cycle just continue as it has before? Do artists hold on to their manifesto, or simply fall in line behind the state's unspoken manifesto? Will art ever matter – and matter enough – in Singapore? Have we already lost the war, with a public that is largely more concerned with what they view as more important, bread-and-butter issues? Does Manifesto only preach to the converted (the artists, the artsgoers, the arts community), and with its brief run in a tiny black box space, will it ever send ripples far enough to ever make an impact? 

I don't have the answers to these questions. But I was thinking about the communality of Singapore theatre in the 1960s, captured in Dr Quah Sy Ren's authoritative book in Chinese-language theatre in Singapore, as well as in Upstage, where groups and individuals would come together on a regular basis, break bread with each other, and work collectively to create art. It is this coming together that Manifesto pieces together from the ashes of friendships and working relationships torn apart by detention and betrayal. The act of creating Manifesto itself was the result of two groups with overlapping histories coming back together. I think it is this arts community that we must come together to nurture, to heal, and protect. That is our manifesto.

UPDATE:

Stray thoughts about the performers and the use of multimedia:

• So many clever touches from the use of film as both documentary and mockumentary, courtesy of a lot of great experimentation from Loo Zihan. I liked how the present-day performance artist Rumiko uses an iPhone the way one might use Snapchat or Periscope today, to do a 'live' feed on arts events. And of course the 'documentary' snippets that recreate the confessions done on public TV during the 1980s that were breathtakingly authentic. 
• There's a scene that actress Goh Guat Kian does as her character Siok Dee towards the end of the play, captured on film, that was quite gutting and that I found out later she had improvised, i.e. her improvisation done in rehearsal made the cut into the final film with next to no changes. Guat Kian, you are incredible.
• Also cried buckets during a scene where the inimitable Siti Khalijah, as the long-suffering actress Som, waiting for her husband to come home, ages through the decades. I know I wasn't the only one.
• I have a soft spot for forum theatre, and it was very pleasing to see it used as a practical, matter-of-fact way of resolving conflict and trouble-shooting. Kind of a small reclamation of the 10 years where funding to forum theatre was proscribed here.
• "Art is the end of the reviewer." Well, that's really—