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.

Ibsen: Ghosts by Markus&Markus at The O.P.E.N.

I spoke with two friends (separately) after Ghosts last night, and we had two very different (and very intense) discussions about the work. German theatre collective Markus&Markus, using Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts (1881-1882) as a loose framework, had created a theatrical response to assisted suicide that was, at the same time, a biography of the late 81-year-old Margot, a warm, funny, confiding woman who chose to die on her own terms in 2014.

One of my friends appreciated the production a great deal, noting the meticulous attention to detail – Markus&Markus were careful to keep Margot the focus of their documentary film footage (she's always in the centre of the frame, everyone and everything else is peripheral), they never allowed audience members to wallow in the swelling strains of Dvorak's sentimental "New World" symphony (a soundtrack to many of the scenes), and interspersed challenging, emotional moments with other scenes of bizarre humour (the Grim Reaper makes an appearance and gives a PowerPoint presentation on a type of pentobarbital used in euthanasia; Markus&Markus dress up in sheets and dance to the theme of Ghostbusters). My friend was glad that Margot had the final say on what they could film of her and what she ruled out as private. Sure, the show was irreverent, even decidedly vulgar at turns, but always respectful of its portrayal of Margot. Everything felt careful and deliberate.

Another friend disagreed. How could they say that Margot "directed" the work? she argued. Markus&Markus did all the cuts. They had the final say. They represented Margot according to their own terms, not hers. She was further upset by Markus&Markus' decision to have a man with dementia be the protagonist of their upcoming (similarly documentary-type) work, Peer Gynt. How can someone who is not lucid give consent to be represented? she asked. Margot may have given full consent, but the discussion of dementia soured her initial acceptance of the ethics of their art-making.

I'm reminded of last week's Riding On A Cloud and its dissection of representation – different context, similar issue. What happens when you're an art-maker who wants to create a compelling, engaging piece of work about an important topic and you require (or perhaps desire) a non-performer to be himself/herself on stage? Are you a slave to the art, or the real-life person on which the art is based, especially when the person in question may not be able to give consent? (I don't have answers to that, so I went and bought Jay Koh's Art-Led Participative Processes: Dialogue & Subjectivity Within Performances In The Everyday.)

I, too, had strong and conflicting reactions to Ghosts. There were very few dry eyes in the audience. I've rarely seen death on stage so confrontational, so intimate, so full of sharp edges but as cozy and welcoming as Margot's little apartment. In their prologue, Markus&Markus make a mockery of death scenes from theatre, film and opera, from Romeo & Juliet ("O, happy dagger!"), to the final sorrow of Young Werther, to the character-slaughtering Game Of Thrones. Staging death will always be a parody because the actor always remains alive. Except in this case, of course, because Margot dies.

We've all experienced death in our own ways, but it's a rare thing to become acquainted with and deeply fond of a complete stranger and then watch her die by her own hand, calmly and at peace, about two hours later. The play, through Margot, brings up a lot of difficult debate on the ethics of euthanasia and, at the same time, the ethics of documenting someone's process as she prepares for euthanasia. It unfolds as a sort of parallel to the death taking place on stage; it is as pre-meditated and careful as it is messy and painful. "Blonde" Markus, who has been popping pills at regular, calculated intervals, goes on to down an entire bottle of what I'm assuming is sparkling wine, then forcefully throws it up all over the stage floor. It's a horrible, stomach-churning moment, an allusion to the sheer force of will it takes to kill one's self. Whether you die in your sleep, of a terminal illness, by your own hand, or in a terrible accident – death, whether voluntary or involuntary, is hardly ever dignified.

And all through the production I wondered, as I cried and cried: is Margot the exploited one, her final month laid bare in front of us, her confessions and her difficult medical history unveiled? Was it a "dignified" way to die, having us watch the exact moment she stops breathing? Or are we, the audience, the manipulated ones, prompted by the theatre-makers to follow a specific emotional arc, to argue, to cry?

Markus&Markus have watched Margot die at least 45 times now, inverting what we assume to be the 'traditional' process of grief: we mourn, we have a funeral, we cremate or bury, we do our best to move on. But death never leaves us. The show presents other cultures of grieving that embrace this loss, whether it's exhuming the remains each year and bringing them home as if they were whole, and real, or allowing the body to decompose at home (the deceased is simply ill until he/she begins to rot). And I appreciated that candour the show brought to the most shadowy, uncertain of things. Everyone has their own convictions, religious, moral or otherwise, as to how their life's conclusion ought to be written. Ghosts made us sit with it, look it in the eye, hold its hand. For that, I am grateful.

IgnorLAND of its Loss by Drama Box

The latest instalment of Drama Box's ongoing IgnorLAND series might very well be subtitled "A Eulogy for Dakota Crescent". It's an atmospheric, meditative piece where the location is the obvious star of the show, bringing the audience on several routes on a 2.5-hour walk through the nearly 60-year-old estate, its cosy, low-rise rental flats something of an anomaly against a backdrop of rising condominiums. Walking through the crumbly apartment buildings, however, I also felt a strong sense of deja vu, that once again we had arrived too late, done too little – that we were, yet again, holding a funeral for a place we didn't even have time to mourn.

This isn't the first time that Drama Box, or artists in Singapore for that matter, have created productions that focus on the perennial struggle between the old and the new. We are obsessed with this push and pull, perhaps because it renders us so helpless. I attended an art and photography exhibition held in the void decks of the colourful Rochor Centre last year before it went under the chopping block; there was another artist takeover at Eminent Plaza, a building in a similar situation, in 2014. What I find uncomfortable is that often – not always, but often – artists only seem to come in when the decision has already been made. We pay for destroyed spaces with the currency of nostalgia, and nostalgia has its limits.

Drama Box broke this trend last year with its three-part It Won't Be Too Long series that involved both a show at Bukit Brown Cemetery and one in Toa Payoh Central. It gave audience members a stake in what might happen in the future, when we are called on to decide which spaces to keep and which to discard. (It also helped that we were voting on these spaces during the weekend of the General Election, which added to the urgency.) It also documented the fight for Bukit Brown, where activists all over Singapore rallied together as best as they could to preserve the municipal cemetery. The fight was lost, but not for any lack of trying. 

But who will speak up for Dakota? In IgnorLAND, the residents are the performers. One of them, Billy, who has lived in the estate for 50 years, brings us on a tour of his small second-floor apartment, crowded with thriving plants and curious knick-knacks. Another, a volunteer at the eldercare centre, is disappointed that their VWO will not be able to continue their work with residents when they've been relocated (another VWO will take their place). IgnorLAND is as much for the audience members as it is for the Dakota residents, a production that allows them to at least share their grief with the public. But there seemed to be an overarching resignation to their performances, an undercurrent of bitterness I couldn't shake.

Drama Box tries to up the stakes we have in the estate as we wander through these buildings, paint little wooden rectangles and paste them on miniature recreations of the Dakota Crescent blocks. They make splendid use of a block of flats for an opening scene and a lovely green spot by the Geylang River for a closing scene. But it's really not enough. We see the work that has gone into this project – painstaking little dioramas by students and children, a complex "cat playground" for the dozens of affectionate, head-scratch-and-belly-rub-loving felines in the estate (what happens to them when all the residents leave??). But still our link to the estate feels observational, tenuous. I can appreciate the production as a period of tireless engagement with the Dakota community, an acknowledgement of the overlooked residents who have to vacate the premises after several long decades. And on that level, perhaps the production is enough, or even more than what they might have expected to receive. But I think shows like these have the potential to move beyond sympathy to empathy. We shouldn't just feel sad, or resigned, when we leave – else we will continue to lose more of a country that is less and less our own.

The final scene is a lovely tribute to Dakota residents: beautiful large-format photo portraits projected on a building wall. After the show, as I was walking back to the nearby Mountbatten MRT station, I passed an elderly auntie who had a cameo in the epilogue and who was walking, briskly, together with a volunteer, back to the location of the final scene. It had, of course, already ended. The auntie said, sadly: "哎呀, 我每次来不及..." ("Aiyah! I never get there in time (to see the slideshow)..."). It felt like the perfect, brutally depressing metaphor for Dakota Crescent. Aiyah, we never get there in time...

(Update: Drama Box gave this dear auntie a private screening of the slideshow!)

Riding On A Cloud by Rabih Mroue

What happens when you allow someone to tell your story – but a version that's really their version of your story? And then to be complicit in that retelling of your story, of your own volition? Rabih Mroue's Riding On A Cloud, which opened The O.P.E.N. (heh) last week, is a gorgeous meditation on what it means to interpret histories – in this case both one's personal history, as well as the history of a nation.

I've been struck, from what I've seen at The O.P.E.N. so far, by the ability of its films and performances to paint a very intimate portrait of a family or individual and simultaneously frame it within the larger painting of a country and its political, national struggles. We see this in Miguel Gomes' sprawling Arabian Nights trilogy, where tales of Portugal under economic austerity are told, sometimes in the most mundane moments of everyday living. And we see this in Jumana Manna's wonderful A Magical Substance Flows Into Me, an attempt at ethnomusicology that at once captures the very domestic daily lives of the diverse peoples occupying Palestine, as well as the larger, incredibly complex Arab-Israeli conflict. 

Riding On A Cloud takes us to Lebanon. But before that, it introduces us to Yasser Mroue, Rabih's younger brother and the main performer of the work. It is Yasser's story that Rabih tells – or should we say appropriates, in the most loving of ways – in an attempt to examine what it means to represent an individual on a stage, or a complex part of history to the world, while completely aware that every story that is told is simply one side of the story.

Yasser makes his way to a small desk on the stage. We realise he walks with a pronounced limp. He eases himself into a chair. Before him: a tower of stacked CDs and a smaller deck of cassette tapes. He records himself speaking. Then with his left hand, he carefully opens a CD cover and pops the disc into a player. A video flickers onto a large screen behind him. He pops a cassette tape into another player, and we hear his voice (or is it Rabih's?). This is how the show goes. A video concludes, and Yasser goes on to the next one, backed by an audio narrative. It's a radio play-type unfolding of Yasser's story, from childhood to a crucial time in his life when he sustains a life-changing injury. 

(Spoilers ahead.) 

In 1987, when he is 17, during the Lebanese civil war, Yasser is shot in the head by a sniper while crossing the street, distraught, after hearing news of his grandfather's assassination. He is saved by an operation but wakes from a coma to be told that he has aphasia. His speech, and his understanding of language, is severely impaired. Most notably of all, his doctors reveal that he has a cognitive problem with representation. The doctor shows him a pen. That's a pen, says Yasser. The doctor shows him a flashcard with a pen printed on it. Yasser can't recognise the object, even when it's placed next to the actual pen. To him, the flashcard is a piece of paper with some colours on it. 

I was inordinately moved by Yasser's journey of recovery. Perhaps it's because I write a great deal, and my currency is precision of language. "I suffer to find the right word," the voiceover says, at one point, after touching on the other twin love of my life, the theatre. He divulges that going to the theatre is a brutal, emotional experience in which he cannot distinguish acting from real life. To him, acting IS real life. The actors are real people. When they die on stage, they truly die. It's a truly epiphanic moment, sitting there watching him perform his own representation of himself, a representation he can distinguish cerebrally but not emotionally.

This quiet unpacking of a single life manages to somehow always feel larger than itself, whether through Yasser's musings on how he was shot – better to be collateral damage or a predetermined target? – or when set against the backdrop of a country undergoing deep, fracturing turmoil. 

How much of this performance was invented, and how much of it was the truth? I'm not sure. But I do know that we convince ourselves of invented histories every day.  The small lies, or half-truths, that help us pad out the traumas that we face, or allow us to take a less severe look at ourselves. How do we represent ourselves to ourselves? How do we backtrack, reconstruct our lives to make sense of what has happened to us? It is these things that make Riding On A Cloud at once devastating and life-affirming. 

Stray thoughts:

• I loved the small asides of wordplay that happen throughout the piece. There's a scene where we hear a song by the Civil Wars, a folksy duo (now defunct) that I love. The phrase "Civil Wars" on-screen then morphs into "Lebanese Civil Wars", and the melancholy ballad suddenly gains new meaning. It's a nod to the free association Yasser turns to when re-learning language, frustrated when he can't recognise the object on a flashcard and reeling off a series of unrelated objects in an attempt to find the correct answer.

Cafe by Joel Tan

"I'm afraid to live, am I?—and even more afraid to die! So I sit here, with my pride drowned on the bottom of a bottle, keeping drunk so I won't see myself shaking in my britches with fright, or hear myself whining and praying: Beloved Christ, let me live a little longer at any price! If it's only for a few days more, or a few hours even, have mercy, Almighty God, and let me still clutch greedily to my yellow heart this sweet treasure, this jewel beyond price, the dirty, stinking bit of withered old flesh which is my beautiful little life! "

– Larry in The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill

In The Iceman Cometh, O'Neill keeps his characters trapped in a bar. Not physically trapped, of course, but they've been there so long it is the only existence they know. We'll leave tomorrow, they say, we'll do this and that tomorrow. We'll change. But they never leave. They cling to their miserable lives not because they want to, but because it is the only thing they know – it's familiar, almost comforting. It's an opiate.

In Joel Tan's Cafe at the inaugural Twenty-Something Theatre Festival, his Singaporean characters share something of a similar fate, even if what keeps them there isn't quite the same. Three baristas/wait staff and two customers linger inside the confines of what is presumably one of the hipster outposts that have mushroomed all over the country. But outside the cafe, and then eventually within it, strange pre-apocalyptic rumblings begin to happen. Furniture vanishes. There is soil all over the floor that never goes away. Milk turns sour, water turns bright blue. El (Ellison Tan), one of the baristas, realises through the fog of her memory that she hasn't seen her mother in some time – but when? She wonders - why can't she remember how she got here? Shireen (Jasmine Xie) can't reach her partner, and then realises she doesn't know where he is. They yearn to leave the cafe, but their colleagues/friends somehow coax them into staying. 

It's a play where nothing seems to happen, but everything is happening. Joel has always had a fine ear for dialogue and his talky script serves him well here, gradually painting in a portrait of an all-too-familiar Singaporean inertia and passivity, where no one knows quite what they are doing but they go through the motions anyway. The world might be crumbling around us, he suggests, but still we cling to our own sanitised version of reality, inoculating ourselves with our cups of coffee laced with perfect swirls of latte art. Zee Wong's passive-aggressive, queasily banal Jaeclyn (did I spell that right?) proves that our greatest enemy is in fact ourselves, and that our greatest weapon is our painful water cooler talk (literally – she tells her pained acquaintance Shireen how her co-workers come to drink at the water cooler on their level because it tastes better. God help us). It's a scathing portrayal of how the well-meaning and well-intentioned, too, get worn down by an insidiously banal system. How can one rage against the machine when the machine is powered by a deep and all-powerful ennui?

I've often wondered at the stasis in some of Joel's earlier plays – some used to good effect, others that made me feel restless – but Cafe comes with a latent message that is powerful enough to buoy the play through most of its slower moments while also making narrative sense, in that the audience is tested by the characters' ramblings but comes out the wiser for it and is rewarded for their patience. But one thing I wanted more of was the characters to fill the room, to be certain of their convictions (and what makes them leave, when some eventually manage to do so). There is plenty of agitation on the surface, but less of that much-needed weight of bitterness and desperation that might propel a character to leave his mediocre existence. It takes a great deal of force, whether external or internal, to make someone leave a place of familiarity, even if that familiarity is dull, and I wasn't entirely convinced by some departures. In some cases, it felt as though the characters hadn't quite reached a breaking point where to leave becomes a more viable and palatable option than to stay.

I'm sad that I missed quite a few shows at the festival; it seems that many productions were well-received and wrestled with important issues, be they the tuition industry in Singapore (Tuition by Euginia Tan) or the futility of public discourse here (Trees... A Crowd by Irfan Kasban). But I'm glad that I managed to catch Cafe, at least – it's a revealing play about a deep-rooted ugliness that curls around all of us and that we often ignore.

Stray thoughts:

• Chekhov's steak knife. I really thought ex-convict-turned-barista Kim (Joshua Lim) would use it at some point, but alas my hopes were dashed. 
• Shireen and Jaeclyn's mind-numbingly awkward coffee sesh/reunion reminded me, slightly traumatically, of some of the 'catch-ups' over coffee that I never should have agreed to.
• Jaeclyn, sitting alone in that darkened cafe space with her endless supply of anecdotes, reminds of the way Larry clings to the greasy bar in The Iceman Cometh in the quote above: "Let me still clutch greedily to my yellow heart this sweet treasure..."