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.

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.