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.

My Country; A Work in Progress at the National Theatre

I recently reviewed My Country; A Work in Progress at the National Theatre, which reminded me distinctly of Wild Rice's Cooling Off Day (2011), a piece of testimonial/verbatim theatre documenting the political resonances and the public's response to the watershed 2011 parliamentary elections in Singapore. I wrote about it in great detail here.

The following review of My Country was first published in Exeunt Magazine.

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On June 24, 2016, as the results of the EU referendum began pouring in, my colleagues and I were watching our computer screens in a newsroom in Singapore with morbid fascination and sickening dread. The percentages sank – 51%, 50%, 49% – as did our stomachs. Our more utilitarian fellow citizens made a point of swarming currency exchange outlets in the central business district to change their strong Singapore dollars for the plummeting pound sterling; money changers shuttered and refused to sell any of their reserves.

The fallout that filtered through to our side of the world, a former British colony no less, left us baffled. Had the majority of UK residents understood what they were voting for? Did David Cameron just up and quit, humming a merry tune at his final press conference? Who was going to steer the UK out of this mess? And yet much of it also sounded familiar, overlapping with socio-political sentiments felt halfway around the world: the anti-immigration rhetoric, the promise of jobs and healthcare, the affluent island nation wary of its neighbours.

My Country; A Work in Progress is the National Theatre’s first attempt at dealing bluntly with the reverberations of Brexit and the country’s spectrum of responses to the referendum, and there’s a brevity to it that reflects, possibly, the haste with which this piece seems to have been put together. It’s an ambitious title – My Country – one that attempts to speak for all of the UK through its vox populi, and perhaps it isn’t surprising that the 75-minute result is a selection of highlights rather than a textured interrogation of the whole.

The hardworking cast of seven, suited and suitcased, embody and personify seven regions in the UK, playing up the accents, the archetypes, and the cultural quirks: Caledonia (Stuart McQuarrie), the North East (Laura Elphinstone), Northern Ireland (Cavan Clarke), Cymru (Christian Patterson), the East Midlands (Seema Bowri), the South West (Adam Ewan), and Westminster, the seat of power, Britannia herself (Penny Layden; she’s affectionately referred to by the other regions as Britney). Britannia has convened her various regions to observe the vote and to speak on behalf of their people against a backdrop of desks and ballot boxes. But by divvying up the country according to its geography and relying on the stereotypes that go with them, this theatrical United Kingdom predictably remains a Divided one.

A team of ten from the National Theatre gathered interviews with residents from across the country, aged 9 to 97, which were then knitted together by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and director Rufus Norris. Excerpts of these interviews are presented, by the personifications of these seven regions, as collections of pithy quotes: “If you’re going to export bombs, you’re going to import people,” declares a resident of Wales; Boris Johnson’s “the EU would be a lobster” speech gets a gleeful impersonation. The interviews have been judiciously edited to reflect a range of responses, with both Leave and Remain camps rubbing up against each other. The conversation moves through a selection of topics: childhood memory, nostalgia for a pastoral history, class privilege, welfare and benefits, geographical boundaries, those who are suspicious of immigrants and others who are more compassionate – the piece is at its best with these intimate verbatim interviews, with Duffy and Norris sustaining their blend of playfulness and pathos. The digestible soundbites are crowd-pleasing, accompanied with laughter and recognition, but they also make it hard to see My Country as more than a compilation of quotable quotes, the sentiments of which have already been paraded endlessly through the news.

My Country wants desperately to speak for the universal and the personal at the same time – the play’s subtitle, A Work in Progress, acknowledges the impossible goal it has set for itself. Halfway through the show, each of the seven regions wheels out a buffet of local foods. It’s an easy gimmick: a Talisker single malt from the Scots; Geordie pizza from the North East. It strikes me that My Country is an amuse bouche of a political documentary, one that summarises the UK’s complex diversity without getting its hands too dirty in the trenches that drive it apart.

My Country; A Work in Progress is on at the National Theatre until 22nd March 2017, followed by a national tour. Click here for more details. 

DIRECTED BY Rufus Norris
WRITTEN BY Text from interviews with people across the UK and Carol Ann Duffy
CAST INCLUDES Seema Bowri, Cavan Clarke, Laura Elphinstone, Adam Ewan, Penny Layden, Stuart McQuarrie, Christian Patterson

(Flashback) Cry, Trojans! by The Wooster Group at SIFA 2014

We've been looking at the work of The Wooster Group in terms of hybrid performance here at Goldsmiths, so I thought I'd post my review of Cry, Trojans! that the Group performed in Singapore a couple of years ago. (Bearing in mind that I was a younger reviewer then, and was still figuring out voice, form, content and readership in criticism... In retrospect, there were some good points here, but clumsily conveyed. So many redundant adjectives, ugh.) This review was first published in The Straits Times.

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Stupefyingly dull, offensive, and an insult to Shakespeare? Or a work that pulls the rug out from under every sacred convention of theatre?

Cry, Trojans! (which I might subtitle Cry, Unsuspecting Audiences!) is all of these things and more, a 2½-hour determined trudge through the minefield of Troilus & Cressida, one of the Bard's most problematic plays. Ostensibly about the doomed love story between the title characters from Troy, who pledge their love and then are ripped apart in two consecutive sets of betrayals (one political, one personal), the play is framed within a larger tale of betrayal of the Trojans by the Greeks, shunting aside the "protagonists" and initial bursts of ribald humour for a darkly violent, gloomy glimpse at war.

The Wooster Group shocked their American audiences with what seemed to be "redface", the blatant cultural appropriation of Native American history; the Trojans are styled as a fictional tribe, feathers and all, dressed in grungy traditional dress that, at first glance, might have been pulled off the rack from a used costume store, yet is morbidly striking – some of the warriors sheath themselves in busts of Greek statues, worn on their backs like scalped human trophies.

At the production's premiere in Stratford-upon-Avon, the Group horrified, even revolted, World Shakespeare Festival audiences, who derided the ensemble for poor acting and delivery and an utter disregard for text, and demanded "good theatre technique" and some sort of coherence. Many said they were connoisseurs of experimental theatre, but disdained this baffling experiment taking place in the heart of Shakespeare's hometown.

It is on this polarising final production that the six-week Singapore International Festival of Arts closes with a startling bang. I myself emerged from theatre in slight delirium, with a bit of a tension headache and a churning stomach – but mostly from the prospect of looking at this production, piece by piece.

The work does not necessarily reward the patient. It is a demanding, challenging production, sometimes tedious and sometimes difficult to follow, and riddled with problems – the most basic of which involves having an all-white cast replicate, to the point of slapstick, Native American customs and culture. It is a dramatic device practically prostrating itself for controversy and criticism, and yet I found myself inexplicably tugged along by the silent undercurrents of this conceptual melting pot: Will the conqueror ever fully understand what oppression means to the conquered?

The Wooster Group is unabashed about this futility – no, we will never come to terms with the blood we have shed on Native American soil, and all we have left is a sort of play-acting within which we forcibly confine ourselves. The cast denigrates themselves, almost self-flagellatingly, before the stereotype of the Native American.

Director Elizabeth LeCompte has stated that the starting point for this work was Shakespearean English as a second language for many American performers; layered over that beginning are interruptions of historical baggage, technological innovation, and the Group's deliberate and fiercely single-minded pursuit of a perfection that only its ensemble seems privy to, every movement and declaration carefully calibrated to fit a larger and mysterious blueprint.

The School of the Arts Studio Theatre has been reshaped into a sort of version of the Group's Performing Garage in New York City, and its mostly bare stage is surrounded by television screens, with two DJs off to the side doing a live sound mix. It quickly becomes clear that the cast are miming gestures from other films and video excerpts being played on these screens, whether in some sort of barren Inuit landscape, or the high melodrama of the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Warren Beatty in glamorous Old Hollywood.

But which is which? Are the videos a simulacrum for the action on stage? Or are the gestures that are copied universal ones, to be read across circumstance and context? Some earn a chilling edge, when the glitz of leading Hollywood ladies flirting with their men is transposed onto the shocking delivery of Cressida into lecherous enemy hands. Others, when female cast members suddenly erupt into song, feel like a lazy gimmick.

But when these moments work, they gain a stark resonance: all that will be performed has already been performed, and history, in the same way, will mimic what has gone before. Troilus and Cressida use the same gestures of violence on each other as the Trojans do in their pow-wow over what to do with Helen: Return their prized princess to the Greeks and end the war? Or stubbornly keep her and their honour at the risk of bloodshed? They trade blows, they convulse, they tuck their hair behind their ears.

LeCompte shears off several scenes from the Greek camp, which mostly expound on the relationships between the Greeks, and focuses instead on the inner turmoil of the Trojan camp. The Greeks were initially played by members of London's Royal Shakespeare Company to maximise a clash of performance styles, but the work has continued to evolve since its premiere in 2012. Now, The Wooster Group takes on all the parts, donning masks when they play the Greeks, with a doubling of parts that turns enemies into friends and heroes into villains. The same actor who plays the lovelorn Troilus (Scott Shepherd) also plays the cruel Achilles; he also plays Cressida's scheming father Calchas, who brokers her trade with the Greeks.

These multilayered characters seem to be a microcosm for the production itself. So much is at play in every scene: a deconstruction of the idea of acting, the repetition of movement across genres and art forms, the bursts of live, dubsteppy music, the echoes of recordings of previous iterations of the same production, a Mobius strip folding onto itself.

Conceptually, Cry, Trojans! is fascinating – but also the equivalent of painstakingly pulling apart a complicated metronome. Its inner parts may be gloriously and endlessly fascinating, but it always trots out the same rhythm. It is almost as if the Group has created the machinery of a universe all to themselves, and I could not help but feel like a sidelined observer, only able to chip away at the surface of an automaton, its cogs and gears a-whirr. I puzzled over the actors' deliberate dispassion in delivering their lines, but was sucked in by the conscientiousness with which they sought to convey this devil-may-care attitude.

One thing is for sure – this is Shakespeare as you have never seen it, and might never see again, in a tide of ceaseless contradictions.

Astronauts of Hartlepool at the Vault Festival

This review of Astronauts of Hartlepool was first published in Exeunt Magazine.

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Science fiction on a shoestring? Hartlepool has you covered. Astronauts by the hundreds, the thousands, have been pulled out of orbit and towards Earth by this generally overlooked northeastern town. And in the musty, humid Pit chamber of the Vaults, you can almost smell the malaise of the forgotten backwater. Against this post-industrial backdrop, a Brexit fable plays out – but not quite the fable one might expect. Astronauts of Hartlepool is deeply ambitious and darkly funny – a twisty, turny, and revelatory look at who the ‘aliens’ in our midst truly are.

The play opens with two women, both in black jumpsuits, on opposite ends of the otherwise bare stage.

“Don’t jump!” Aidan (Sophie Steer) yells at Nadia (Rakhee Thakrar), who’s perched on what is possibly the edge of a bridge or cliff.

Nadia’s astonished. She turns. “You can see me?” she asks, slightly incredulous, a woman accustomed to being on the periphery of everyone’s vision.

Now Aidan’s a bit suspicious. “…I didn’t think you all look the same,” she tests the words in her mouth.

Oh, okay, I think, in the middle of their remarkable rapid-fire banter, this is going to be one of those direct sci-fi analogies of acceptance mapped metaphor for metaphor onto our daily lives. Nadia’s astronaut-immigrant is presumably the extra-terrestrial alien arriving on a hostile, xenophobic Earth, and Aidan interjects at this point that Hartlepool is “obviously better than where you’re from”.

Mild spoiler: it isn’t one of those sci-fi plays. Playwright Tim Foley has a glorious mass of science fiction tropes at his disposal, and he lobs each one at the audience whenever we think we’ve got the mechanics of the play figured out.

There’s a taste of the stable time loop of Groundhog Day or All You Need Is Kill in the opening scenes, as Aidan encounters ‘Nadia’ again and again. But once the rules of these occurrences are established, Foley pulls the rug out from under us and introduces his sprawling, ever-unfurling multiverse, a series of stacked alternate dimensions from which an endless stream of Nadias arrives week after week. (Did I spy a hint of that Doctor Who–River Song anachronic order of meetings?) Rakhee Thakrar is spot-on in her varied portrayals of the various Nadias, each slightly different from the next, her body language and tiny tics fleshing out each complete character. She and Sophie Steer have wonderful chemistry, their energy unflagging as they – under Siobhan Cannon-Brownlie’s excellent direction – single-handedly conjure up the lush, complex world they find themselves in with hardly any props and the minimal use of lighting and some well-timed blackouts.

So much is packed into a production of just over an hour, as we discover each character’s back story, their disenfranchisement, and the compromises and choices they’ve been compelled to make in order to leave terrible circumstances behind or to attempt to change a dying, rotting world. There are several other mind-bending twists to the plot, which allow the audience to put together the puzzle bit by bit, scene by scene, until the moments arrive, in quick succession, where the pieces click together ever so satisfyingly. The audience is worked hard to get the larger picture at play, but it’s deeply rewarding when that image comes into focus.

It’s hard to avoid the baggage of political didacticism that comes with this theatrical analysis of current affairs and the immigration crisis, but the creative team does this as deftly as they can, choosing subliminal messaging and bleak humour over slogans and feel-good advocacy. Astronauts of Hartlepool suggests that we are all aliens, that we are all astronauts – but also that the situation at hand doesn’t have easy answers and that every stubborn conviction comes with thick layers of accumulated bitterness or grief. The sins of the fathers and mothers are visited on their sons and daughters, over and over again. One terrible, misunderstood encounter can lead to decades of violence and exclusion.

Astronauts of Hartlepool is as sharply funny as it is deafeningly sad, a well-timed commentary about the times we live in – where a revolution can hinge on a tiny change, or where change can be failed by a revolution.

Produced by Hannah Tookey
Directed by Siobhán Cannon-Brownlie
Written by Tim Foley
Cast includes Sophie Steer and Rakhee Thakrar

NOW17 Week 1: PLANES and This Moment Now at The Yard Theatre

This review of the opening week of the NOW17 festival was first published in Exeunt Magazine.

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The opening double-bill of the ongoing NOW17 festival at The Yard Theatre takes two very different approaches to the question of mortality. In Richard Dodwell’s PLANES, it’s the absence that death brings in the suicide of his sister; in Sylvia Rimat’s This Moment Now, it’s the presence that conception bestows on the unborn child in her womb. Both halves of the evening pose questions that will never be answered: How long do we each have to live? Does my child get a smaller number of years than I do, or will he or she outlive me? Why did my sister choose to die? Where do we go from here?

Dodwell describes PLANES as ‘a live tuning’, and it does feel like an extended tone poem, relying on the evocations of sound and video imagery over his own performance delivery and narrative. He pierces the fog-filled room with the beam of a high-powered flashlight when he enters it, and as the piece unfolds we realise he is still feeling around in the dark for answers. His quiet eulogy to his sister and confessional episodes about his own life and sexuality are punctuated by fragments of video and the plaintive, dissonant notes of the live piano and violin, accompanied by the fizz of static on the walkie-talkie he cradles throughout the piece. Knitting these plot lines together is the metaphor of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the plane that vanished in 2014 while enroute to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur and has never been found. Just as investigators have tried and failed to piece together the scattered evidence of the plane’s disappearance, Dodwell has no answers for his sister’s death even as he rummages through memories of his childhood and her struggles with borderline personality disorder.

It’s often difficult to gauge how much ‘authentic’ emotion to display to an audience about a deeply personal, scarring event – what might be interpreted as ‘too much’, and therefore ‘histrionic’ and ‘over-performed’; or what might be misconstrued as ‘too little’, and therefore ‘unfeeling’ or ‘impersonal’. There are no rules for grief, and Dodwell chooses to talk about her sister and their relationship in a soft, self-conscious monotone, removing emotion from the equation altogether. This means that there is a stasis that eventually settles over the piece, the sort of suspended animation one might feel mid-journey on a long flight when, gazing out the window, it isn’t certain at first glance whether one is moving or standing still. This purgatorial sensation means it is sometimes difficult to focus on Dodwell’s long streams of prose, even if his sentences are often very beautiful. “4am over the Atlantic is prime time for tears,” he says, quietly, “The lights dimmed in sleep – or perhaps death.” It can be very powerful to deal with trauma in an understated way, but this also means that the audience has less of a grasp on what propels the work forward.

The rhythmic leap from PLANES to This Moment Now is a large one; This Moment Now opens with the clack of four metronomes both in sync and out of sync, and drummer Chris Langton plunging into an energetic solo, setting the mood for Rimat’s quirky meditation on life. His complex rhythmic interludes continue to form the backbone of the work. There’s a different brand of self-consciousness at work here, with Rimat mining her physical awkwardness – she’s 4½ months pregnant – for charming visual humour. The metaphors for her production are more abstract ones, drawing from a simplified version of the second law of thermodynamics (largely dealing with entropy), as well as Einstein’s theory of relativity, and applying it to how we experience time. Some of these ‘manipulations’ of time are baldly gimmicky (e.g. stage manager Alasdair Jones asking us to set our watches to an atomic clock, or Rimat telling us she will slow down the performance time so that time passes slower in the room), but Rimat is an endearing performer, and even if her time-related excavations only just brush the surface, they are filled with joy and delight. Some of the most engaging, thoughtful questions posed by the piece come from her video interviews with an eight-year-old girl and a 92-year-old woman, and their markedly different perceptions of time, as well as their demonstrations of what a little bit of time (a girl at the beginning of her life) and a lot of time (a grandmother close to the end of hers) do to the human body.

But beneath all the trimmings is a moving question about the new journey she is embarking on, one as a mother-to-be. Can it even be called a ‘journey’, if the human perception of a ‘moment’ is just three seconds? Rimat positions herself between the dancing images of 8-year-old Rose and 92-year-old Eileen, and as she begins to dance with abandon, we begin to wonder: Is her body still growing – or beginning to break down? She asks us to ponder how much time we have left, and as the hour-long show draws to a close, I realise I have given an hour of my life to her; but she’s also given an hour to me, in exchange.

The lack of a finite, known journey through life frames both PLANES and This Moment Now, but both are less concerned with journeys and more preoccupied with turning points, pivots, moments and decisions. Perhaps ‘journey’ is the wrong metaphor for life, they suggest. In inviting us to participate, to listen, and even to drink tea, they seem to say: perhaps we ought to simply be.

PLANES
Written and performed by Richard Dodwell
Directed by Nick Blackburn
Live score by Timothy Thornton
Violin Toby Hawks

This Moment Now
Concept and performance by Sylvia Rimat
Stage manager Alasdair Jones
Video and sound design by Sam Halmarack
Choreography by Laura Dannequin
Drummer Chris Langton