>stray by stage pals

>reviewed by musa fazal

>date: 19 dec 2003
>time: 8pm
>venue: the guinness theatre
>rating: **

>tired already? go home then
>review junkie? whitney, give them this click to sniff

                           
>look, we know that you need to know that we, as responsible reviewers, have some quantifiable categories to rate productions, and are not just relying on some undefinable instinct or gut feeling. So to put your mind at ease, we will give you a logical rating system based on the practitioner's vision / and the reviewer's response of a particular production. Here it is then: ***** : Transcendent / Rapturous. ****: Crystal / Appreciative. ***: Transmitted / Thoughtful. **:Vague / Unsatisfied. * : Uncommunicated / Mystified. Yet in the end, you will feel that this is (1) a cheap attempt to justify the subjective arbitrariness of our rating system (2) buttressed by an interest in the logical (and inevitable) categorisation of such productions, which is (3) undermined by the cheapness of the attempt, and (4) confused by the creeping feeling you are getting that we are dead serious in our feeling that this rating system is an accurate description of the content, intent and quality of the production. Oh please -- does it even matter now? Look, at least we tried.


>>>>>PAPA DON'T PREACH

STRAY tells the story of four twenty-something Singaporeans. Ray, an obsessive romantic who spasmodically breaks out into song, has taken advantage of the economic recession to quit his dead end job and try out all the things he never had a chance to do. Su, his fiancée, agrees to play along with his crazy schemes to show support. Ray and Su decide to form an activities club (how creative young Singaporeans have become!). They manage to get all of two people to join - Kim, the bra-stealing super-bitch with black eye shadow, and Leo, the Cheena nerd.

The rest of the play traces the adventures of this motley crew as they croon karaoke songs, cheat people into donating to a bogus charity for stray animals, and try out new sexual experiences in Happy Sunrise Hotel in Geylang. Intertwined with all of this are scenes played out by a chorus of nine actors doing largely satirical takes on local events.

One such chorus scene has an actor disinterestedly slapping fifty-dollar bills on street beggars and a "life support machine". Another amusing scene takes a well-deserved jibe at the Andrea D'Cruz saga, too often hailed as the ultimate act of Singaporean generosity, through a TV series, 'A Liver in Time'.

Sets and props are kept to a minimum. Only two boxes painted red with white stars clutter the stage, rather crudely reminding you in case you weren't aware that this play is an indictment of all things Singaporean. Far more subtle and interesting is the use of meta-text in this play. A doorway in the back of the stage is cut out revealing an old woman in a cubicle, pounding herbs with a mortar and pestle, folding clothes, smoothening out old newspapers, and feeding stray animals. The 4 leads never communicate with this old woman, and she never speaks, but her understated presence throughout is the play's most powerful and damning critique of the society we live in.

>>'For a play determined to lash out against the restrictions imposed by a paternalistic society, the criticisms this play makes are just too tedious, pedantic and old.'


In spite of all the establishment bashing, the system wins in the end. Ray disbands his hedonistic club and decides to settle down with Su. An effusive speaker throughout the play, he is silent towards the end, and leaves it to his steady fiancée Su to narrate the preparations for their wedding. Meanwhile Kim leaves for Canada and Leo goes to work for the government.

Several of the ideas in this play, especially in the chorus scenes, are interesting but badly executed. In several scenes the actors become animals, clocks, or machines ala Acting 101 workshops, but their physical movements are untidy and amateurish. Many of the chorus actors look constipated throughout the performance, and their ignominy is made complete by the torn pieces of clothing they are made to wear as costumes.

The 4 leads are a tad more polished. Chong Shu Ying and Zarelda Marie Goh who play Kim and Su respectively are quite good. Don Shiau who plays Ray thinks he can sing better than he really can, but is on the whole a competent actor playing an annoyingly sappy role. Co-director Aaron Tan plays Leo, and watching him act, one understands why the play has turned out looking the way it does.


Pacing could have been improved. Some scenes are a chore to get through, notably one scene where each of the 4 leads sings their favourite karaoke tune. I should mention that this play is peppered to the point of overkill with golden oldies, including numbers from John Lennon, and Madonna's early days. There are even some feeble attempts to infuse the text with lyrics, Baz Luhrmann style.

Emeric Lau, playwright and co-director of STRAY, mentions in the programme that he is troubled by the dearth of local writing in Singapore. STRAY is his attempt to fill this void. For me the tragedy in Lau's attempt lies in his narcissistic self-indulgence. None of his characters portray the diversity of young Singaporeans as the flyer proclaims. All of them portray Lau. Why else would the play start with Lau, have him sitting in the front row filming the performance throughout, and then end with him onstage gazing on his characters beatifically?

Perhaps STRAY is just a wandering of Lau's mind, a contemplation of alternatives, a deviant's exploration of possibilities. What makes straying with Lau so dissatisfying is that one gets the impression Lau hasn't strayed far enough for any meaningful new insights to be gleaned. For a play determined to lash out against the restrictions imposed by a paternalistic society, the criticisms this play makes are just too tedious, pedantic and old.
Go below to write in your comments or to read other comments about this performance!

Readers' Comments

From: The Editor (matthewlyon@myway.com / Monday, December 22, 2003 at 23:14:17)

Got anything to say about the review or the production? Click the button above and let us know.
From: Emeric Lau (emeric82@singnet.com.sg / Tuesday, December 23, 2003 at 05:19:18)

I would be lying if I said that I'm unaffected by reviews.

Before saying any more, however, I want to qualify that my purpose of this posting is not to take out an attack of any sort on Musa or anyone else. In fact, I am very grateful that the Flying Inkpot deemed STRAY a production worthy of reviewing.

I paste below another review of STRAY taken from the following website: www.xanga.com/akikonomu . I find it highly interesting that while one review accuses me of dragging STRAY into the dust with "narcissistic self-indulgence", the other seems to imply that - at a mere 25 years of age - I've written a magnum opus of sorts.

Honestly, I think I'd be driving myself quite crazy trying to make sense of the two together. This takes me to the purpose of my post.

By putting up this other review, I hope to show to my cast, production team and other theatre practitioners that reviews are by no means definitive report cards of how good or bad a production is. I gladly note that Musa is aware of her own subjectivity by putting in the redundant personal pronoun qualifier, "For ME the tragedy in Lau's attempt..." I thank Musa for maintaining as much balance as she has in writing about what must have been a most disagreeable experience.

For now, I shall seek solace in the following lines by Oscar Wilde, "Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital. When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself." ~From "The Preface", Dorian Gray. I'll try to believe that no matter whether Stray was great or awful, at least I did something right.

Here's the other review, heaping unbelievably histrionic praise:

Sunday, December 21, 2003

Review for Stray

So you’ve written a sardonic, anti-establishment play that pokes fun of, even punctures straitjacketed Singaporean society. Knowing smiles broke out in the audience each time Stray highlighted the insanity of a nanny state that produces conservative, play-it-safe clones. Silent laughter, the most dangerous kind, erupted each time the play held its mirror to a citizenry which has been so disempowered, deprived of most liberties (especially creative ones) that it is only free to participate as vacuous actors in the futile and fashionable pursuit of consumerism and the sham social charades that include televised charity drives, National Day parties, celebrity-watching, economic restructuring exercises... And of course, the obligatory, but oh-so-stinging deconstruction of sound bites from our leaders and typical Singaporeans by the chorus, never failed to bring the house down with genuine laughter.

Yet, to the credit of its playwright Emeric Lau, director Aaron Tan, and talented cast of Stage Pals, Stray never comes across as heavy-handed or polemical when it expresses the rage, alienation, and irreverent, iconoclastic humour of the 20-somethings, its ideal audience. It helps that the humour is always at the expense of the powers-that-be - and the 20-somethings are the first generation in Singapore to openly and savagely mock their leaders in everyday speech - but more importantly, this play is the honest collaboration of people who know and love Singapore too much to want to present the topic in any other way, and in such damning detail.

In his preamble, Lau writes of his struggle against the “dearth of well-written, well-performed original material in the local theatre scene in recent years”. It is a fact that most ‘big’ Singaporean productions are either adaptations of acknowledged Great Plays of the civilised West (modern or classic); huge musicals (any of the interchangeable Dick Lee productions); or “seem to pander to niche audiences” - a code for the Gay Play, which can be dissected into the Gay Martyr Play where every gay person emotes existential angst (the recent stage adaptation of Cyril Wong’s poetry), or the Gay Camp Play that merely celebrates the spending power of its niche community (the vulgarly shallow and consumerist Asian Boys Vol. 1, Sex, Lies and F***ing, among others); or the multi-disciplinary, multilingual, multinational “Pan-Asian” play that has no real message aside from its own salad-bar conception of an ersatz, exotic, and auto-erotic Asian identity. Lau and Tan are right in lamenting that the tradition begun by Kuo Pao Kun seems to have been forgotten.

In this respect, Stray has managed to avoid the pitfalls its creator identifies as endemic to current Singapore theatre. The play is unapologetically original and Singaporean - its themes and issues, sensibility and psyche are undeniably “20something Singaporean”, and most importantly, the play has a real heart and soul; it grapples with real issues. In other words, an attempt to resurrect the tradition of Kuo Pao Kun, a tradition of writing and performing original Singaporean plays while maintaining the intercultural and eclectic osmosis of creativity.
From: atifimle ( / Tuesday, December 23, 2003 at 17:50:13)

For your information....Musa is a male name not a female...
From: atifimle ( / Tuesday, December 23, 2003 at 17:53:17)

errrr for your info...the play is 'sex,violence,blood,gore' and 'shopping and f**king'....get your facts right....
From: zQ ( / Wednesday, December 24, 2003 at 10:47:54)

Emeric merely reproduced the review verbatim from the website.
From: gracet (blue_jewel_sapphire@yahoo.com / Saturday, January 24, 2004 at 15:30:31)

heyy, i watched STRAY too and i agree with Musa that although the main actors are pretty good, the script itself may need more work... it felt a little unrehearsed, and ensemble parts though intriguing and funny at times (esp. the D'Cruz bit -- a gut-gasper) seemed to weigh the play down... as i saw it, they only served to provide what could be called "background info", which may not even be necessary since the target audience was Singaporeans in the first place. perhaps if we only saw the stories of the main characters, the play as a whole could have been much more focused and streamlined, and may have worked better in bringing its message across. as it is, it makes certain original points, but "with a hammer rather than a rapier" as certain scriptwriters would say :) still, i'd agree that it is a very creative script trying to make a difference -- and with a little more whittling, it may very well succeed.
From: IconoclasticBch (beachyyet@saintly.com / Wednesday, February 4, 2004 at 04:29:13)

Isn't the self-indulgence telling though? Sympathy for the performers, then...
From: fifi ( / Tuesday, February 10, 2004 at 15:12:30)

The playwright displays a typical Singaporean attitude toward criticism, which is ironic, considering how his play is supposed to critique Singaporean mores and all...