I arrived at the Drama Centre with mixed expectations for Second
Link. As a W!ld Rice production, as well as the finale event of
Writer's Festival 2005, the performance was sure to be of a certain
quality, yet the premise of the production seemed suspect: a troupe
of Malaysian actors was to perform a selection of Singaporean literature,
followed by a troupe of Singaporean actors similarly acting out a selection
of Malaysian literature. I've witnessed various attempts at the dramatisation
of Singaporean poems, and these tend to have decidedly mixed results,
due to the sheer difficulty of translating words designed for the page
into the language of the proscenium.
Fortunately for us all, the creators of Second Link weren't
limiting their textual selections to poetry. The program revealed the
origins of the production: the first act, Riding the Nice Bus Home
was concocted as an item for the Singaporean contingent at the 2004
KL Litfest. Singaporean playwright Eleanor Wong assembled a set of excerpts
from Singapore's best literary work for the Malaysian public, showcasing
all three established genres of poetry, prose and drama and arranged
according to theme and relevance. Last July, the show was directed by
the late Malaysian director Krishen Jit and staged by the Five Arts
Centre in KL Zouk's Velvet Underground.
Having decided to re-import the work back home, a companion
piece was in order, to display Malaysian writing to a Singaporean audience,
to be directed by Ivan Heng and brought to life by the actors of W!ld
Rice. Malaysian playwright Leow Puay Tin was invited to curate, and,
opting for a more chaotic representation of her country, chose to create
the second act of the day's performance as Tikam-Tikam: Malaysian
Roulette, a polyphonic selection not only of literary writing,
but also of song, folksong, folktale, memoir, journalistic interview,
obituary, recipe, the Sejarah Melayu, and even the Malaysian
Constitution - arranged in a random sequence, determined via an audience
lottery before the intermission.
What emerged was a clear division in quality between
the two halves of the performance. While Riding the Nice Bus Home
was of a commendable, but less than exciting standard, Tikam-Tikam
was decidedly excellent. This was in part due to the extremely strong
Singaporean cast and cohesive direction for the second half, but also
due to the creative curation of the Malaysian texts, which resulted
in more dramatic themes of violence, power and ethnic tension than the
often sedate Singaporean selection, which tended toward after-the-fact
contemplative moments, perhaps due to the heavy weightage of poetry
in its composition. Some weakness may also have arisen due to the recent
death of Krishen Jit, and Ivan Heng's self-admitted reluctance to warp
the creative vision of his departed friend by taking over directorial
control.
Certainly, Riding the Nice Bus Home included
very worthy revivals such as Ovidia Yu's The
Woman in a Tree on the Hill, and delightful recontextualisations
such as Tan Hwee Hwee's observations on Singlish in Mammon,
Inc., restaged as a classroom lecture. The traditional use
of the monologue also allowed good actors to excel, particularly in
the stellar case of Anne James, who displayed her gift for comedy in
her jerkily eccentric reading of Koh Beng Liang's Self Portrait,
her talent for conveying pain in her description and re-enactment of
spousal abuse in Elangovan's Talaq, as well as her gift for
human drama in Jointly
and Severably, which she performed with the similarly gifted
Sukiana Venugopal. Also impressive was Edwin Sumun, whose commanding
stage presence gave him the ability to elicit a hearty laugh from the
audience every time he interrupted his monologue as an affluent professional
in Felix Cheong's The Nearly Man in order to pose for a perfect
picture with his wife, two kids and dog. However, a small number of
works left the audience quite unmoved. Most tellingly, Wong's decision
to open with Edwin Thumboo's oft-lauded, oft-parodied Ulysses by
the Merlion proved a mistake. Even the actors seemed undecided
if they should adopt a reverent or parodic tone toward the text, resulting
in a slow piece with an unfocused idea of what it expected to elicit
from the audience.
Tikam-Tikam, by contrast, featured clearly directed
scenes with strong group dynamics, specifically designed to provoke
an emotional response from the audience. The first piece immersed us
in a chilling poetic account of the ethnic riots of 1969 in Beth Yahp's
In 1969, which describes how this set the scene for a race-based
division of culture that persists to this day; trauma was subtly and
powerfully conveyed through the stylised collapse of bodies and deadpan
newsreading in Malay and Mandarin from the fallen figures over the voice
of the narrator. However, the dominant tool of the dramaturge was humour,
through scenes such as the riotous pantomime of the fable of the clever
mousedeer in Sang Kancil and a hilarious dramatisation
of an outing with Raffles in The Autobiography of Abdullah bin Kadir
(1754-1854).
On top of all this, the direction and acting in Tikam-Tikam
were almost uniformly excellent. Jonathan Lim, Karen Tan, Lim Yu-Beng
and Neo Swee Lin all performed at the high standard befitting their
reputations. Of the five actors, however, it was Gani Karim who impressed
me most with his versatility, displaying his stirring singing voice
in Usman Awang's Uda dan Dara as well as his dance experience
as a Thai go-go, flanked by the rest of the cast, in S.H.Tan's Mystery
of the Attraction in Haadyai Solved. Both he and Lim Yu-Beng were
also uproariously funny in racial drag as the Indian and Malay astrophysicists
in Huzir Sulaiman's Atomic
Jaya - a conceit that Anne James had also used to great advantage
in the previous act, playing a Chinese, Singlish-speaking shop assistant
in The Lady
of Soul and a Chinese goddess in Ovidia Yu's The Woman
in a Tree on the Hill.
The use of the projector screen in each act was a telling
indicator of the difference between the two acts' production values.
While used constantly in Riding the Nice Bus Home to project
rather uninspired photographs of uncertain or obvious relevance, during
Tikam-Tikam the screen was only used as necessary at dramatic
points, displaying a controversial TV commercial as a preamble to Adlin
Adman Ramlie's interview, Who's Bad?, as well as a clip from
a Frank Sinatra movie as a counterpoint to another monologue. Otherwise,
the screen displayed only the titles and authors, and occasionally the
text or translations thereof.
In the final scene, the actors of both halves of the play
appeared and began to dance the ronggeng in pairs, splitting between
themselves the lines of a poem describing how the participant in this
dance of zero contact longs to touch the other to create new, beautiful
forms. As a metaphor for the production, this is particularly apt: Tikam-Tikam
had indeed created a new, beautiful form of work by combining Singaporean
acting and directing talent with the vitality of Malaysian writing,
building on an existing Singaporean-Malaysian collaboration. While Riding
the Nice Bus Home did indeed rise above conventional standards
for performance of text-based literature, more intimate interaction
between curator and cast could have lifted it further. On the whole,
I'd congratulate W!ld Rice and Five Arts Centre for delivering an impressive
recital of texts, ultimately quite unlike any other I've witnessed before
in Singapore. Nonetheless, if nothing is workshopped or amended before
it's re-exported to Malaysia, I'm worried that our northern neighbours
may find Singaporean writing a trifle tedious compared to their own.
Theatre, fortunately, is a text in progress. Let the words flow back
between the nations. |
"I congratulate W!ld Rice and Five Arts Centre for delivering an
impressive recital of texts, ultimately quite unlike any other I've
witnessed before in Singapore"
Credits
Directors: Krishen Jit and Ivan Heng
Curators: Eleanor Wong and Leow Puay Tin
Cast: Sukania Venugopal, Edwin Sumun, Vernon Emuang,
Anne James, Neo Swee Lin, Lim Yu-Beng, Karen Tan, Jonathan Lim and Gani
Abdul Karim
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