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After a slow, if amusing run-up, this show rocked. Ramesh Meyyappan, who for
years has been one of the most accomplished mime actors in Singapore,
is now breaking some truly interesting ground in his field. His team,
which includes director Wendy Ng, as well as fellow deaf actor Lars
Otterstedt, invited from Sweden, has collaborated to create a piece
that portrays the drama of growing up male in a competitive and hierarchically
governed society. It's mime theatre that examines and pathologises our
everyday rituals - and, quite crucially, it's actually entertaining.
Over the course of an hour, the audience watched Ramesh and Lars morph
through a fluent succession of masculine roles, including sons, gang
members, soldiers, players and fathers, each gracefully illustrated
with only a modicum of props and some wonderfully disciplined body movement.
For the sake of the hearing audience, sound designer Darren Ng provided
an amazing live sonic backdrop to the piece, creating ambience and clarifying
action, including a slick series of effects to accentuate body blows
- the punches and crunches that proliferated with the violence of the
play's subject matter.
The two actors stuck to fairly familiar mime territory in the first
scene as they became little boys playing with toy soldiers, warring
with each other for possession of the largest of the action figures.
Having some familiarity with the use of mime in children's theatre,
I was only mildly entertained, even when the squabbles developed into
full-blown clownery and the two boys played at chainsawing off each
other's limbs and emptying their brain pans - though a demonstration
of superiority by one boy's growing a gargantuan penis indicated that
we were going a little beyond the borders of juvenile drama.
Momentum built across the following scenes, reaching a five-star peak
in the lounge bar scene when the two played friends competing against
one another in drink, darts and women. The device of dividing this scene
into segments through an ever-increasing number of vodka shots was extremely
effective: as the night wore on, we could see the men's inner animals
rearing their heads, striving more and more openly for supremacy until
an actual brawl broke out over their support for rival soccer teams.
The apparent continuation of Ramesh's underdog character into the next
scenes grippingly continued this theme, as it illustrated how status
abuse at work could be channeled into spousal abuse, as the character
began to embrace a cult of male violence that he began to teach to his
son. While this wasn't quite the right note to end on, the reprise of
the first scene as an ending didn't quite work either, diffusing the
energy of the earlier scenes without giving it a satisfactory resolution.
I'm especially impressed with the execution of the play - the outrageous
facial expressions of Lars were particularly memorable, though both
actors displayed remarkable and at times hilarious physical contortions.
More crucially, there were only one or two moments when the mimed action
mystified me - Ramesh's transformation into a priest to diminish Lars'
penis being one such occasion. Even costume changes were largely eschewed
- the simple addition of a jacket or tie demonstrated a change in status,
and the stylised process of putting on these items was also incorporated
into the action, maintaining the smooth pacing of the show. One unfortunate
side-effect of this streamlining was that the piece lasted all of 50
minutes - not quite enough to feel like a good evening out, in my opinion.
What was missing for me in this show was the sense of a real discussion
of ideas. While the life cycle of the competitive, violent male was
portrayed, there wasn't much of a real exploration of its nuances and
complexities, or really a three-dimensional focus on any one character
(though Ramesh was typically at the mercy of the more dominant Lars,
this arrangement seemed more of a casting decision than the projection
of the journey of a consistent character through life). This is a lot
to demand of two actors who use completely different systems of sign
language, and it's even more to demand of a performance devised over
only two weeks. But those are my standards for a satisfying play.
This is not, after all, the first time that mime has been used to
address serious topics in our theatre. Li Xie recently used mime to
address the issue of war in Errorism
- Flowers of Evil. But what Ramesh does which is truly unique
here is to combine the accessible, laugh-a-minute aspect of mime with
hard-hitting themes - balancing the horror of war with the buffoonery
of fistfights over sports matches, yet recognising their common root
in the masculine ego. It's only to be hoped that he can develop this
vein further, beyond the traditional constraints of speechless drama,
to stand neck and neck with the more vocal pieces of our most established
companies here.
On consideration, I'm unsure if I'm overemphasising Meyyappan's
role in the formation of this play. If anyone involved in the production
finds it necessary to correct me, please add a comment. |
"What is truly unique here is the combination of the accessible,
laugh-a-minute aspect of mime with hard-hitting themes"
Credits
Director: Wendy Ng
Lighting Designer: Tony Kam
Sound Designer: Darren Ng
Cast: Ramesh Meyyappan, and Lars Otterstedt
Previous Productions by Ramesh Meyyappan
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