Homesick
was a disappointment and a delight, a triumph and an embarrassment.
It succeeded beyond expectations and it just wasn't good enough.
What am I talking about? Mainly, I'm talking about the hype. Well before
the curtain went up for this first-ever play of the Singapore Theatre
Festival, Homesick had been touted as the play to watch. A
family drama about "stayers" and "quitters" during
the time of SARS, by famed writer Alfian Sa'at and the consistently
excellent W!ld Rice, coupled with political dialogue at the Art
and Life Forums and a kickass poster to boot - it's no wonder so
many nights sold out, and seats got filled with the bums of both virgins
and veterans of theatre. Frankly, I thought it was going to be better
than sex.
But Homesick opened with a first act that was clumsy - painfully
clumsy - largely due to an amateurish script. To begin with, it was
too damn wordy: the diasporic Koh family discussed their relationships
to the nation-state in eloquent circumlocutions that belonged in textbooks,
not popular theatre. As sociologist Kwok Kian Woon was later to observe,
many of the characters themselves spoke like sociologists.
This verbosity wouldn't have been a problem if only we'd had gripping,
three-dimensional personalities we could fall in love with. Yet by and
large, the people we encountered in the play appeared as stereotypes
or political mouthpieces. Even an actor as excellent as Lim Kay Siu,
who played the Anglophile Herbert with post-colonial, pinkie-raising,
paranoiac-schizoid aplomb, couldn't quite raise much empathy with the
audience. Worse was the case of Euro-activist Daphne (Serena Ho), a
caricatured über-feminist screaming for the rights of culled cats
- though even she looked good beside the American émigré
character of Marianne (Eleanor Tan), who, aside from her marriage to
an Indian man, had pretty much zero character (and, may I add, could
not even conjure up an accent for verisimilitude).
Watching the play, one felt just like the Koh family - suffocated,
trapped in quarantine in a house too full of people you didn't care
about. For shame - W!ld Rice, with its celebrated repertoire of tried-and-true
Singapore plays, usually doesn't perform such weak material. What exactly
happened here? How did Alfian's pen go astray?
First, let's remember that for all his renown, the playwright doesn't
have much experience in full-length dramas in English - Landmarks:
Asian Boys Vol. 2, The Optic Trilogy and sex.violence.blood.gore
were all episodic plays, and Anak Bulan di Kampong Wa'Hassan
and Fugitives
played in the more homely, intimate arenas of Malay and Mandarin language
theatre respectively - quite distant from the lofty imported accents
of the migrant Koh family. Second, let's remember our fact that the
play's thematic premise was pretty tenuous. SARS and the "stayers"
and "quitters" debate have a pretty oblique connection, in
spite of all the clever monologues you may throw at the audience on
the semiotics of a transnational virus.
Third and most importantly, it's really hard to marry the genres of
family drama and social theatre. The heritage of the first lies in the
soap opera, while the second lies in the manifesto and political pamphlet,
and Alfian was unstinting in borrowing from both disciplines. Homesick
was thus a tour of antique plot devices - characters entering one by
one for a family reunion, sibling rivalries, infidelities and shameful
secrets - combined with long lectures on the nature of patriarchy and
the definition of nationhood.
Alfian was probably misguided in holding fast to both the traditions
of soap and the political essay. The two frequently combined to deadening
effect: as a debate between two characters ended, lights would go out
and theme music would play, bluntly underscoring the final speaker's
line as the last word in the argument. Many a habitué of theatre
was alternately bored by the banality of the teledrama and the dryness
of the academic babble.
Yet this refusal to compromise was also Alfian's triumph. Amidst my
matinee crowd, I could see that many in audience were able to engage
in the play precisely because of the Channel 8-style theatrical devices
that turned me off. The playwright's ambition seems to have been to
embrace the non-initiates of theatre, all the folk newly welcomed into
the fold of drama, and speak the unabridged truth to them on what is
happening to the country.
And speak he did. Long after my irritation with the dramaturgy has
faded, I'm still able to recall some classic lines: "Singapore
is a small town that thinks it's a city." "I feel like I'm
trapped in an old man's dream, and the only way to break free of that
dream is to shout so loud that he'll wake up." And the words aren't
only resonating with this reviewer - they've been quoted by Ken Kwek
and Zuraidah Ibrahim in Straits Times articles since.
Furthermore, by act two, the melodrama had started to work. Planting
the character of Cindy (Chermaine Ang), the pei du mama from the PRC,
was a masterstroke - deepening both discussions of citizenship as well
as generating a delicious frisson of tension as the sick father's mistress.
Her presence also generated a superb performance from Neo Swee Lin,
in her role as the mother Patricia Koh, as she first displayed tenderness
towards Cindy, then subjected her to a show-stopping display of imperious
authority in the role of a first wife in traditional Peranakan households,
having the second wife massage her feet. It was Neo's handling of the
finale that finally brought the play to a level of excellence when her
character made a firm decision to migrate to America with her daughter,
leaving her adulterous husband to fend for himself with his new wife.
It's sad, however, that Patricia was one of the few characters granted
a clear journey of development. No other characters were seen to change
as fundamentally or as dramatically, which is a real pity in a play
that relies on an ensemble cast as much as this one. There might have
been potential for a similar blossoming in the character of the youngest
son, Patrick, who makes the decision to serve NS in Singapore rather
than absconding to Australia. Hansel Tan's rendition of this part, however,
was as the blinking everyman, confused by the new possibilities before
him, not quite distinct enough to be arresting - yet his delivery of
a final speech actually moved me to tears. And I quote, poorly:
Patrick: I think that every time you leave a place, you're saying "Yes.
Yes, you win, I give up. I can't change anything." For once, I
want to be able to say "No".
For many of us in the world of the arts, that's exceptionally resonant
- and a hell of an argument for not packing your bags and switching
passports. It's an amazing, heartbreaking ending that touches you to
the core, much deeper than most dramatic writing does - but while one
is ready to forgive the creators for a shoddy beginning, one never quite
forgets.
What could have saved this play? A script doctor of some kind? A director
who refused to accept a draft with so many flaws, or who would unflinchingly
circumcise the talky bits? Or perhaps a platform with a little less
hype? It's becoming clearer in retrospect that Glen Goei never intended
the Singapore Theatre Festival to be a showcase of the great stars of
Singapore theatre - it's a grand platform for experiment, to allow the
Singapore playwright to speak his or her piece in full view of the public.
But in the early 90s, in the heyday of Singapore playwriting, extreme
censorship forced playwrights to rework their scripts until they attained
a polished sheen - nowhere near the cumbersome bulk of Homesick
that ultimately made it to the packed aisles of the Drama Centre.
I'm glad that Alfian has chosen to explore the difficult form of the
intelligent family drama, and that W!ld Rice has given him a chance
to do so - the form is indeed possible to do well in Singapore, as we
know from The Necessary Stage's Three Years in the Life and Death
of Land. Both author and company should, however, remember their
legacies of presenting strong, earthy characters full of idiosyncrasy,
and should bring them back into their plays to give them new life.
One also wonders about the future of Homesick. It's ultimately
an extremely resonant essay on national identity, tripped up by its
cumbersome excess of ideas. One almost hopes it could suffer the fate
of Off Centre and Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral,
becoming a dramatic text taught in Singaporean schools, where its ideas
could be disseminated at leisure to breed a truly thinking batch of
students. Woe betide the kids who attempt a full-length staging of this
though - unless a kinder, more compact version becomes available.
It wouldn't be a bad idea - Homesick, published and distributed
as an MOE text. It is, after all, less a play than an educational experience,
terribly suited to the purposes of a subversive schoolteacher. Call
it a lecture or call it a propaganda serial; it has nonetheless reached
out to a full auditorium of Singaporeans and used drama to make them
think. In print, it could reach a whole new appreciative audience -
as a show no-one should have seen, but everyone should know. |
"Ultimately an extremely resonant essay on national identity, tripped
up by its cumbersome excess of ideas"
Second Opinion
Credits
Playwright: Alfian Sa'at
Director: Jonathan Lim
Cast: Chermaine Ang, Nelson Chia, Serena Ho, Lim Kay
Siu, Neo Swee Lin, Remesh Panicker, Eleanor Tan and Hansel Tan
Set Designer: Nicholas Li
Lighting Designer: Yo Shao Ann
Costume Designer: Mothar Kassim
Hair and Wigs: Ashley Lim
Music composer: Bang Wenfu
Production Manager: BB Koh
Stage Manager: Esther Teo
Technical Manager: Teo Kuang Han
Producer: Tony Trickett
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