I can't say
I saw any real men in ACTION Theatre's Real Men, Fake Orgasms,
and, even more disappointingly, I didn't notice any fake orgasms either.
Instead, I saw a series of vaguenesses - sometimes soft-focus, impressionistic
vignettes and other times hard-edged, quick-draw caricatures. The evening
as a whole was like a cross between a poem and a sketch show. Sadly,
though, neither the poem nor the sketch show was very good.
The play's first scene fell into the former category. Two men in white
underwear are alone on a blank stage. Mostly they talk, but sometimes
they are silent; mostly they are still, but sometimes they jump around.
There is a window high in one of the featureless walls, and this provides
a screen for what is credited in the programme as Li Hong's multimedia
design, but mainly it looks like they've just left a Windows screensaver
on - the one called "Bliss" with the rolling green hills and
blue sky.
The intention seemed to be to create an emotional no-man's land - a
prison for two kindred souls unable quite to connect with one another
- and thereby to invoke an aura of poetic regret tinged with an undercurrent
of sanitised sexuality. But it was all a bit pretentious. I was reminded
of an episode from the second season of the British sitcom, Extras,
in which the protagonist, a frustrated comic actor on a lowbrow
TV show, decides he can up his artistic credibility by appearing in
a play. He ends up cast as a conflicted gay guy in a morose two-hander
directed by Ian McKellen at his luvviest. The whole episode is meant
to satirise the airy-fairy self-regard of theatre folk. And the empty
set, the strained sincerity, the two guys in white underwear - it was
all exactly like Real Men, Fake Orgasms.
Or rather, it was exactly like the start of Real Men, Fake Orgasms,
because then something different happened: Chua Enlai and Claudio
Girardi, playing the two men, started drawing on the black walls with
an opaque white marker. They drew bed frames and lions and random doodles,
and scribbled over each others' contributions. I initially thought this
quite interesting, and was pleased that playwright Chong Tze Chien had
incorporated a striking visual element into the play, since visuals
are so often his strength. The way the play was going, I thought each
character would use their marker to draw the physical and emotional
world in which they could be comfortable and then we might see, from
the disconnect between the two sets of drawings, exactly why they are
unable to be happy together. And perhaps this was the intention, but
it didn't work because the wall-drawing was not, as I had originally
surmised, present in Chong's script; it was a directorial imposition
from Samantha Scott-Blackhall.
A while ago, in a review of Dead
Certain, I characterised Scott-Blackhall's direction as competent
and clean, but too safe - and this was true of all of her early work
that I saw. Shortly after that, she started making interesting choices.
In The Physicists,
her collapsing set provided a breathtaking moment between acts one and
two, but left her with a tiny playing area and ugly shadows in the first
half of the play. And with Quills,
she vacuum-packed a florid melodrama into the shape of a study in psychological
realism - with mixed results. However, even at the moments when her
choices seemed most ill-advised, she retained her grip on the basics:
blocking, pacing, character interaction. With Real Men, she
seems, for the first time, to have sacrificed these: when Chua and Girardi
drew on the walls, they were stuck in one place facing away from the
audience (blocking), the dialogue had to stop in odd places to accommodate
them (pacing) and they were unable to look at each other (character
interaction). And since the images the two men produced had only occasional
and superficial relevance to what the script was saying, the whole graffiti
endeavour became extremely irritating very quickly.
Fortunately, the wall-drawing soon ended and the play switched gear
with its scene change. It became clear that the first, pseudo-poetic
scene was a framing device, a container for three less suffocatingly
symbolic sketches which outlined some of the possibilities of male relationships.
These sketches each contained the theme of a man finding reasons not
to return another's love (I can't love a transsexual; I can't love my
best friend like he wants me to; I can't love someone when I'm dying)
and they were effective in places. The best of them was the second,
which takes place on a jogging track where a man is trying to disguise
his love for his friend with macho one-upmanship and joshing. In this
scene, unlike the other two, most of the set-ups Chong had built into
his dialogue paid off with amusing punch lines and he found enough variety
to sustain the action, escalating the friends' testosterone-fuelled
posturing into aggression and then deflating it into regret and discomfort.
But mainly these scenes seemed static and constructed, with Chong spending
too much effort on slightly awkward wordplay and too little on heart
and movement. Certainly there was nothing here I hadn't seen done better
in the 2003 Necessary Stage production, Oh
Man!, a sketch show that admitted it was a sketch show.
The actors were generally fine, though. Chua was, as usual, slightly
broader and more theatrical than he might have been, but he had an infectious
energy that made him very watchable. Girardi had a pleasant stillness
in places and looked comfortable onstage. Both did enough to differentiate
their various characters. But neither looked like they had much to chew
on, so their performances never had the opportunity to be better than
merely competent.
I don't know what else to say about this production. I don't really
see the point of it. It wasn't a psychological exploration; its symbols
were vague and intermittent; and its structure, and especially its framing
device, didn't hang together. It's puzzling, because Chong has covered
all three of these areas beautifully in the past (see Spoilt,
Wong Kar Wai
Dreams and Between
the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, respectively). Chong is a
talented playwright, but his output is extremely eclectic, and perhaps
he has to decide what he's aiming for, be it visual, symbolic, or naturalistic,
before he can make the most of his abilities. Add in some ill-conceived
direction that over-rode the script and introduced an unfortunate pretentiousness
to the proceedings and you end up with a production whose pleasures
were even faker and less orgasmic than one might expect.
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"I don't really see the point of this production. It wasn't a psychological
exploration; its symbols were vague and intermittent; and its structure,
and especially its framing device, didn't hang together"
Credits
Playwright: Chong Tze Chien
Director: Samantha Scott-Blackhall
Cast: Chua Enlai and Claudio Girardi
Multimedia Design: Li Hong
Producer: Ekachai Uekrongtham
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