The truth
is, I've always hated the "Uniquely Singapore" slogan.
How can we claim our country's hybrid culture is unique when,
just across the Causeway, there's the same blend of cultures at
work on a way larger scale? Malaysia, with its massive tribal, religious
and political enclaves, boasts a cultural diversity far richer than
our own; one that's profoundly real, complex and problematic.
Break-ing Ji Po Ka Si Pe Cah showcases this diversity: it's
born out of the Pentas Collaboration Project, which biannually commissions
three directors to each create a half-hour piece on a particular theme.
In the case of 2006, the theme was "Language": transcendent,
subjective, politically divisive in Malaysia, and inescapabably dramatic.
While quality varies, each director in this edition succeeds in delivering
something resonant, relevant and powerful.
Let's break it down. First off, there's Silence, Please
(****1/2), directed and written by Jo Kukathas. It's a middle-class
Indian woman's account of events surrounding her mother's
death, given a bizarre directorial twist. Almost the entirety of the
text is spoken as a voiceover, against a subtle background of rhythmic
music. The five actors (three Indian women and two Chinese men) initially
perform naturalistic actions against the set of a middle-class living-room,
but soon find themselves abstracted: their movements may bear no direct
relation to the text, forming intriguing counterpoints to the narrative,
shifting books and furniture across the set, occasionally breaking into
prayer chants or laughter.
It all sounds terribly lofty and conceptual, but trust me, it wasn't.
In the midst of the strangeness, Kukathas never loses sight of the human
emotion at the heart of the drama: the grief of losing a mother, the
shock and confusion of having one's identity taken away from oneself.
The voiceover tenderly traces a family history of a grandmother who
played favourites based on skin colour, a mother who scolded trees into
bearing fruit, a country that betrayed its citizens. And - oddest
of all, yet fitting into the dream-logic of families - a set of
disappeared uncles and aunts and an ancient grandmother who appear at
the funeral to reclaim their mother's body, an odd suggestion
that she was not the mother she said she was.
In her director's message, Kukathas explains how she was inspired
by her studies in Japan of traditional theatre forms, where speech and
action may often be separated. She seems to have studied the forms well:
though I couldn't always grasp the symbolic connection between
the spoken text and the choreography, I was completely won over by the
clean aesthetics; it felt, in a word, classical.
The theme of language operates on several levels here: there's
the presentation, where speech is isolated from image, allowing a separate
fetishisation of both, then there's the detailing of how difficult
speech becomes in the context of suffering: the mother unable to speak
during illness, her children finding themselves similarly speechless,
even frightened of speech, as they first wait out her illness then mourn
her death. The idea of silence pervades this piece, both in form and
content.
And yet the crucial moment of the play involves breaking this silence,
with a return to concrete reality. When the siblings visit the temple
after their mother's body is taken away, they meet a young Indian
man who shouts at them in Tamil, a language which they cannot understand,
scolding them for using English in a sacred Hindu place, as if they
are ashamed of their roots. This is a key to reading the entire piece:
the English language is a mother tongue for her characters, but the
grandmother tongue - Tamil - nonetheless exerts a undying claim
on them, one that can strip them of their speech, rendering them silent.
All in all, it's an excellent piece, with the cast of actors
and dancers demonstrating beautiful physical awareness amidst the quiet.
The most jarring moments, in fact, came when the youngest woman, played
by Anitha Abdul Hamid, had to speak: the brittle uncertainty of her
voice jarred with the mellifluous beauty of the voiceover, feeling out
of place. And true, the ending is a little abrupt - the siblings
approach a civil servant for help in reclaiming their mother's
body, but are told all he can do is launch a report - but this
loose end is so accurately reflective of the human condition in real
life that it ultimately works. It helps, of course, that the set designers
leave us with a final, stunning image: the central wall turns, and inside,
stacked on shelves, are all the furniture items of the living room,
housing small papier-mâché dolls: the home as an altar.
The second play, the devised work Repot [Mind + Mine] (****),
is arguably just as good, because what it lacks in sophistication, it
makes up for with sheer energy and entertainment value. Coming after
a piece about silence, this piece is instead about noise, language as
noise, politics as noise, performance as noise, noise that is glorious,
chaotic and alive.
It begins with actress Gan Hui Yee alone onstage, delivering a Mandarin
monologue defining the parameters of language, while the recorded clack-clack-clack
of a typewriter assaults our ears; she teases those of us who are reading
the surtitles that we must be experiencing a cognitive lag - and
truly, as a person semi-fluent in the language, I'm lost amidst
her technical terms, disoriented by the clash between spoken text, projected
text and clackety-clack-clack; disturbed in the best way possible.
Director Loh Lok Man's interested in investigating the strange
relationship between Chinese Malaysians and language diversity: many
are raised speaking a Chinese dialect at home, then go to schools where
Mandarin is taught as a first language together with Malay (the national
language) as well as English (the international language of trade).
The show thus emerges as a series of experimental projects exploring
this cacophony of diversity, hence the name Repot, which means "report"
in Malay.
The first sequence, Repot 1, centres on a video recording
of the four actors during the workshop process, discussing and experimenting
with these very themes of language in their lives, speaking in a mix
of Mandarin and occasional English, breaking into Malay for the Malaysian
pledge. Cute enough, you'd think - but the four actors themselves
are on-stage, speaking the same lines in sync with their recorded selves,
even hurriedly shifting positions from jump-cut to jump-cut so that
what you see on stage mimics their image on video.
Repot 2 involves the re-enactment of a survey: actors pair
up in different combinations, one playing the interviewer and the other
the interviewee, answering stock questions about mother tongue vs. national
language. The answers are pretty repetitive, and we don't learn
much from the content: English is more important to them than dialects,
yadda yadda. What keeps the act alive - and makes it hilariously
watchable - is the variety of interviewees portrayed: speakers of Mandarin,
Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka; professors, hawkers, émigrés,
even a thuggish martial arts teacher played by the petite Tan Chai Chen
and an Indian man who learned Mandarin from an ex-girlfriend, strongly
performed by the extremely solid Chua Teck Yee.
Repot 3, however, is the perhaps most rib-tickling scene of
the lot: actors re-enact scenes projected on the video screen behind
them once again, but this time, the scenes are from the 1960 Malay film
Antara Dua Darjat by director P. Ramlee. Displaying their talents
for the Malay language (hitherto given meagre exposure), they subvert
this artefact from one of the progenitors of modern Malay culture, hijacking,
no, maybe simply pirating this classic, turning its overblown melodrama
into farce merely by duplicating it to the best of their ability.
One could write a whole essay about this last act - is it possible,
the director seems to be asking, for Chinese Malaysians to embrace,
to assimilate themselves into Malay culture without incongruity? But
as a whole, Repot seems to be celebrating this incongruity, revelling
in the manifold ironies of being a minority culture. There isn't
a clear thesis being shaped, but on the whole, there's an upbeat
sense of joy in the mania of language, overriding any practical impulses
of nation-building or clear communication. Content, here, is less important
than style and vigour.
There is an odd coda to this piece, however: a video that tracks the
actors as they boisterously go backstage into the Esplanade dressing
rooms, down the lift and out into the open, just as the rain starts
to fall. Is there a hidden meaning here? A hint that while language
complexity may be all laughs in the theatre, outside life needs must
be more problematic?
In any case, it makes for a good transition into the final piece for
the night, WIP(***), which stands for "work in progress".
Written and directed by Nam Ron and performed completely in Malay, this
work follows the relationship between an imprisoned blogger on Islamic
issues and his torturer, seeking to shine a light into the way language
is policed and used against people - the opposite of communication,
as the director says in the programme.
Sadly, this is the weakest piece of the lot. It's definitely
hurt by the fact that it's a naturalistic play with a minimalist
set, all of which seems a trifle boring after the acrobatics of form
that we've witnessed with the previous two plays. But the fact
is that there's something fundamentally problematic with the script:
throughout the process of incarceration and torture, the prisoner maintains
his dignity, calling for a lawyer, insisting on his rights. There is
no sense of development of character or action, not really even enough
human detail to enable us to sympathise with this martyr for free speech.
And while the two actors play the roles adequately, there is nothing
luminous in them that shines out with conviction, that supplies the
oomph the lines to become transcendent.
What is important here is the topic: we're seeing a play in which
a self-proclaimed moderate Muslim is being persecuted by the government
of a Muslim country, not for liberal ideas but for what's viewed
as dangerous, extremist beliefs. The blogger has written that believers
worldwide should unite against the West - not in arms, he adds,
but in ideology, to fight back against their misrepresentations and
abuses of Islam and the Muslim nations. For the government, that's
a statement that comes too close to terrorist ideology and could damage
trade relations, hence the justification for arrest. It's a scenario
that strikes close to home for many Muslim members of the audience:
even here in Asia, it's not safe to profess too much devotion
to your faith.
I've been told that this incarnation of WIP is completely
different from the one that premiered at Break-ing's
first run in KL. The subject of bloggers being arrested for sedition
is too dangerous for legal performance in Malaysia; a few of my friends
were amazed that it was permitted here, impressed by the director's
bravery. Surprisingly, though, the show's ultimately rather empathetic
towards the figure of the government: after the torturer shoots his
prisoner in the head, he begins to mourn him, recalling how as a child
he once killed his pet bird for daring to fly away. It's the perfect
analogy for the paternalist government, which believes it is acting
as a benevolent caregiver when it oppresses its own people, when in
reality it's exhibiting the patterns of a childish tantrum. Unfortunately,
this final monologue isn't performed to best effect - but
if the show is a work in progress, as the title suggests, then there's
definitely motivation and capacity for improvement.
At the end of the night, it's hard to make a statement about
language based on its treatment in these three plays. But what's
clear is the importance of initiatives like Pentas Collaboration Project.
Under what other circumstances could one be treated to such a range
of theatre in a single evening, gaining exposure to the perspectives
of three completely different sectors of a city's theatre community?
It's practically an ambassadorial event, showcasing difference,
not attempting to sweep its problematic facets under the table -
for remember, this is an event curated by artists, not government employees.
We've had a long history of multilingual and multicultural plays
here. We've even had a number of inter-company, inter-linguistic
collaboration projects: The Necessary Stage has worked with Teater Kami
on Pillars
with The Theatre Practice on 100
Years in Waiting, while last year's Trick
or Threat involved both Mandarin-based artists from Dramabox
as well as Malay-based ones from Teater Ekamatra.
Collaborations like Break-ing, however, seem deeply important,
because they not only bring different audiences together, but they allow
directors to each assert the integrity of their individual pieces. Projects
like that in Singapore have been rather rare - there was an English
and a Mandarin play in last year's Full
Frontal, and the year before that there was a Malay and a Tamil
play in Projek
Suitcase, but that's more or less it.
We don't have the same kind of diversity as Malaysia -
here, English is obviously, undeniably hegemonic, in the theatre world
as well as in the world of commerce - but that doesn't mean
they can't teach us a lesson. Break-ing demonstrates
how exciting, and how dramatic it can be to juxtapose different visions
within the same playing space. Rather than harmony, it displays polyphony;
and more than perfection, it displays passion, in every single on of
its plays. Let's learn from Malaysia. That kind of spirit shouldn't
be unique.
First Impression
Two excellent productions and one kinda mediocre piece are included
in this Malaysian triple-bill of plays about language. First off, Silence,
Please (****1/2) works beautifully with its oblique, sophisticated
approach to contemporary theatre: five actors move in a combination
of naturalistic and abstract movements as a brilliantly performed English-language
voiceover describes a Hindu family's experience of their mother's
death. Poetic, moving, and politically resonant too - splendid.
Next, Repot [Mind + Mine] (****) features a madcap series of
scenes where four Chinese-language actors re-enact the interrogation
of language: they mimic their own monologues and movements as a pre-recorded
video of their improvisations plays in the background, then re-enact
interviews with a range of Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and Hakka-speaking
citizens, then there's the P. Ramlee movie - though the
text gets a wee bit repetitive, be assured, it's too inventive
and funny for you to care. Finally, there's WIP (***),
a Malay-language duologue between a prison interrogator and a detained
Islamist blogger. It's a great premise, stepping out to explore
trenchant issues still taboo in Malaysia, but the script's too
straightforward and the conservative, naturalistic direction suffers
when juxtaposed with the exciting experiments of the previous two plays.
All in all, a remarkable evening, displaying the vibrant diversity of
the KL theatre scene - a solid item in this year's Esplanade
Theatre Studios Season.
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"While quality varies, each director in this edition succeeds in
delivering something resonant, relevant and powerful."
Credits
Director: Jo. Kukathas, Loh Kok Man, Namron
Writers: Jo. Kukathas (Silence, Please), Loh Kok Man, Teoh
Ming Wah, Tan Yan Tee, Gan Yui Yee, Lim Yeow Haw, Moo Siew Ken, Tan
Chai Chen, Chua Teck Yeo, Chen Huen Phuei (Repot [Mind+Mine]),
Nam Ron (WIP)
Stage Manager: Tuna Lim
Production Managers: Au Sow Yee, Jason Lai
Lighting Designer: Loh Kok Man
Set Designers: Caecar Chng, Teoh Shaw Gie
Music and Sound Designer: Ng chor Guan
Video Artist: Au Sow Yee
Cast: Anne James, Sukania Venugopal, Anitha Abdul Hamid, Caecar Chong,
Lee See Keong, Gan Hui Yee, Tan Chai Chen, Chua Teck Yee, Chen Huen
Phuei, Wan Azli Bin Wan Jusoph, Mohd Fared Bin Jmladdin
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