You've heard
the proverb "less is more"? Evidently director Benjamin Ho hasn't. Death
of a Hero proceeds along a strategy of overload and excess, throwing
flourishes of theatre at the audience from multiple directions - and
I like it. I like the raw energy of the gigantic ensemble, I like the
gloriously messy set of crumpled newspaper, I like the boom of Chinese
drums and the shock of blood-'n'-opera makeup and the sexy bare chests
of rippling muscle; I like the heights of fantasy, the depths of slapstick
and horror that this piece contains.
But as much as I like this work, I'm dissatisfied. Ho doesn't
quite achieve a sense of unity with the piece - amidst the spectacle,
there's a subliminal sense of incoherence that dogs me throughout
the show, that prevents me from being overwhelmed, from being drawn
in, from being convinced that this is really good stuff.
Part of this awkwardness stems from the script: created as Chew Boon
Leong's maiden play in 1995, it tells the tale of Ah Hock, an unemployed
layabout with a pregnant girlfriend named Sherry and a nagging mother,
periodically shifting into a fantasy world where he's a hero destined
to save a village by slaying 99 monsters. As his standing in the real
world gets worse and worse (it's revealed that he was swindled out of
a large sum of money, and now loan sharks are after him and his family)
his fantasy world ceases to be an escapist paradise: the villagers,
awed at his power, whisper that he is the 100th monster, while the maiden
he's falling in love with plots to destroy him - as it is she, in reality,
who is the 100th monster.
Many viewers complain that the parallel strands don't rationally
gel - the long-suffering, sharp-tongued Sherry isn't a mirror
of the sweet, conniving village maiden/monster, and Ah Hock's
embattled success as a monster-slayer finds no comparable fortune in
the real world. I could argue that the two tales are both narratives
of masculinities in crisis, describing how both inaction and violent
heroic triumph contain the seeds of self-destruction - but the
truth is, in my gut I too can feel the semantic gap. The stories don't
add up.
But it's not just the text that's fractured. The style
of performance is also pretty schizophrenic. This is partly for clarity's
sake: events in the real world are portrayed by human actors, while
the fantasy world is populated by traditional wooden puppets. But even
in the human realm, scenes switch rapidly from over-the-top bawdy physical
humour to heartlander naturalism to violent mass choreography, (with
some pretty thrilling ensemble work thrown in, incidentally). The forms
don't quite cohere - a friend of mine notes the disparate influence
of Kuo Pao Kun, Ang Gey Pin and the old Finger Players school of pantomime,
never quite unified in the same vision. In fact, Ho's funniest
visual coup - the appearance of the fantasy world "villagers",
in the form of colourful slippers converted into puppets - possesses
a silliness quite different from the rest of the play. An inspired image,
but it doesn't fit.
A third and final reason for the play's shakiness is the lead
actor Rei Poh. While not actually a bad actor, he lacks that crucial
stage presence that Ah Hock needed as a a protagonist to hold the audience's
attention - one's tempted to assume he was cast mainly because
he's able to look like a lovable loser than for more solid talents.
From correspondence, I've learned that Ho had the full intention
of crafting his role as one that viewers could not respect, an utterly
pathetic man. Fine, then - I think this was a bad directorial
move. It'd have been better, I believe, to hire a truly strong
actor to perform weakness.
Mind you, the general level of acting was good - Serena Pang,
Trey Ho and Patricia Toh were especially delightful in their various
roles as slack-jawed Cantonese-speaking mothers, fiery-eyed monsters,
haggling housewives, panicking villagers, blind tissue paper sellers.
And there was so much else to enjoy in this production, standing as
testament to the broad and vivid imagination of the director.
Yet the flaws of the play run through the work and prevent the critical
viewer from being truly overwhelmed, from really allowing himself to
be immersed in the world of the drama. They're also what stands
between Benjamin Ho being seen as an interesting director and as a great
one.
Death of a Hero is the inaugural production of Puppet Square,
and it's hard to say what it spells for the future ahead. Compared to
recent works by The Finger Players (Singapore's original adult-inclusive
puppet troupe), this company's output seems to boast a rougher, messier,
more dynamic texture. It's not yet a fully differentiated style, but
that's normal for a company's first production.
Like Jeffrey Tan, Loretta Chen and Zizi Azah bte Abdul Majid, Ho is
one of a handful of young directors who're still trying to establish
an independent voice. Time will tell whether whether and how he'll
distinguish himself - and how his style fits into the city's
greater cultural complex.
Ng Yi-Sheng's First Impression
There's so many things I liked about this production: the raw energy
of the large ensemble, the live drum music, the gloriously messy set
of crumpled newspaper, the heights of fantasy and the depths of slapstick
and horror that it encompasses. And yet the show did not overwhelm me
- I simply could not find a direct emotional connection to the piece.
I kept being bothered by the weakness of the protagonist Ah Hock - the
actor seemed to have been typecast for the role rather than actually
being a strong actor portraying weakness. And while I could posit a
connection between the twin storylines - something about embattled masculinity
- a problematic semantic gulf still remained between the two. This is
a play that impresses, yet doesn't quite feel complete.
Kenneth Kwok's First Impression
This is a play of two worlds - the contemporary one where our hero
is saddled with unemployment, bad debts and a pregnant girlfriend, and
the mythical one where he is a brave warrior who saves a village (and
a fair maiden) from an army of a hundred monsters - and director
Benjamin Ho's vision for Death of a Hero brought both
to vivid life on stage with the help of Fiona Lim's lighting design,
percussion work by the Zing-O Drum Group and a spirited ensemble cast
who took on multiple roles with much commitment and discipline. The
use of physical theatre and puppetry was not always the most innovative
I've seen but certainly consistently engaging although I must
admit that against the kaleidoscope of images, the hero's story
faded into the background. Hero was an enjoyable and exhilarating
work but I left unsure of what exactly it was trying to say about modern
society and the myth of heroes. I'm still undecided about the
set as well which consisted entirely of newspapers: it was visually
very striking and there's a statement about the media somewhere
in there but it was also distracting to see the actors trying to wade
through the mass of crumpled newspaper strewn on the ground. ***1/2
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"The flaws of the play run through the work and prevent the critical
viewer from being truly overwhelmed, from really allowing himself to
be immersed in the world of the drama"
Credits
Director: Benjamin Ho
Playwright: Chew Boon Leong
Stage Manager: Doris Teo
Lighting Designer: Fiona Lim
Costume Designer: Vivianne Koh
Cast: Koh Wan Ching, Patricia Toh, Renee Chua, Serena
Pang, Rei Poh, Trey Ho, Lyon Sim and Andrew Lua
Drums and Percussion: Zing-O Drum Group
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