A wise woman
once sang that when love came, it would come with rockets, bells and
poetry. While this may well be true, over time, the fireworks and rockets
eventually fizzle out and love gradually dissolves into everyday life.
That doesn't mean it's anything less special. It's love, for goodness'
sake. The big L. But it can become such a natural part of your life
that you hardly notice it, although you can always feel it.
That power of love (and I will stop it now with the references to cheesy
love songs) was captured beautifully and sensitively in Duets
which presented the everyday love of a couple (creators Kaylene Tan
and Paul Rae) in a series of vignettes set against recorded songs and
live music.
Each vignette was a thing of little beauty - uncluttered and simple
and usually garnished with an interesting visual trick. In an early
scene, for example, with the entire venue in darkness, Tan and Rae used
laser pointers to indicate where objects such as shoes, chairs etc.
were placed in their apartment while they described the memories associated
with each. Later there was a long period of silence when Tan walked
around eating an apple while Rae brought furniture and furnishings into
the space to literally create the set of that apartment onstage. These
were interesting enough for the audience to enjoy for their own sake
thanks to the confidence and crispness of the actors' delivery but they
also echoed the theme in their own way: love can sometimes be so much
a part of our mundane and ordinary lives that it need not be something
seen or something spoken about; it is simply lived.
It was to the actors' credit, then, that in the little disagreements
over who should cook dinner and the conversations about buying insurance
and about a stranger one of them meets in a park, the love the couple
shared still came across so clearly without any explicit declarations
in words. Instead it was in the way they interacted onstage, sometimes
joining hands to support one another, at other times just in the ease
they had with each other.
It was also to their credit that these random musings were actually
strangely engaging in themselves. In some vignettes, there was a poetry
to the lines that allowed the text to stand on its own but in others,
there simply wasn't very much for the actors to work with. And yet,
they somehow managed to bring it to life. Rae, in particular, slipped
into his character as if he had just wandered into his own living room.
When he told an anecdote about a woman he had met who wanted to lovingly
chew on the feet of his baby, his delivery was so natural and he seemed
to be taking such unadulterated delight in the situation that it made
you wonder if he was simply ad-libbing the whole thing.
It was ultimately besides the point, though, whether the script and
the characters were facets of Tan and Rae themselves. What matters was
that these characters were facets of us in the audience. And for me,
the power of this production was in its sincerity in trying to capture
in little snapshots the truth of how love - so ordinary, so beautiful,
so real - can exist
My only quibble was with the music. Not Zai Kuning's soundscape which
helped to create the atmosphere for each vignette perfectly, but the
songs themselves which, while playful and fun, were not particularly
memorable or poignant, at least to my untrained ear, and yet were oddly
supposed to be the basis of the production. In fact, the programme,
perhaps ironically, even described them as "some of pop's most enduring
duets". I'm not sure how many people have heard of Steak For Chicken
by The Moldy Peaches or It's Good To Be On The Road Back Home Again
by Cornershop, though. Where were Islands In The Stream and
Endless Love?
Then again, maybe that was the point. Perhaps the songs that truly
endure are not necessarily the ones standing proud at the #1 spot of
the Billboard charts with rockets, bells and poetry.
It's the quiet ones you have to watch out for.
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"Love can sometimes be so much a part of our mundane and ordinary
lives that it need not be something seen or something spoken about;
it is simply lived"
Credits
Text: Paul Rae and Kaylene Tan
Performers: Paul Rae and Kaylene Tan
Sound: Zai Kuning
Lights: Ken Ikeda
Stage Manager: Melanie Tan
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