Twisted by
The Finger Players was billed as "Singapore's first puppet performance
for adults." But Puppetry of the Penis this was not,
nor even Avenue Q. Instead, the show seemed almost like a
children's fable - a simple bedtime story, perhaps, about "a man who
keeps falling into the same hole his entire lifetime" (programme notes).
The foreground of the set pretty much told this story even without
any puppets. It consisted of a wide platform on the left, a narrow
but deep depression (the hole) in the middle, and then a higher platform
on the right. The idea was that in each scene, the man would traverse
the wide area on the left, temporarily get stuck in the hole, and then
climb out of it and continue on his way. In its simplest version, this
was exactly what happened - five times. In each scene we saw a new
puppet depicting the protagonist at a different stage in his life.
All were simple rod puppets, all small but of slightly varying sizes
and appearances according to the protagonist's age, and all were manipulated
by one or two puppeteers in full view of the audience. Each time, we
saw the puppet presented with a new experience, fail in some way to
accept it, and then pick itself up and move on. We started with a toddler
puppet who learns to play, then a schoolboy who learns to fear, a teenager
who learns to love, a middle-aged man who learns to cope with bereavement,
and finally an old man who learns to accept his own death.
In each of these five simple narratives there were tiny moments of
magic. The toddler plays with a bouncing ball and marvels as it takes
him flying; the schoolboy cowers in terror from a monster his rage
has unleashed; the teenager reads a letter from his beloved and shudders
with awe and gratitude as it reveals she loves him as violently as
he loves her. The magic of these moments was heightened by Darren Ng's
lush piano score, which he played live. In the lighter,
more whimsical sections of the play, Ng's music was like being bathed
in gentle light, or like a mother sitting by a child's bedside, gently
waking him; and in the darker or more intense sections, it was like
being lost in a mysterious forest. Yet even at its darkest, the music
retained a sense of innocence, a sense of security. This was the same
innocence one could see in the puppets' trusting, black-button eyes
- in the way they looked up questioningly at their puppeteers; and
it was the same security one could see when these gentle puppeteer-gods
reached down to lend their troubled children a hand. No one could ever
truly become lost in this forest - there would always be a grown-up
watching out for us - and it was this sense that nothing could go really
wrong that made the performance seem like a children's fairytale and
belied its "adult" publicity.
Only one scene in the main puppet narrative came close to being "adult".
It becomes clear that the middle-aged man puppet has lost his partner,
and, in his grief, he rips off the front of his face to reveal bloody
eye sockets, ear holes and nasal cavity. This comes as a shock (the
audience audibly gasped) and it would certainly be disturbing to small
children, but still, the idea of bereavement is presented rather than
explored and the scene follows the same simple pattern as the others,
with the man recovering at the end. Apart from that one visceral moment,
the scene is benign, lulling almost, like a bedtime story.
A greater problem, though, with the main narrative was not its simplicity,
it was its repetitiveness. Five times is too often to tell the
same story, even if each iteration is differentiated by a unique
gimmick. And, by the time we got to the old man puppet, it became clear
that the production team had run out of ideas. The old man just went
through the motions of crossing the stage and falling into the hole
without doing anything interesting or new.
The main narrative was interspersed with shorter shadow-puppetry segments
projected on to a screen at the back of the stage. These segments
proved slightly more adult and more varied, though they also devolved
somewhat towards the end.
Most of the shadow segments revolved around a simple, silhouetted finger
puppet whose journey loosely paralleled that of the rod-puppet protagonist.
The most interesting of these scenes showed the finger puppet navigating
a cityscape which moved as if it were being filmed by an airborne camera.
The puppet climbs ladders and jumps across rooftops, straining to reach
a godly hand which hovers just out of reach. Eventually, when the puppet
reaches the edge of the last roof, it makes a leap of faith and, even
though this shadow world is more unstable and starker than the gentle,
earth-toned world of the main narrative, we still expect the godly hand
to catch the puppet, just as the puppeteer-gods have assisted their
wards before. But our expectations are confounded: the hand disappears,
and the puppet falls, broken, to the ground. This is one of the few
truly adult moments of the play; one of the few times we believe that
we are on our own in a dangerous world with no one looking out for us.
It is also one of the few times we are required to think. Why is the
puppet chasing the hand? Is it mental illness? Disappointment with the
real world? A metaphor for a misspent life? And why doesn't the hand
catch her? The play could have done with more of such provocative scenes.
But perhaps the best scene of the play didn't even use puppets - it
just used hands. We see two
hands (both belonging to Ong Kian Sin) silhouetted on the back screen.
Through some Hermetic process, Ong endows his hands with emotions,
needs and frailties. He makes them love one another and makes one of
them love too strongly, so strongly that the other is frightened and
retreats. He teaches his hands fear and loss and
subtler shadings of pain: self-blame, hope, disillusionment. Not only
is this scene powerful and moving on its own terms, it also provides
a perfect dark mirror to the journey of the teenage rod puppet who
loves with violence. Through this mirror we see that he will remain
in his hole of grief far longer than his narrative portrays, and we
feel more strongly for his pain.
Sadly, many of the shadow segments were rather more abstract and less
satisfying, and most were anchored by a text, projected on the screen
and also printed in the programme, which (again) paralleled the main
narrative but which fell far short of the poetry it was trying to achieve.
And, much worse, there was a whole other narrative which was utterly
unnecessary. In it, Tan Beng Tian, the play's only human actor, yet
again paralleled the main growing older narrative, this time from a
female perspective. Tan did a respectable job, but the only thing this
thread added to the production was the spoken word,
and since that spoken word did no more than repeat a story that was
also being told in three other forms, it just felt flabby. It didn't
help that this thread contained none of the flashes of
magic that lit up the rest of the play.
All in all, while Twisted was a pleasing, accomplished
and occasionally striking production, it suffered from bloat and repetition,
and failed to live up to its title as it seemed to be aiming at
an audience of, if not children, then of extremely nostalgic adults.
It certainly suffers by comparison to April's miraculous Between
the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, but since the same is true
of every other play I've seen in the last five years, that shouldn't
be taken as much of a criticism. With a bit of tweaking, Twisted could
be great, and even without, it serves as more evidence that The Finger
Players are capable of some of the most interesting theatre around.
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"With a bit of tweaking, Twisted could be great, and
even without, it serves as more evidence that The Finger Players are
capable of some of the most interesting theatre around"
Credits
Created and performed by: Ong Kian Sin, Tan Beng Tian
and Tan Wan Sze
Featuring: Koh Leng Leng
Set Designer: Oliver Chong
Lighting Designer: Lim Woan Wen
Sound Designer: Darren Ng
Mandarin text written by: Ong Kian Sin
English translation written by: Chong Tze Chien
Stage Manager: Evelyn Chia
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