Why the hell
was Survivor Singapore billed as the highlight of the Singapore
Fringe? It was a clumsy, unsophisticated work of social theatre that
spoke exclusively to an audience of youth. It should have been rated
JA(18) for Juvenile Arts - seriously; it tested the patience of any
theatregoers over drinking age who'd had the folly to grab tickets.
Sure, adult fans of The Necessary Stage and Cake Theatre could have
been warned by the synopsis in the festival booklet, which advertised
the play as a "must-see for every teenager", and described
it as being set in a school where students have been tasked with creating
projects that "think outside the box". Most of us, however,
banked on the reputation of the theatre groups and the festival's strong
endorsement of the performance - the cast was even featured on the cover
of the festival booklet, wielding machine guns and survival gear.
The show's set at a school assembly hall, where a principal, Mrs Kwan,
conducts a post-mortem of the controversial projects. A project on domestic
workers involves a student working as a maid and almost murdering her
employer. An eponymous Survivor-style project has Nintendo-addicted
students challenging themselves to live on Ubin, without the comforts
of first-world living. Last, there's an experiment to test the strength
of Singapore's racial harmony by attempting to start a racial riot.
For the majority of the audience, largely composed of school groups,
this works out fine - it's an introduction to social theatre, raising
socio-political issues close to young people's hearts. In his talkback,
playwright Haresh Sharma described his aim to express the voicelessness
of Singapore youth by bestowing his characters with a "vision they
could not express". Certainly, this sense of adolescent aimlessness
comes across clearly in the production, as actors idly toss balls to
each other while planning their work.
However, this sense of immaturity ultimately infects the play itself.
Survivor Singapore ends up taking on the most annoying attributes of
disaffected youth. It tries painfully hard to be hip - witness the bizarre
neon-coloured combat gear wardrobe of the cast - and struggles to be
taken seriously while constantly undercutting itself with its superficiality
and crude humour - one second, Phin Wong is playing a teacher, didactically
explaining the necessity of encouraging independent thought amongst
his brood; the next minute, he's capering around in a cardboard cut-out
costume as a female news reporter with a torturously affected accent.
The forceful style of surrealist comedy that's made Cake Theatre famous
is watered down to mere kitsch and slapstick - what justification was
there, for instance, for the cast's candy-coloured costumery, or the
pointless hip-swivelling motions they make at periodic junctures in
the play? Laughs were milked a-plenty using the lowest forms of humour
- drag queens, caricatures, and men falling down. This isn't necessarily
a bad thing, as seen when a physical actor as gifted as Najib Soiman
plays a comically abusive Malay grandmother. But all this aimless clowning
comes at expense of real wit; a real flaw in a topical play like this.
Survivor Singapore is also weakened by the rigid structure
of Sharma's script, which places unnecessary attention on the three
student projects. Each project deals with a complex issue deserving
of a play of its own - domestic worker abuse, technological overdependence
and racism. Consequently, the twenty-minute re-enactments are barely
able to introduce the themes, and oddly, where they succeed best - as
in the scene where an Indian student, trying to incite a racial riot
at SINDA, realises the racism of his own friends - the play becomes
diverted from its central theme of voicelessness.
Perhaps the central problem with the theme of voicelessness is that
it's a negative concept - it's most strongly illustrated in contrast
with the articulation of a strong rebel voice, as in Bryan Tan's classic
young people's play Over the Wall. Without such a voice, the
bedfuddlement of the students in Survivor Singapore comes across
as mere stupidity - enhanced by the writing of almost characters as
generic, whiny teenage stereotypes. This is why the play's conclusion
has such an impact - the chorus of students confronts Mrs Kwan, who
has resolved to turn them over to the police, and begins chanting, "We
don't have a voice! We don't have a voice! We don't have a voice!"
This moment of protest, of real outcry, redeems what's otherwise a
wishy-washy pastiche of youthful angst. It's a potentially dangerous
moment - director Natalie Hennedige noted that the actors lived in fear
of the student audience joining in the protest and storming Jubilee
Hall.
This is exactly the kind of edge that strong youth theatre needs in
order to have a place at the Fringe Festival. Survivor Singapore
appears to have been trying to incorporate such an edge, with its discussions
of racism and its depiction of how students might be treated like terrorists,
and even a line which, as Hennedige revealed, was deleted at the request
of authorities, running along the lines of, "But what if Malaysia
invades Singapore? Then we can run away to China." And in a phone
interview, Sharma further confided that the Singapore Fringe had fought
unsuccessfully to have the RA(18) rating removed from their reprise
of Fundamentally
Happy, with the result that a generation of GP students were
prevented from sharing and discussing the issues of pedophilia that
the play dealt with.
Such is the double-bind that TNS and Cake Theatre discover themselves
in - they wish to expand young people's minds with a mature, dangerous
play, but are barred from discussing taboo topics by regulators of the
arts. In the process of negotiating the dilemma, a synergistically bad-ass
production is sometimes able to flower, such as The Necessary Stage's
award-winning What
Big Bombs You Have!!!, a youth production on terrorism based
on the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. But at other times,
the result is a handicapped work like Survivor Singapore, provocative
enough for a student audience but thematically and aesthetically disappointing
for over-18s. Obviously, students aren't the only ones who can complain
of voicelessness.
I'm not going to heap all the blame on the government, though. My original
complaint still stands: this play simply should not have been advertised
as a Fringe highlight. According to the programme booklet, "the
Festival aims to bring the best of contemporary, cutting-edge and socially-engaged
works to the Singapore audience." Survivor Singapore might
have made admirable attempts to be edgy and relevant to the local concerns
of its audience. But to claim it's among the best of such works would
simply be folly.
First Impression
Survivor Singapore opens a whole lotta doors, but doesn't
close them. It's a fable about a bunch of schoolkids who embark on wild
social science projects, attempting to work as maids, survive in the
wilderness or incite racial riots, so it's full of little jibes about
kids being pampered and clueless. It's only gradually that the real
message emerges of the voicelessness of Singapore youth, delivered with
a daring conclusion which thrilled the uniformed students in the theatre
- yet for an adult, the piece remains irritatingly light and loose,
so full of slapstick humour that it's hard to take it seriously. In
a nutshell: it's a youth theatre project, and doesn't travel well between
generations. |
"Provocative enough for a student audience but thematically and
aesthetically disappointing for over-18s."
Credits
Director: Natalie Hennedige
Playwright: Haresh Sharma
Production Stage Manager, Set
Constulant and Prop Maker: Joanna Goh
Assistant Stage Manager: Yap Seok Hui
Lighting Designer: Suven Chan
Cast: Chermaine Ang, T T Dhavamanni, Kumar, Najib Soliman
(bijaN), Karen Tan, Phin Wong
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From: Bernice (bernicehuang.wq@gmail.com / Monday, April 2, 2007 at 00:17:00)
An angsty skit based on bad stereotypes insulting the intelligence of teenagers. Deals with issues terribly superficially, really quite a pain to watch, or even to listen to (the preachiness). Very much a direct in-your-face insult; being myself a very indignant and disgruntled student who paid nineteen dollars for such an utterly disappointing school-skit without being able to rightfully claim the 60% Tote Board subsidy from the school.
Also, the set was really rather redundant and under-utilised (and used only for characters to incessantly climb up and slide down), and undermined effective stage movements such that there were points at which Principal Kwan stood with her back facing the audience, looking upwards and speaking to one of the students standing atop the set, which was only good for the juxtaposition of prison-playground and otherwise quite superfluous.
The costumes didn’t fare any better than the set, and as pointed out by this reviewer, was a bad attempt at ‘trying painfully hard to be hip’. If anything, it failed utterly at any attempt at creating any effect, and was rather odd how Principal Kwan, the strict stern principal character of Karen Tan was clad in army-print three-quarter pants and a rather revealing, almost shoulder-baring top outfit, complete with (heeled?) boots, which made her quite indistinguishable from the other similarly dressed portrayed teenage brats characters.
Let me then just clarify that this production is not a 'youth theatre project that doesn't travel well between generations': it doesn't travel at all.
From: Yi-Sheng (ng.yisheng@gmail.com / Sunday, April 15, 2007 at 01:55:30)
Bernice, you write very well (and very honestly!). You should join Inkpot as a writer leh.
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