As advertised,
A Midsummer Night's Dream was "a fun frilled frolic in the
park": a casual yet cultural experience catering to an audience
of thousands on the grass of Fort Canning. The event drew families and
couples, locals and expats, novices and theatre bitches alike to be
diverted by one of Shakespeare's most popular comedies. It was - I reiterate
- engineered to be broad-based, appealing and fun.
But sometimes, fun is not enough. For all its strengths, I will argue
that SRT's Midsummer was - dare I say it? - ideologically bankrupt.
In search of spectacle and mass appeal, director Barry Kyle apparently
overlooked the fundamentals of theatre, generating a product agreeable
to the lay viewer but shoddy and unprofessional to fellow theatremakers.
To begin with, the production was utterly lacking in a unifying vision.
A glance at the costumes of the show already alerted my suspicions:
designers had gone with the eclectic-fusion-pantomime look, combining
East and West, traditional and modern. The play consequently existed
in a cultural limbo - attendant fairies wore glittery clubbing uniforms
but Titania and Oberon sported bindis on their foreheads; Lysander and
Demetrius sang the score of The Phantom of the Opera while
Hermia and Helena played oh-ya-bei-ya-soh in Mandarin; the Rude Mechanicals
appeared as working-class Englishmen in their football uniforms in Act
One (they're all played by white men), yet by Act Five they were lion-dancing
and doing drag in red cheongsams.
Sure, we got some good laughs out of this clash between the local and
the exotic. But it's not an original theme in theatre - antique works
like Theatreworks's Lear
or The Necessary Stage's Pillars
have used it to greater effect to illustrate the cultural rifts
in society. Here, the confusion of cultural references undermines their
utility in delineating the themes of the play. When both mortals and
fairies are equally foreign, what's left to separate their dominions?
Just as crucially, how is this play relevant to our world? In the programme
notes, the director highlights Titania's speech to Oberon, as she points
out how their dispute has bred chaos in nature; "contagious fogs"
and "hoary-headed frosts... in the fresh lap of the crimson rose".
Kyle claims that this speech foreshadows our contemporary problems of
climate change, and seizes this as an opportunity to project stock footage
of tsunamis and flood damage across Asia. There's definitely some promise
in this environmentalist interpretation, as it displays potential as
a driving motif throughout the play (though it does invite the sappy
conclusion that mere love will solve our ecological crisis; i.e. the
ice caps will regenerate if George Bush tricks Laura into having sex
with a donkey).
Yet Kyle fails to pursue this vision - not even a hint of it - in further
scenes. And without a single passionate idea to compel the production
forward, the play's three major threads are unbound, causing Midsummer
to resemble a collage of multiple directors' work rather than of a single
imported auteur.
Within each individual thread, actors were often able to perform accomplished
work, redeeming the play in some audience members' eyes. The first thread,
following the plot of the romantic leads, was inarguably the most successful,
exhibiting fruitful chemistry and artful physical work between Lysander
(Jason Chan), Hermia (Joanna Pilgrim), Demetrius (Rehaan Engineer) and
Helena (Wendy Kweh). Pilgrim's performance as a spoilt, stuffed animal-toting
girl was especially tickling, topped only by Kweh's hilarious rendition
of her character as a bespectacled, manically pathetic young woman in
pursuit of her destined husband, finishing off eloquent, impassioned
speeches by rolling over as a lapdog and woofing.
Kyle was also generally successful in the second thread of scenes,
involving the Rude Mechanicals, the amateur actors who rehearse and
perform the play-within-a-play of Pyramus and Thisbe. It was only in
the third thread, set in the fairy world, that he truly revealed his
shortcomings as an acting coach and a visual director - and this is
a real pity, since it's these scenes that are most definitive of Midsummer:
fantastic sequences depicting a struggle over an Indian orphan, the
harvest of a magic flower and a love sequence between an empress and
a beast.
Sadly, any sense of magic in this production was diffused by mediocre
acting. Daniel Jenkins was able to hold the fort as a strong, declamatory
Oberon, but both Emma Yong and Gene Sha Rudyn seemed nonplussed at how
to play their respective roles of Titania and Puck. The two recited
their monologues without emotional modulation or human vitality, bound
by the very stiffness that a contemporary performance of Shakespeare
ought to dispel. (Yes, 16th century English is difficult, but we're
talking about the starring actress of Dim Sum Dollies fame
and the one-man performer of Anak Bulan Kampong Wa'Hassan -
if you can't teach these guys to do Shakespeare, you can't teach anyone.)
The chorus of fairies, composed of the SRT Young Company and the Centre
Stage School of the Arts, was similarly lost in the midst of poor direction.
For some reason, the female portion of the chorus had been told to act
like giggling bimbos - an instruction which killed any sense of disciplined
creative movement they might have naturally possessed. Lines were lost
as they spoke in overlapping unison, and the finale, where fairies mingled
with the audience, delivering blessings with their hands, utterly failed
to conjure up any sense of the ethereal.
Yes, I'll praise the creators of the show for an effective set design
- the grid of gangways and paths that criss-crossed the Fort Canning
green allowed audiences a democratic opportunity to watch close-up action
wherever they sat, and provided opportunities for extremely dynamic
chase scenes and catfights. But the sets and special effects were, for
the most part, gratuitous - why bother to have a giant playground slide
if it's used only once during a chase scene? Why employ giant video
projections of Oberon and Titania when they're already in plain sight?
Why inflate giant neon balloons to represent the sun and moon when they
inspire not awe, but horror at their tackiness?
Also, what about the staging of Titania and Bottom's love scene in
a giant white box? What about his placement of a psychiatrist's couch
in stage centre, or the exchange of a flower between Hippolyte and Hermia?
Did Barry Kyle really expect none of the audience to know these are
rip-offs from Peter Brook's 1970 production of the same play?
Not everyone will share my objections to Midsummer, nor even
find them relevant. That's why I chose to encourage viewership during
the play's run with my first impressions review, and still retain my
initial rating of three stars. After all, the show contained many strong
points, and was palatable (and relatively affordable) to the average
viewer, demanding little in terms of psychic commitment and owning no
pretensions to being a profound work of political theatre. My expectations
were, perhaps, unfairly raised by witnessing Hamlet in 1997
- another collaboration by SRT and Barry Kyle, also staged in Fort Canning,
featuring powerful acting and cunning textual interpretation to describe
the tensions of contemporary Asian politics.
Nonetheless, something is rotten in the state of Singapore if a theatre
production can prosper with no guiding vision, no ideological convictions,
inconsistent acting and design elements stolen from other directors.
When so much talent, passion and money go into a piece, I demand that
it yield either a solid work of conservative theatre or else a daring
new piece that strives to communicate a heartfelt idea.
Integrity, not "fun", should be the base requirement of a
professional theatre production. Without it, a dramatic piece is a mere
shadow of true theatre - a shadow that offends.
First Impression
SRT's Midsummer is the perfect occasion for a picnic with
friends or family - the excellently designed set, involving a grid of
walkways that encompasses the audience on the green, provides for a
democratic mix of intimate and epic perspectives on the performance.
It's also clear that a lot of talent has gone into this production -
we've got some great comic acting and chemistry among the romantic leads
Lysander (Jason Chan), Hermia (Joanna Pilgrim), Demetrius (Rehaan Engineer)
and especially Helena (Wendy Kweh). Nonetheless, it's evident that the
work lacks a unifying directorial vision - the mish-mash of contemporary
and traditional, of East and West, never quite gels together, the use
of multimedia is superfluous, and standards of performance are disturbingly
uneven - most of all among the youthful Chorus of Fairies, who are quite
unable to conjure up any sense of magic in the air. This is a pleasant
enough evening for a casual theatregoer, but to all you hard-ass critics
out there - don't expect to get transported to Fairyland.
|
"Something is rotten in the state of Singapore if a theatre production
can prosper with no guiding vision, no ideological convictions, inconsistent
acting and design elements stolen from other directors."
Credits
Director: Barry Kyle
Set and Costumer Designer: Martyn Bainbridge
Lighting Designer: Suven Chan
Sound Designer: Mike Walker
Composer: Ilona Sekacz
Choreographers: Aaron Khek Ah Hock, Ix Wong Thien Pau
Hair Designer: Ashley Lim
Stage Manager: Woo Hsia Ling
Cast: Daniel Jenkins, Emma Yong, Gene Sha Rudyn, Matt Grey, Jason Chan,
Rehaan Engineer, Joanna Pilgrim, Wendy Kweh, Andy Hockley, Peter Hodgson,
Michael Corbridge, Andrew Keegan, Claudio Girardi, Becky Ho, Elizabeth
Tan, Serene Tan, Amanda Tee, Melissa Chiew, Natalie Wong, Deborah Emmanuel,
Adeline Pang, Megah Lakhssana Ahsari, Aaron Khek Ah Hock, Jereh Leong,
Li Yong Nan, Ix Wong Thien Pau, Chanel Chan Hui Yin, Melissa Chiew,
Cara Edney, Joyce Gan, Alyssa Lee, Victoria Lim, Nur Khairiyah Ramli,
Kusumawati Supadi, Caitanya Tan, Sophie Wee, Eunice Yee Yen Nee, Kirsty
Aitken, Emily Armstrong, Aparnaa Balamurali, Sameen Boparai, George
Bullock, May Bullock, Izzy Cornish, Lola Rose Donohoe, Shannon Fender,
Brighten Kaufaman, Matt MacKay, Vivek Narayan, Eléonore Otway,
Daniel Parsons, Megan Rosee, Gigi Samuel, Ayush Shah, Gabrielle Virk,
Sorcha Young
|
