The searing
comedy House of Sins by playwright / director Li Xie is a masterful
piece of work that truly deserves a place in the canon of great Singapore
literature. Li had acted in Drama Box's 2003 version of Caryl Churchill's
Cloud
9 which Kok Heng Leun and Quah Sy Ren had reimagined in a Singaporean
context, but here, Li goes one step further: she draws on the most powerful
elements of Churchill's landmark play about sexual repression while
creating a wholly original Singaporean work that can stand on its own.
Both plays are about seemingly perfect families but what drives the
plot of House are the actual Hell Houses in America which are
staged by fundamental Christians during the Halloween period for evangelical
reasons: in House, a family becomes so outraged that no one
in their community behaves in as morally upright a manner that they
decide to invite the local residents to their home and then act out
shocking scenes of depravity and sin in front of them so that they will
be scared into leading more saintly lives.
Li cues us to how self-righteous the family is by having the family
members occasionally pause in the middle of a conversation to smile
and give each other the thumbs-up while a bell chimes in the background
as a sign of approval. This is just one of many surreal elements which
Li introduces into the over-the-top, cartoon world of House.
The most striking one, of course, is the much-talked about casting across
genders lines that was clearly inspired by Cloud 9. Cross-dressing
can be played for laughs and that is certainly the case here, especially
with actress Doreen Toh as a ridiculously macho policeman. However,
there is a more serious side to it as well. In both House and
Cloud 9, the son is gay and is constantly being told by his
father that he needs to be a "real man". In our heterosexist
society, gay men have to wrestle with the constricting stereotype of
gay men being effeminate and the constant pressure on gay men to pass
as "one of the guys". Having this part played by a woman,
therefore, actually brings vividly to life one of the central themes
of the plays which is how society sometimes forces people to painfully
suppress who they are and take on different roles just to survive. Similarly,
the mothers in the two plays are played by men because the women desire
the sexual freedom that they often perceive men to have in society but
have to continue to play their ascribed role in society as dutiful wives.
Another one of the play's main themes is hypocrisy and we see that
most clearly as the family members begin to get carried away in the
roles they play in their Hell House. The father, for example, is only
too eager to play a man who visits prostitutes and we eventually discover
that he gets off on watching his neighbour engage in illicit lovemaking
and see him raping his wife when she refuses to have sex with him -
this, of course, is the same man who tries to instruct his son about
what a "real man" is. The play is, thus, also an indictment on puritanical
conservatives who try to repress the natural sexual desires of others
but who themselves turn out to be only all too human, if not worse.
More than that, it also shows the damage that such repression can have
on others: if the family had been more accepting of the son's homosexuality,
the play suggests, he probably would not have had to suppress it to
the point that he ends up blackmailing one of his young students to
have surreptitious sex with him.
A departure from Cloud 9 which I particularly appreciated
in House is how much Li upped the intensity of the comedy.
Cloud 9 does have many funny moments but here, quips come fast
and furious, usually laced with a raunchy sensibility that is somehow
both irreverent and playful. There is also much slapstick humour and
there are some truly hilarious set pieces built on dramatic irony -
for example, how the father cannot understand why his son is so insistent
on playing not only a drug addict but, more specifically, a gay drug
addict. The bawdy tone of the play is also complemented by a set that
is very much part of the joke as well. In one of the bedrooms, for example,
is an illustration of a plate of fruit which is composed so that it
can easily be interpreted as more than a depiction of a banana and two
berries. Sure, some of the gags aim below the belt but that is precisely
the point: the play is a celebration of sex and, specifically, sexual
freedom. Praise, then, also goes to Li and her production team for the
colourful set design, fizzy musical interludes, fanciful costumes and
vibrant lighting, all of which add to the energy of this play.
For all its humour, though, Li's script is not without its moments
of darkness as reality bites in scenes depicting rape and pedophilia,
but she weaves these contrasting elements skillfully into a tight narrative,
using the aforementioned musical interludes to control the tempo of
the production. If House drags, it only does so very slightly
in the last fifteen minutes or so of the play. I must say, however,
that I am unconvinced by her decision to suddenly have the characters
address the audience at the play's coda as if we in the Jubilee Hall
were the actual audience for this house of sins. I suspect she is trying
to remind us of the culpability of society at large and our own hypocrisy:
as Li points out in her programme notes, society's condemnation and
outrage at Edison Chen's nude photos probably reflects more poorly on
us than the photos do on Chen. We tsk-tsk at sex scandals but aren't
we the ones buying buy the tabloids that document them? It is an interesting
point but unnecessary in a play already so rich with ideas and deserving
of more development if meant to be taken seriously.
In terms of her direction, I liked her confident and clear creative
vision and especially how she used the split-level set to move people
around so that the presentation never got too static. This resulted
in the occasional problem with sightlines but I enjoyed the scenes of
the father and grand-aunt in their cute little makeshift car set into
the apron too much to complain.
I felt that all the actors turned in strong performances - even small
parts like that of Li as a pregnant cabaret singer (another visual cue
to challenge sexual stereotypes) and Toh as a prostitute were vibrantly
played. Still, I was not entirely won over by Goh Guat Kian as the son
and Toh when she was playing the policeman because their physicality
as men seemed a little too put on. Toh was clearly going just for laughs
which was fine but I was more impressed by the superlative performances
by Julius Foo (cross-dressing as the grand-aunt), Peter Sau (cross-dressing
as the mother) and Tay Kong Hui (as the father) because all three were
deliciously over-the-top when required to be outrageously funny but
able to engage on an emotional level as well to be more than just caricatures.
There is a deep authenticity in the situations and the characters that
these three actors managed to tap into and this gave their performances
the weight and poignancy that the female performances lacked - although
I acknowledge that Li's writing had a part to play in this as well,
their characters being better written than those of the female actors.
The three lead actors impressed me because they delivered moving performances
that were immersed in the world of the play yet seemed to speak with
a knowing sadness to the wider concerns beyond it. I particularly appreciated
how Foo and Sau played their parts as women and not as men dressed as
women which would have made a mockery of the play's theme since the
scariest thing about hypocrisy, after all, is that it is always well-hidden.
My greatly appreciative experience of House was, unfortunately,
marred by technical problems that evening which resulted in the play
starting about 15 minutes late and a surtitle operator who must have
been unable to hear any of the dialogue onstage because the surtitles
would be flashed on screen completely out of sync with what the actors
were saying. This meant that if you did not understand Mandarin at all
you would have no idea which character was saying what and when he or
she was saying it - a non-Mandarin-speaking Inkpot colleague walked
out after ten minutes because he had no idea what was going on; I soldiered
on despite not being a world champion in Mandarin since I knew I had
a review to write. The surtitles also had the very odd habit of moving
around all over the screen so that, quite often, they would be projected
not on the flat surface of a wall but over a curved pillar, which made
them very difficult to read.
These things may seem like minor quibbles but the fact is that little
things do affect one's overall experience - even though I had eventually
stopped trying to
read the surtitles, the fact that they were jumping around all over
the place kept pulling my eye away from the stage - and I wish Drama
Box had paid attention to them as well. I was particularly disappointed
that the company showed little care for its non-Mandarin-speaking fans
when criticism about the way English surtitles were handled had already
been leveled at Li and Drama Box's Artistic Director Kok during the
talkback session following Little
White Sailing Boat in 2007. No company or artist is under any
obligation whatsoever to provide surtitles for a work but once you decide
to advertise a play as "In Mandarin with English surtitles",
then, yes, you do have a responsibility to your ticket-buying audience
to make sure these surtitles are provided and that they are accessible
to the audience.
I know the play argues that one should not seek perfection in life.
However, perhaps we should still strive to achieve it at least in art.
These technical problems were small sins but sins nonetheless that detracted
from what was otherwise a divine piece of work.
Kenneth's First Impression
If you don't understand Mandarin, do yourself a favour and skip
House of Sins, despite the "In Mandarin with English
surtitles" tag. Yes, the surtitles are there and very well translated
but all surtitles are flashed completely out of sync with the actual
dialogue on stage (sometimes four to five lines later) so it will be
hard to figure out who is saying what and when they are saying it -
which means the story probably won't make much sense and you'll miss
a lot of the gags.
If you do understand Mandarin and do not have to rely on the surtitles,
however, then I would say the opposite: don't you dare miss House
of Sins! It is a masterful satire by acclaimed playwright / director
Li Xie that attacks the hypocrisy of the self-righteously conservative
with wicked intelligence and unadulterated glee. Sins tells
the story of a family that prides itself on godliness and high morality
only to be revealed to be just as human as everyone else - if
not worse: the father, for example, condemns his sexually active neighbour
but gets off watching her have sex and rails against homosexuality to
his son whom he wants to ensure is a "real man", even if
being a "real man" means raping a woman. The ribald and
raunchy comedy alternates between slapstick and smart but is consistently
successful in either mode and the actors, especially Tay Kong Hui, Julius
Foo and Peter Sau, all deserve accolades as well, the latter two for
playing their female roles as intended: not as in drag per se but as
actual women. A lot of thought has also clearly gone into the set, light
and sound design. All in all, a great concept extremely well-executed!
Matthew's First Impression
I walked out of House of Sins after about ten minutes and
I'm not sure why I didn't ask for my money back. The play was advertised
as being in Mandarin with English subtitles - and while the production
technically delivered on this promise, the subtitles were always at
least three speeches behind the spoken lines on stage. Consequently
I was always five to ten seconds behind the rest of the audience and
had to work out which of the characters had said the lines I was reading.
This made my brain hurt, utterly ruined the pacing and characterisation
for me and was a thoroughly frustrating experience. To add insult to
injury, the projected surtitles occasionally changed shape without warning
so that the rightmost words would suddenly be projected over a curved
surface, making them extremely hard to read.
After five minutes, I realised the inept surtitles operator, Zhang Shanshan,
was never going to sync up with the actors and I resorted to ignoring
the surtitles and watching a fairly static play I could not understand.
This proved no fun either, so I left.
Surtitles are not hard to do right. I have seen loads of surtitled plays
and some of them rank among my favourite theatrical experiences. Certainly
a play has never before been ruined for me over such an easily correctable
issue. If, for some reason, Drama Box cannot manage the extremely simple
task of advancing its surtitles on cue, it should not try to sell its
plays to non-Mandarin speakers, because right now, I feel the company
has been disrespectful and has taken time and money from me under false
pretences.
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"The three actors delivered moving performances that were immersed
in the world of the play yet seemed to speak with a knowing sadness
to the wider concerns beyond it"
Credits
Playwright / Director: Li Xie
Set Design: Wong Chee Wai
Lighting Design: Andy Lim
Sound Design: Jeffrey Yue
Producer: Nicole Lim
Production Manager: Evelyn Chia
Stage Manager: Koo Ching Long
Technical Manager: Gabriel Chan
Lighting Operator: Yap Seok Hui
Sound Operator: Ho Kian Tong
Surtitle Operator: Zhang Shan Shan
Crew: Jed Lim
Cast: Doreen Toh, Goh Guat Kian, Julius Foo, Peter
Sau, Rei Poh and Tay Kong Hui
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