I'd read
the synopsis of Frozen Angels in the papers, so I figured I
knew what to expect: another issue-based episodic play, in the grand
ol' Necessary Stage tradition that's given us shows from Land
to Abuse
Suxxx!!! to Separation
40 and Mobile.
This time, the play would take the form of three stories performed by
the same two actors in multiple roles, exploring the theme of stem cell
technology - lip service, maybe, to the medical theme of this year's
National University of Singapore Arts Festival. I guessed it'd be a
minor work in the company's repertoire, exploring new science with old
dramatic tropes.
But boy was I wrong. This show is dynamite, not just because it's well
crafted and performed, but because it's new - it represents a sudden
departure from what we understood to be the current direction of TNS
aesthetics, an exciting new path, integrating trenchant intimacy with
organised chaos and lush technology.
Let's just start with the multimedia/set design. The actors stand before
a foldable butterfly screen that covers the breadth of the stage, at
times moving behind it, playing with the size and scope of their shadows,
playing with presence and absence. Multimedia artist Loo Zihan and medialogist
Jozsef Vamosi sit close by, broadcasting their images on the screen,
and what images: crackling and popping with rawness and beauty, fleshy
interiors and concrete landscapes, flashing, shifting, marvellously
complementing the live action.
It's possible to say there's a new generation of technology
in drama at work here. There is interactivity: actress Cheryl Lee argues
with two images of herself on both sides of the screen. There are games
of trompe l'oeil: what appears to be a video of the actors sitting
upright on a park bench turns out to be a live feed of them backstage,
lying horizontally on a perspective background drawn on the floor. There's
even realism: a teenage couple court each other via online chat in the
cutesified, telegraphic English of genuine netspeak, the screen projection
displaying their coy games of backspace and enter.
But most importantly, there's heart. The show begins with the actors
onstage in civilian clothing, Cheryl Lee seated, sobbing, Kelvin Zhang
standing, smiling. Cheryl describes her father's dialysis treatments;
her sense of helplessness; how once he called to tell her he was a hundred
dollars short for payment. Kelvin describes his life as a diabetic:
not disabled, just different; lifting his shirt to show off the insulin
pump affixed to his flesh. At this point, the audience can't tell if
it's truth or fiction, but the directness of the emotion strikes home
- it disorients our dramatic experience, it disarms us.
And interestingly, there's no lecture-style explanation of stem cell
technology in the play - just stories, playing with the themes of science
and disease. A 200 year-old couple (the same online teenagers we'd seen
earlier, still in love) struggle with the fact that one of them has
grown tired of immortality. A widower father remains locked in grief
while his daughter grows up and leaves him with a maid, who in turn
leaves him with her own daughter - no mention of stem cell tech here;
just an odd resonance of the "cloning" of caregiving women
to keep a body reluctantly alive. A black market trader has an affair
with a scientist, selling him leftover egg cells from her lab, then
goes berserk when he can do nothing to help her when her mother falls
sick with leukaemia. (This last tale is told with a particularly piquant
twist, as the sci-fi characters speak in a streetwise idiolect of Mandarin,
Hokkien and Singlish. This is what happens when technology goes into
the heartland.)
The stories weave in and out of each other, actors changing their stylised
costumes with clean precision, their identities strangely echoing through
their transformations. The form is important: playwright Haresh Sharma
does not overwrite, instead allowing the silences to speak, for movements
or accents to denote a change of character, and for the projected images
to pull their weight as part of the dialogue of ideas. Video is the
paramount element in one especially moving scene, as the screen displays
the mise-en-scene of a void deck funeral, its tables slowly filling
with ghostlike copies of the two actors. The scientist stands on stage,
watching as her dead mother (an excellent cameo by Goh Guat Kian) advances
slowly toward the camera, dressed in a bridal gown, blessing her, reassuring
her of her happiness.
It's by now commonplace now to play with video wizardry in drama -
The Necessary Stage has done it in shows like godeatgod
and BOTE,
TheatreWorks in Play
On Earth and Dance Dance Dance and The Theatre Practice
in Mama
Looking For Her Cat. Yet in all these works, the most innovative
forms of multimedia feel vaguely disconnected and conceptual, even gimmicky;
problematically distanced from the real meat and soul of drama. (TNS's
more recent works, Fundamentally
Happy and Good
People, have by contrast been stunningly moving and used no
video at all.)
In Frozen Angels, there's initially a coldness to the
tech, but over the course of the play it grows more and more organic,
eventually blending seamlessly into the flow of action and emotion.
By the finale, a sequence of images literally chases the actors across
the stage, the characters of different story strands meeting, fleetingly,
abandoning and re-discovering their props. With this play, frigid technology
is finally melted, is finally alive.
During the talkbacks, director Alvin Tan explained how his company
had seized the chance to perform in the NUS Arts Festival because it
seemed to offer a safe space to experiment. The university had offered
funding, rehearsal space and research resources - but most importantly,
perhaps, it did so without demanding a grandiose, high-profile performance;
unusual conditions in a time where corporate and government sponsors
market the arts as an industry, as a parade.
The Necessary Stage wasn't the only professional group doing
work in this festival, either - experimental and collaborative
pieces were staged by choreographer Daniel Yeung, performance group
Collective Mayhem and the Singapore Chinese Orchestra. Similarly, this
year's Singapore Management University Arts Festival involved
a who's who of professional contemporary artists on the island.
University festivals might end up being an important part of our cultural
scene here, a haven for edgier work that nonetheless accommodates and
co-operates with the young and amateur.
Was there anything wrong with the performance? Perhaps I thought a
few lines of the play a trifle too maudlin at times, and for my own
perverse reasons I wanted a clearer explication of stem cell science.
One surprise was that the company's casting of NUS undergrads
in the two lead roles did not lead to diminished quality: while Kelvin
was a little hard to swallow in his guise as an old man, he held sway
in the comedic-then-conflicted role of the ah beng-like black marketer,
while Cheryl excelled in all her parts, alternately exuding innocence,
spunk and suffering. Amidst the tech, these two shone with their own
talent for drama.
That's the core of Frozen Angels. Regardless of science,
regardless of innovation, the human condition persists: men and women
struggle with love and death, the twin constants of life.
First Impression
Tiny, subtle and intimate: this is the best theatre I've seen this
year (and I know it's only March, but I see a lot of shows). Director
Alvin Tan allows his trio of storylines to fold and weave into each
other organically, playing an exquisite game of presences and absences
as young actors Kevin Zhang and Cheryl Lee slip in and out of costumed
characters, playing the 200 year-old lovers, the aged father/the daughter/the
maid, the black market merchant/the scientist. The play's superficially
about stem cell technology, but in fact it reaches down to grasp at
the roots of the human condition: love and death, which even the promise
of eternal life through science may not conquer. Big props also to multimedia
artist Loo Zihan and medialogist Jozsef Vamosi: their dual screen projections
and live video feeds work seamlessly with the live action, with the
actors making use of the space behind the screen as much as that in
front of it. Though hidden away in the programme of the NUS Arts Festival,
it's clear that this work points toward a new direction in the work
of The Necessary Stage. It is miniature, it is evocative, it is important.
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"With this play, frigid technology is finally melted, is finally
alive."
Credits
Director: Alvin Tan
Playwright: Haresh Sharma
Medialogist: Jozsef Vamosi
Multimedia Artist: Loo Zihan
Production Stage Managers: Elnie Shumastri Mashari, Juraidah Rahman
Production and Make-up Assistant: Molizah Mohd Mohter
Production Intern: Layla El-Deeb
Cast: Cheryl Lee, Kevin Zhang
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