Singapore Dreaming
Colin Goh, Wu Yen Yen
It better be a problem with the projection. It had to be. The film was out of focus for long stretches and took on a fish-eye lens effect that just strained the eyes. So this didn’t help.
Neither did the fact that most of the roles never developed into full-fledged characters. I expected more than caricatures rehashing old themes on the most superficial level. Instead, scattered pot-shots were aimed at the Loh family’s preoccupation with the 5C’s, academic pressure, paper qualifications, with nary a resounding hit. Forget about the Singapore dream, why was this their dream? Why did they want the things they want? Just kept thinking that the Talking Cock website had funnier and more insightful things to say on this, or any other, topic.
The movie’s laugh-out-loud scene was between CK (husband of Mei, the daughter) and a beer promoter from China. Language barriers are always a hoot. The scene even took an unexpected turn when the promoter reveals that she’s working in order to save up for her dream. (That’s the second time, after Homesick, that a character from China embraces Singapore as the land of opportunity. Hmm, how soon before this turns into a clichéd shorthand?)
Given the general disinterest in the characters, the movie ended up seeming overlong. Even the revelations of the long-suffering mother was too little too late.
Yeo Yann Yann stood out for her convincing portrayal of Mei, a woman who tries to do the right thing but has to battle with an inferiority complex and pressures from work and family. She wasn’t likeable but at least one could see where she was coming from.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Mary Roach
It only took 3 years. When it came out in 2003, Stiff was feted as one of the year’s best. Eventually bought it in New York after it came out in paperback, and then it sat on my shelf in Beijing, then Singapore, before I finally got round to it.
And what an immensely enjoyable read it was. A book that makes you think about the possibilities after you die doesn’t come along everyday. Roach displays a consistently light touch, displays excellent comic timing, and ferrets out the most appropriate similes, turning what could have been a grim and/or morbid subject matter into an entertaining and hilarious book. Armed with curiosity and a lack of squeamishness, she ventures into labs, freezers, compost, to turn up facts about death and cadavers that most of us have simply never concerned ourselves with. She also shares generously with us the absurdities of yore with regard to medical science as well as of various maverick individuals and their experiments. Should have picked it up sooner.

Mysterious Skin
Gregg Araki
This has to be the most restrained that Araki has ever been, and it’s a good thing. Araki stays pretty faithful to Scott Heim’s book, though the narrative is now focussed on Brian Lackey and Neil McCormick instead of being filtered through the various characters. It’s not easy evaluating film adaptations on their own merit because I keep thinking about the source material and looking out for what’s been changed or dropped. The pacing usually feels off because I prefer the more expansive pacing of the book. The pivotal final scene though was exquisitely directed and acted and proved to be even more moving than on the page.
Have to say that Joseph Gordon-Levitt did a great job as Neil, he’s definitely left 3rd Rock from the Sun behind. Quite a few familiar faces including Elisabeth Shue (what’s she been up to?), Michelle Trachtenberg (from Buffy) and Mary Lynn Rajskub (from 24) show up in the solid supporting cast.

The Sunday Philosophy Club
Alexander McCall Smith
Hoodwinked by the "international bestseller" label and the promise of a new series from the author of the highly successful The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books. This one features 40-something Isabel Dalhousie, who edits the Review of Applied Ethics, and gets involved in what is strictly not her business when she witnesses the fall of a young man at a theatre in Edinburgh. Unfortunately, the murder mystery set-up was merely the most skeletal of frames for Smith to hang his various digressions into applied ethics and issues of morality. Uh-huh. Unfortunately, most of the digressions were just not very interesting. So don’t come a-knocking unless that’s what you’re a-wanting. Judging by the comments on amazon.co.uk, quite a few were similarly underwhelmed by this book.
No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, though episodic and difficult to get into, did at least offer the laidback charms of an unfamiliar setting, Botswana. It was also suffused with a genuine affection for the land and its people. But it didn't compel me to explore the rest of the series though.

When It’s All Over We Still Have to Clear Up
Snow Patrol
With the benefit of hindsight, I can’t help but conclude that the clutch of singles from ‘Final Straw’ was perhaps Snow Patrol’s finest hour. I remember hearing Run with its anthemic chorus ‘Light up/Light up/As if you had a choice,’ and they were right, I didn’t. This was followed by Spitting Games, Chocolate, How to be Dead, one melodic slice of indie-rock after another. Which is why ‘When It’s All Over’ is such a disappointment. There’s nothing particularly distinctive about it with too many tracks falling into a mid-tempo morass of indistinguishability. And why do so many songs start with the repetition of a lyric?
The lead single from their new album ‘Eyes Open’ flirted worryingly with generic arena-sized rock and follow-up single Chasing Cars sounds like more of the same.
Is this it?

The Human Body EP
The Electric Soft Parade
The White brothers have never been happy peppy campers and a quick glance at the titles, ‘Cold World,’ “Stupid Mistake,’ ‘Kick in the Teeth,’ indicates an exploration of familiar morose territory. But the lyrics suggest there’s something else going on. On ‘Cold World,’ ESP sings ‘I wanna get rid of this feeling/I want to be a part of everything’ and discover ‘at the centre of it all, a beating heart.’ The human body is a fragile thing, skin and teeth and muscles and heart; but it’s capable of love and violence and stupidity. ‘So Much Love’ suggests that we have a choice.
Music-wise, ESP has moved from the intimate indie-sound of “Holes in the Wall” and continues from the sonic explorations of “The American Adventure.” Thankfully, their ear for melody continues to be in evidence.
Looking forward to the next ESP release. Hopefully, it’ll be a full-length album.

Hard Candy
Hard candy is chat room parlance for an attractive minor. In this case, 14-year-old Hayley Stark, who hooks up with 32-year-old photographer Jeff Kohlver online. They meet, go to Jeff’s house and then Hayley turns the tables on Jeff. The premise was interesting but the movie could have been much tighter. Director David Slade, who had previously directed music videos, consistently goes in for close-ups to heighten the claustrophobia and ratchet up the tension. A better script would have helped.
Hard Candy’s realistic setting eventually raises troubling questions about Hayley and ultimately leaves little to choose between her and Jeff.
Ellen Page did well to portray a 14-year-old’s mix of bravado and vulnerability, though that eventually turns out to be an act. Patrick Wilson was smooth enough to keep us guessing and even win our sympathy through most of the movie.
Still, kept thinking all the time that Takashi Miike’s Audition was superior. The horror flick, with its surreal atmosphere, tapped into man’s primal distrust and fear of beautiful women and/or was a feminist revenge fantasy. And nothing in Hard Candy comes close to the excruciating act of vengeance inflicted in Audition.

Cherry
Matt Thorne
This was not something I would normally pick up since it looked like the male equivalent of chick lit. Which is what: Lad rag? Homme tome? Dude book?
But I was intrigued by the fact that it was longlisted for the Man Booker prize, and that Calvino, Schnitzler and Kafka were bandied about in one review.
As it turned out, I finished Cherry in 2 days. It was easy to read and Thorne had set up an intriguing premise which kept one engaged till the end. The protagonist, Steve Ellis, is a teacher who has had a long dry spell in the romance department. All this changes when a representative from Your Perfect Woman shows up on his doorstep and promises Steve his perfect woman. Steve eventually meets her and she is as he specified, down to the name ‘Cherry.’ Questions of who Cherry is and what Your Perfect Woman is exactly soon give way to darker questions of how far one is willing to go for love, or even the illusion of it.
Nothing is fully revealed beyond a tantalizing coda, which keeps the mystery lingering after the book ends.

Mysterious Skin
Scott Heim
Something happened during the summer when he was eight that has dogged Brian Lackey his entire life. After a Little League game, he found himself coming to in the crawlspace beneath his house with no memory of what occurred in the previous hours. He becomes convinced that he was the victim of an alien abduction, but as his repressed memories begin to surface, he realises that the key to unlocking the past lies with Neil McCormick, fellow Little-Leaguer turned hustler. As the story builds towards the meeting between the two, Heim paints a powerful picture of the effect of abuse and of the different coping mechanisms it triggers. He manages to keep a measured tone that never descends into shrillness or preachiness, letting the story speak for itself.
Heim also keeps things interesting with an evocation of small-town Kansas, and by filtering the narrative through a variety of characters.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
Marina Lewycka
Reels you in from the get-go with a tantalisingly comic set-up of stubborn, love/lust-struck 84-year-old Nikolai Mayevskyj’s impending marriage to buxomy, gold-digging thirty-something Valentina from Ukraine. His estranged daughters, Nadezhda and Vera, soon team up to prevent this from taking place. The Mayevskyjs themselves are Ukrainian, but have settled down in the UK.
Having drawn one in, one is treated as a co-conspirator by Nadezhda, whose point of view grounds the novel. We share in her reminiscences of her mother, her outrage at her father’s behaviour and her need to learn about her family’s past. What begins as a comical story develops into something much more and eventually the long shadow of the atrocities of war and history, the resilience of the human spirit and the strong bonds of family are all revealed. In between, we get treated to a discourse on yes, a short history of tractors, translated from the Ukrainian.

The Campaign to Confer a Public Service Star on JBJ
What’s in a name? With a title such as ‘The Campaign to Confer a Public Service Star on JBJ,’ quite a bit. It was bound to raise certain expectations, and if the entire play turns out to be a mere sleight-of-hand, the audience is going to feel cheated. One could argue that this was the point, that the title and the expectations it engendered was really a comment about the power of certain words, about (real or imagined) boundaries and the preconceived notions an audience carries with it into a theater. But no one is going to enjoy being taken for a ride (unless it’s a superbly constructed one).

Part of the problem with the play was an indulgence in double-speak and nudge-nudge wink-wink. There were puns and allusions and dances-around-the-mulberry bush, and by the end of act one, I was left wondering if it was going to be all peep but no show. Tan Tarn How commented in the programme that ‘the craft of beating about the bush is part of the playwright’s arsenal too.’ Fair enough, but clearly, beating about the bush is not an easy craft to master.

So what was Wong gunning at exactly? She teases us with the prospect of a government conspiracy with regard to the JBJ campaign, tells us that what happens to David Lee (the student leader whose brainwave it was to mount the campaign) is not the result of one and then proceeds to present us with a conspiracy anyway. In X-files style, complete with clandestine meetings in a car park. At which point the play tipped dangerously close into the territory of farce.

Despite the murky whole, there were scenes that worked. In the first act, David Lee seeks to harness the power of the internet to rally people to his cause. Wong milks the mr brown episode (in which the on-line blogger is censured when his commentary is carried in a newspaper) for a number of laughs and even lampoons New Age hokey-ness in the process. Even the non-sequiturs were funny.

In the second act, Clara Tang, the bureaucrat “tasked to exercise damage control,” has a hilarious encounter with the Deputy Superintendent (DSP) of the police. This was where the political satirizing was sharpest. As the DSP put it, in the Old Singapore, things were clear since nothing was allowed. The problem with New Singapore and the loosening of constraints was the sudden abundance of grey areas. In the Old Singapore, a memorandum from the “powers that be” would have made clear what was to be done in the matter of David Lee’s case. In the New Singapore, one was not given instructions and yet could not run afoul of the powers that be since constraints, albeit loosened, were still in place. It was enough to make one curl up, hide under one’s desk and suck one’s thumb! This was an over-the-top moment that illustrated perfectly the maddening frustrations of negotiating this New Singapore for the bureaucrat (at heart).

Unfortunately, there were also the dud scenes to sit through. Was there really a need to parody the Singapore Idol auditions? It was a too-easy target (the singing! the judges!) without much of a pay-off.

The bifurcated structure of the play, with its focus on David Lee in the first act and Clara Tang in the second, meant that both actors had to take on a number of roles. Oei’s comic timing and excellent use of accents were most welcome, though the less sympathetic Clara proved to be a harder nut to crack. In contrast, Oliveiro’s David came off as rather bland, and he never seemed to fully inhabit the different roles.

Staging-wise, Heng kept things simple and a few props often successfully conveyed entire settings. However, there were a couple of questionable choices. The video projection was unnecessarily stating the obvious (eg. transition into evening) and served to detract from the play. It was also a strange decision to have Oei announcing the act and scene number, which constantly took the audience out of the play.

So the sum of the uneven parts did not coalesce into a coherent whole. The ending, a dance between David and Clara, is meant to evoke… what exactly? Are they “dancing on graves” as Clara mentioned? What died? The passing of Old Singapore? Clara’s loss of innocence? Was this meant to be a poignant moment between the two? If so, it was not earned, and the play ended, not inappropriately, on an odd, neither-here-nor-there moment.

(For The Flying Inkpot http://inkpot.com/theatre/06reviews/0812,campconfpublserv,bc.html)

No Day Off
Eric Khoo

“No Day Off charts four years in the life of Siti, a young woman who leaves her husband and baby boy in a remote village in Sulawesi to work as a maid in Singapore. The narrative unfolds through her perspective and captures her trials and tribulations as she works for three different families in Singapore.”

This should be compulsory viewing for all prospective maid-owners (such a possessive term!). You hire a gardener, you go to the doctor’s, but you own a maid, with all the unpleasant connotations of slavery that implies. Of human bondage huh? The scary thing is that this view of maids isn’t far off the mark for some people. How else to explain the abuses, physical, verbal and mental, that take place?
These are people driven by economic necessity to seek a better life for their families and themselves by working overseas. Didn’t our ancestors do the same? Where is our sense of empathy? If not basic human courtesy?
The movie is told from Siti’s point of view and we don’t see the faces of the different families. All the better, says co-writer Wong Kim Hoh, for the audience to ask whether I’m the bastard up there on the screen.

Homesick

The title Homesick refers to different things: a longing for home, and literally, being sick at home as the play is set in the SARS crisis of 2003. This suggests an exploration of the tension between two opposing impulses: longing for home, and being sick in/of it. Playwright Alfian Sa'at explores this and more. He proceeds to unpack this central dilemma with nine characters (including the absent paterfamilias) over ten days, the period of home quarantine imposed upon the Koh family.
The plot, briefly: the somewhat estranged Koh family gathers in Singapore from all corners of the world when the patriarch falls ill. When he is diagnosed as a suspected SARS case, the entire family is slapped with a home quarantine order. They are joined unexpectedly by a young woman whose appearance injects more secrets and lies into the already volatile mix. Over the course of the play, we get to learn about each character's history as secrets are unearthed and lies exposed.
This is an ambitious undertaking in both the scope of the story and the breadth of the issues covered. Homesick is really two plays, a family (melo)drama and a play of ideas about identity and belonging. It is to Alfian's credit that it feels like a largely coherent and convincing whole. One wishes, however, that there was more space for some of the ideas and themes to breathe, such as the prickly issue of racial prejudices which the mixed marriage between Marianne (sibling number two of five) and Manoj had stirred up.
The exploration of family dynamics and sibling rivalry was adroitly handled and had the ring of emotional truth. When Ma pulls out a secret photo album, Arthur realises that he was never the neglected middle child he had believed himself to be. Such moments of familial interaction and poignancy served to ground even the most potentially shrill and one-note characters, keeping them human and believable.
Kudos as well to director Jonathan Lim for his deft and unobtrusive direction. Given that the play clocked in at two and a half hours, pacing was of the utmost importance. Lim and the untiring ensemble cast kept the momentum going through each and every day of the ten-day quarantine. While all the actors pulled off the neat trick of standing out as individual characters and also coming together as a family/cast, Remesh Panicker's low-key affability and Neo Swee Lin's sweet matriarch with a spine of steel were particularly effective. There were also moments of visual wit, as when the entire family is wearing surgical masks at the dining table, with Ma urging the unmasked Cindy (the young woman who had arrived unexpectedly) to eat.
Interestingly enough, the most disturbing point in the play came from offstage - from the audience's reaction. When Daphne voices her frustration, saying that she does not want to live out one man's dream since doing so leaves no room for her own, and then proceeds to identify this man as Lee Kuan Yew, there was a collective intake of the audience's breath. It was as if the spectre of the bogeyman had been raised. How and when did our founding father turn into he-who-must-not-be-named, or more specifically, he-on-whom-aspersion-shall-not-be-cast? As a pointed comment on freedom of expression and OB markers (real or imagined), this was a moment that spoke volumes.
This scene attracted the most attention during the feedback session after the play, with attendant questions about censorship. While the MDA's approval of the play suggests a loosening up over freedom of expression in theatre, what was even more heartening was Alfian's response that he was not practising self-censorship. If anything, the reverse was true and he was pushing the envelope instead. Alfian added cheekily that the censoring should be left to the authorities; after all, they are the ones who get paid for it.
Alfian also claimed during the session that he was not into grandstanding and that he was more concerned with the integrity and credibility of the characters. Still, one cannot deny the baiting power of statements such as "Singapore is not a country" or that Singaporeans do not exist. This was soapbox rhetoric that was meant to provoke a reaction. But he was also scrupulous enough to provide multiple viewpoints on any one issue which he handled with aplomb by juggling the interactions of the various characters.
This was aided by the set design, which was essentially the interior of the Koh family house. The living room, kitchen and dining area, and bedrooms served to physically segregate the characters so that crucial exchanges could take place between two or three characters while major confrontations involving the entire cast played out downstage. For example, youngest son Patrick's struggle with his looming National Service commitment is examined from different angles, and in different spaces, in his separate interactions with his brother-in-law Manoj and newcomer Cindy.
Over the course of the play, the characters wrestle with so many fundamental questions: "Who am I?" "If my mother is Peranakan and my father speaks Hokkien, how does speaking Mandarin connect me to my roots?" "Where is home?" "What are my familial obligations?" "Should I stay or should I go?" Not every question is resolved, but the asking and debating is important. If we cannot define ourselves by answers, asking questions is at least a start.
As I think about the play, more questions loom. What does it say that the character who most strongly embraces Singapore and sees it as the land of opportunity is not from Singapore? What about those for whom staying or leaving is not a choice? How much say do we have in the construction of a national identity?
This was a most auspicious beginning to the inaugural Singapore Theatre Festival. It bodes well for the rest of the festival, for the continued existence of the festival, and, most importantly, for theatre to play a vibrant and pertinent role in Singapore.

(For The Flying Inkpot http://inkpot.com/theatre/06reviews/0802,home,bc.html)