interview by Lim Wei Sheng & Charissa Tang
What were the roots of your collaboration?
Effendy: Well, basically we just wanted to get together. A few years ago, at the M1 Fringe Festival, The Necessary Stage was putting up sideshows. We decided to put up the performance Pain of a Million Ants at various locations.
So how did you two come up with the idea of Circus?
Effendy: Initially when we were thinking of a title, we just sat together and thought up a random title together. We decided on Circus at that point in time, so our title was Circus — For Now, because we think that life is like a circus. We tried to make up the storyline on the poster (for the show) with everyone sitting in a circle and each contributing one word, then repeating the process again and again. However, this method did not work out.
Rizman: In the end we just tried to come up with different ideas and put them together, and that’s how we came up with the performance.
Effendy: The interesting thing about this …

presented by TheatreWorks, 3 – 5 April 2008
review by Ng Yi-Sheng
1.
First, there is the darkness. Then there is the body. A woman’s body, naked, opening up from a crouched huddle. Barely enough light to see. She moves tentatively, crossing the stage, circling herself. Moving.
Fragments of sentences across the tinted screen. I never dreamt. I am waiting. I try to forget. Then the pre-recorded voice of a man, speaking in Cantonese: It’s me. If I have an extra ticket, will you leave with me?
Next, a pool of light falls on a dress. The fabric is sharply angular, pleated. The woman approaches the dress. She puts it on. She repeats the sequence of motions, exploring the space.
Then the white outlines of a room appear on the dark screens behind her. The room transforms from a primitive sketch to a hyperreal phantasmagoria: an unending passageway of identical doors, a blue wallpapered room which slowly composes itself, each item of furniture built up from its metric components, suddenly losing their gravity, floating free around the performance space; then a landscape of rain.
She …

review by Richard Lord
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an amateur theatre company blessed with a flock of thespians eager to tread the boards must be in want of a play calling for a large cast. (I use that term “amateur” not as any indication of talent but of financial resources; if you are amateur, you don’t have to pay actors, so the more, the merrier.)
This stage adaptation of Jane Austen’s ever popular novel, Pride and Prejudice, is a favourite of acting schools around the English-speaking world, and it proved a rather good choice for ACSian Theatre, a troupe which is a mix of Asian-Chinese Junior College graduates, current students and faculty members. (This time around, the cast was, with but two exceptions, current students.)
It was a good choice for several reasons, the most obvious being its sizeable cast. Another reason is that Austen’s story presents a rather undemanding view of love which falls nicely into the emotional range of Singapore junior college students as it celebrates love overcoming a series of neatly placed obstacles. Then there is …

Getting Fucked
review by Zhuang Yisa
When a member of the audience is so angered by a production that he wants to walk out of the theatre less than half-way through it, it is often because this person feels insulted. He wants to say to the theatre-makers: do you think I am really that stupid?
What is unconscionable about Ng Yi-Sheng’s play, 251, is the treatment of its titular subject, pornstar Annabel Chong. (251 refers to the number of partners Chong performed with in one of her films.) The sense I got when I watched the show was that Annabel Chong functioned solely as a pretext to a campily conceived rant against the perceived flaws of Singaporean society. “Camp”, here, may perhaps be read exclusively with the connotation of trivialisation.
The point is not that that an Annabel Chong story and socio-political critique should remain mutually exclusive. Rather, what is displeasing about Ng’s play has to do with this following consideration: whatever happened to — for want of a better expression — the human aspect of Annabel Chong’s story?
What I got, and …