presented by Ho Tzu Nyen and Fran Borgia, 11 – 13 June 2008
review by Amos Toh

Based on critical essays by Marvin Rosenberg, Jonathan Goldberg and Wilson Knight, Ho Tzu Nyen and Fran Borgia’s The King Lear Project: A Trilogy attempted to eviscerate the difficulties of performing one of Shakespeare’s most contentious tragedies. Conceived on the scale of a precisely controlled spectacle, The Project spanned three nights at the Drama Centre, demanding a high level of commitment and investment to witness its full deconstruction. Paradoxically, this placed pressure on the artists to not only sustain a coherent theatrical dialogue throughout, but also ensure each show remained separately individual such that any theatregoer watching only one of the three plays would understand the events unfolding during that performance.
However, this responsibility was largely unfulfilled, especially during the third night, which raced into its deconstructionist agenda with minimal regard for new audiences. A tediously staged Question-And-Answer component–repeated five times to illuminate different perspectives on the staging of the concluding scene–compounded their bafflement and frustration.
While the trilogy’s intentions were noble–Ho and Borgia …

presented by The Substation, 18 – 19 April 2008
review by Amos Toh
The debut of Cake’s multi-sensory epic Nothing in April last year marked not only a brave and critical re-examination of director Natalie Hennedige’s artistic vision, but also a defining moment in Singapore theatre. Previously, Hennedige and her creative team could be likened to mad scientists, celebrated for their ingenuous methods, yet threatened by them. Though adept at fashioning exquisite theatre out of the mundane or unexpected, they were just as likely to lose their audience in the wake of dangerous solipsism. Nothing, a dreamlike pastiche of human relationships reflecting on death, love and longing, witnessed the coalescence of Hennedige’s characteristic energy and boldness with moments of haunting intimacy and introspection. Later that year, y grec reinforced Hennedige’s newfound restraint, delivering an enthralling interpretation of poetry on stage that reminded us of the play’s ability to go places inaccessible to other art forms.
Cake’s artistic development proves that the best experimental theatre ascribes some logic to its madness, heightening the audience’s sensitivity to the play while careful not …

Review by Richard Lord
For the Stage Club, Singapore’s oldest extant theatre company, this season’s black was Black Comedy. But the usual connotations of that term do not apply to the show the Stage Club served up most recently.
This Black Comedy is a deliciously clever tour-de-force by Peter Shaffer. Shaffer was part of that stampede of talented playwrights who made the London theatre such an exciting place in the 1960’s. (Though Shaffer’s own theatrical career was launched two years before the Swinging Sixties swung in, with the widely acclaimed Five Finger Exercise.) He is most famous for dark, serious dramas like Equus and Royal Hunt of the Sun, but also showed himself a deft hand at comedies such as this one.
But even in a light-relief piece such as Black Comedy, the young Shaffer was primed to flaunt his skills as a dramatist. Here Shaffer hauled out the tired old workhorse of the theatrical farce and revitalised it by turning basic theatrical rules and conventions inside-out.
The most basic of theatrical rules is, simply, that the audience should be able …

Richard Lord
For a long time, Romania was known as one of those small European countries (well, relatively small) that regularly produced more history than it could consume locally. Then, over several months stretching from the end of 1989 through early 1990, this production was stepped up considerably and Romania suddenly became a lab for the human soul in extremis. Towards the end of this period, British playwright Caryl Churchill, director Mark Wing-Davey and a team of Romanian theatre students from London’s Central School of Drama, went off to Romania to survey the scene and get inspiration for a play on the situation there. They observed, spoke to a wide range of Romanians, workshopped and wrote. So, a good deal of that stormy history gets spilled into the resulting play, Mad Forest.
Mad Forest is a strange, intriguing piece of theatre. For one thing, the two central antagonists in this drama are never actually seen — except as caricatures served up by other characters. These key villains are the late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauescu and his loving consort and partner-in-crime, Elena.
Just to …

a project by Ho Tzu Nyen and Fran Borgia
review by Ng Yi-Sheng
What are we watching?
Why are we watching?
These are questions that Singapore theatre does not ask enough. We’ve become conservative in an age of commercial success, relying on revivals, imports and sensationalism to sell our tickets, and when we do experiment, we seldom ask more than, “Who am I (based on my national/generational/sexual identity)?” or “What can I do with this cool multimedia/puppetry technology?”
Enter Ho Tzu Nyen and Fran Borgia. In 2006, the two artists proposed a work for development under the Esplanade Theatre Studio’s Sparks 4 programme, which operates with an aim of “Challenging Set Notions of Performance”. They began with a simple premise: instead of yet another dramatic rendition of a Shakespearean classic, why not attempt a staging of a critical essay of a play?

The Workshop Presentation of “King Lear: the Avoidance of Love” thus begins as a literal performance of excerpts from the text of the philosopher Stanley Cavell’s “The Avoidance of Love”1 — first as a voiceover during a video collage of different film versions of …

Projek Suitcase 2006: Police + Thief
by Teater Ekamatra
23 - 25 March 2006, 8pm
The Substation Theatre
Teater Ekamatra’s latest production Police + Thief is a doublebill of scathing and scatological, social critique of the underlying madness beneath our everyday lives on this island we call home. With the general elections around the bend, Police + Thief perhaps acquires added significance …

National Museum of Singapore | 6 - 29 December 2006
I was murdered in the National Museum. I was playing “Day of the Figurines”, an interactive art project by the UK artists’ collective Blast Theory, installed for the National Museum’s Opening Festival, 2-31 …

Everything but the Brain
Action Theatre
Esplanade Theatre Studio| 18 - 28 January 2007
It is not difficult to imagine why this play has been so unanimously praised by reviewers and well-liked in equal measure by theatre-goers. For the former, Jean Tay’s script, in the context of the local theatre scene, offers a new way — through its …

Presented by the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2007
Esplanade Theatre Studio,
2 & 3 Feb 2007, 8pm
Performed by Daniel K, Bani Haykel, Cyril Wong, Neo Hong Chin
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
1.
The mystery was revealed. We are under the mystery.
2.
In that moment when the entire theatre was bathed in sepia, one became acquainted with a certain idea of salvation: grim, but the only kind we can ever imagine in the obscurity …