Lights go up slowly and bring us to a stripped-down Parisian scene: faux-stone steps ambled up to a landing, a few metres north of a wooden park bench, an old street light, and a wrought-iron café table flanked by two wrought-iron chairs. The layout is simple but rather effective. We are at the DBS Arts Centre, but it has become possible to think that we are in a French corner of the city. Well, Singapore prides itself on its multiculturalism, does it not? One of the things I find most compelling about multiculturalism in this uniquely patchwork society is how it succeeds best when it does not try too hard. That is when it lets multicultural aspects blend together easily, naturally almost.

Case in point: the recent production by Singtheatre of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well in Paris. This production, headed by a Frenchwoman long resident in Singapore, presented by a cast made up of two local Chinese, and two ‘foreign talents’ (one an Australian, the other British). The show celebrates the songs and sensibility of Jacques Brel, himself a case study in tortured multiculturalism as a francophone Fleming growing up in Brussels and growing out in Paris. (Belgium, of which Brussels is the capital, is more of a legal fiction than a country, a society split between Dutch-speaking Flemings, or Flemish, and French-speaking Walloons. The two sides are noted for their deep-seated mutual disdain.)

This was the second production by the fledgling Singtheatre, and after showing much promise with their début show (a loose songbook of hits by French chanteuse Edith Piaf), the troupe fulfilled that promise with an even more successful homage to the more acerbic Brel. This musical anthology is one of the most famous and most successful revues of the last half-century. Brel originally opened off-Broadway in 1968 and became an instant sensation, introducing a little known but brilliant singer-songwriter to the English-speaking world. While there is no through-line plot linking all the diverse songs, each number tells a tight, engaging story of its own.

The title poked fun at his lack of name-recognition at that time, playing on the convenient disappearance and later sighting of famous people in that period. (Such as Nazi war criminals who had managed to slip out of Europe as the Third Reich crumbled.) Sadly, within a few years, the highly talented Jacques Brel was not so well and by 1978, he was no longer even alive: a long-time heavy smoker, he succumbed to lung cancer at the chillingly young age of 49. But the songs and this successful revue which showcased some of the best of them lived on in numerous revivals of this show.

(An interesting footnote: For several years after the singer’s demise, the show was staged under different titles–such as the defiant Jacques Brel Lives!–to avoid the macabre humour that the original heading might evoke. But in some places, the revue became an untouchable, evidently because producers felt it in bad taste to stage a show with that title and a dead subject. As the years have passed since Brel’s death, the show has again become popular and reverted to its original name.)

In 2006, the roster of songs was changed slightly, and it is this newer version of Brel that we were treated to last month. And treated is, indeed, the proper term as both the show itself and the production that introduced it to Singapore were first-rate.

Many of the songs in Jacques Brel reflect the complexity of its subject: Brel was, from all accounts, an intriguing personality who embodied many seeming contradictions. An ethnic Flemmard who primarily spoke French in a country where language tensions and loyalties constantly threaten to tear the bantam nation apart; a somewhat devout Roman Catholic who delighted in criticising the Church and its hierarchy and regularly sidestepped Church teaching on morality, especially in the sexual sphere; a man proud of his Flemish heritage, yet appalled by the conservatism and narrow-mindedness he felt infected many of his fellow Flemmards; a devoted family man who lived largely apart from his family and engaged in numerous extra-marital affairs–this was the man who put together some of the most compelling songs of mid-century in any Western language.

Singtheatre’s edition of Brel is a stylish example of how all local theatre companies could and should approach this type of show. I am not speaking here simply of the quality of the production, but of the assured ways casting and presentation were handled. The abundantly talented quartet who made up the central cast included George Chan, Leigh McDonald, Tony McGill and Emma Yong. In addition to strong singing and acting skills, the four performers brought strong stage personalities to bear on the festivities. Producer-director Nathalie Ribette seems to have assigned Brel’s songs on the basis of these personalities as much as the quality of the singing voices.

For instance, George Chan,with his granite-wall cheekbones, strong jaw and wild, energetic dancing was perfect as the “singing-dancing Spanish toreador” in “The Bulls.” It is not fair to call Chan a great dancer, but his intense stage presence and thundering feet made the song a big crowd-pleaser. Chan could also probably have excelled with the Brel standard, “Amsterdam,” but that classic was turned over to the older and more physically padded Tony McGill. The effect suggested this was someone with a lot of experience of the port city who had seen the town in different times, under various guises. More, as with so many of the numbers in this Singtheatre production, there was here the sense that the performers were not simply singing songs but telling a part of their own life stories. But as powerful as Tony was in this rendition of “Amsterdam,” he was helped along by the other members of the cast, who played vital subsidiary roles.

The revised show now opens with “Ça Va,” a song about the devil dropping in on the earth to survey the situation here–and being rather pleased with what he finds. The song (which was not even included in the original show) is quintessential Brel: a lively, jaunty number where sardonic wit shapes a cynicism born of wounded idealism–and the result is thoroughly winning. This song has also taken on increased relevance in our world; a reason, perhaps, for its inclusion here. The first half then proceeds in a nicely paced march to the powerful “Amsterdam”, which is one of Brel’s two or three most famous numbers.

The show closes with another of Brel’s two most famous numbers—“If We Only Have Love.” This song’s lyrics are both uplifting and hopelessly facile. But what is truly interesting about this song, which could have served as an anthem for the Flower Generation, is that it was written almost a decade before the Flower Generation bloomed. More, the music is so compelling that you really want to believe its message–unlike most of the late 60’s songs, which typically yoked facile lyrics to saccharine tunes.

If he had a somewhat naïve view of solving the world’s social and political problems, Brel had a very mature outlook on love, as seen in “Song for Old Lovers.” In the Singtheatre edition, this number was handled delicately and beautifully in a duet featuring Tony McGill and Leigh McDonald. Again, the two voices and two personalities were used splendidly to catch all the emotional contours and shadows of this number; providing a memorable and moving little story. Emma Yong, whose stage personality often suggests both vulnerability and resilience, brought these elements together to offer a quite strong take a “Ne Me Quitte Pas” (in English, “Don’t Leave Me”), Yong next appeared, in nerdish specs, in “Timid Frieda” and proved perfect for that deceptively complex role as well.

Director Ribette also showed nice attention to detail in that latter piece. While Yong commanded the stage with her singing, the other three performers held the background and read newspapers: athletic George Chan skimmed “L’Equipe,” a sports paper; Tony read the left-liberal “Le Monde”; while a coy Leigh McDonald dipped into “Le Canard Enchainé,” the Gallic voice of political satire.

This revue also includes several good examples of Brel’s social and political songs, and the Singtheatre team also gave us strong renditions of these. “Next” is a funny but highly vitriolic song about military induction ceremonies, which was treated to a fittingly energetic and rough-hewn version here. “The Middle Class,” meanwhile, is an energetic drinking song cast as a duet with the two guys, a sort of thinking man’s Brechtian dig. George Chan and Tony McGill delivered the number very well, moving convincingly from heavily fuelled young radicals to middle-aged beer buddies who have themselves become slightly bourgeois, and regretful about it.

Other highlights of the evening included “Brussels,” a song about Brel’s grandparents, with Leigh McDonald sparkling as the main singer; “Old Folks,” a touching, painfully true number delivered here at just the right emotional pitch; “Fanette” a street-corner chanson with great twists and turns, each of them expertly manoeuvred by Tony McGill; an energetic version of “Carousel” imaginatively staged; and the haunting “Alone.” At the end of that latter song (which began with other cast members present), Tony McGill sat solitary at the single café table, staring out forlornly, wrapped in a palpable loneliness, which played beautifully into the song’s closing line: “You’re alone, we’re alone.”

But this is not to say that all the other numbers were in any way afterthoughts or secondary efforts. While this production offered a number of peaks, there were no real valleys marring the overall enjoyment. This review could go on for another thousand words or so if I gave deserved appreciation to every number here and the way the Singtheatre ensemble handled them. Suffice it to say that there were no truly weak numbers in the whole evening. Kudos must also go to the five-piece band, which delivered the music underpinning to the singers. This highly talented quintet comprised accordionist Daniel Blayo; guitarist Daniel Chay; Chris Nolan on piano; Brandon Wong on double bass; and Lee Lin Chow on drums. Nolan also got the chance to show off his fine singing voice when he stepped downstage to spin off “Bachelor’s Dance,” a number that seems covered in syrupy romanticism until one notices the delicious strain of satire running through it. Nolan handled the romanticism well, but he could have ratcheted up the satiric tones a bit.

Of course, the band also demonstrated that easy, natural blend of talents that showcases Singapore multiculturalism at its finest. In fact, the Singtheatre’s edition of Jacques Brel could serve as a kind of therapy for local shows that strain at achieving multiculturalism as well as local companies which strain both their budgets and their talent pools putting on large-scale musicals. A classy, highly polished production (the set design of Hella Chan and lighting design design by Suven Chan contributed in no small way to the look and feel of the show) that proved how appealing a relatively small-scale musical can be–this Brel was rather brilliant, a tidy cache of well-tended gems.

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 demonstrated a keen critical eye; and certainly, with a production length of over six hours, it was painstakingly detailed–the execution was often belaboured, as it sought novel ways of transposing literary and performance criticism to the stage with little consideration of whether they were suited to the live and shared experience of theatre.

On its first night, Lear Enters, this long-gestating epic began promisingly enough, fashioning theatre out of the theatrically unseen. The artists conveyed wry, sparkling observations on the art of performing, putting both crew and audience through several agonising, but ultimately illuminating auditions for the lead role. Providing comprehensive coverage of Rosenberg’s archetypal Lears were Remesh Panicker, K. Rajagopal and Gerald Chew, who played variations of the role as God, Madman and Everyman respectively.

Ho and Borgia’s realistic portrayal of the auditioning process plumbed the actors’ offstage interactions for fresh insight on how characterisation could shape cast dynamics. In some of the most electrifying productions, theatre or otherwise, actors inhabit their roles so deeply they often find it difficult to shake them off. Inevitably, reality and the stage overlap, often with profound personal and emotional impact on the actors. Felicity Huffman as a pre-operative transsexual in indie hit Transamerica, for example, was so engaged in her character’s gender transformation that she began to act and talk differently, until her husband William H. Macy finally “told me not to call in that voice. It was weird for him.”¹

Similarly, we witnessed, through the actors’ subtle tics, gestures and mannerisms, the unfolding of their characters in real life. Panicker manoeuvred the other actors with teasing authority, interspersing his directions with wisecracks like, while donning a ghastly black fur coat, “I’m more King Kong than King Lear.” One sensed with Rajagopal, however, a certain detachment from his surroundings. Eyes half-hidden under a beanie, he spoke in a sparse monotone, and radiated nervous energy during the performance talkback. The atmosphere of the audition room also changed considerably when a gum-chewing, laidback Chew came on stage. Although cautious to include everyone in pre-audition discussion, he, like his character, ultimately favoured Shu An Oon, who played Cordelia, in making several wardrobe and prop decisions.

The auditions themselves mined several outrageous and strangely effective ways of expressing what Rosenberg called Lear’s “inner dialectic,” where “the most powerful Lear needs help as he enters…the mad…will have a flash of lucidity…the sanest…a tremor of doubt of his soundness.”²

Particularly memorable was Rajagopal’s rendition of madman Lear, whose wildly entertaining entrance was more tribal dance than regal procession. Later on, Tan Kheng Hua, as Goneril, smothered her face in Lear’s chest, enlivening her sycophantic tribute with hilarious sexual frisson. This madcap setting, juxtaposed against the sobering climax of the scene, was an incisive reminder of how fury is so often a shade away from madness.

However, there were creeping annoyances in Lear Enters that became major obstacles in latter parts of the Project. The audition setting, for example, was a perplexing evocation of a film set, with cameras panning the theatre and director Kaylene Tan yelling “Cut!” after every scene. And why did Tan adopt an unyielding, Miranda Priestly-like persona, which not only succumbed to stale directorial stereotypes, but also lent unnecessary frigidity and tension to the show? Another character hard to follow was producer Paul Rae, planted in the audience as the production’s Deus Ex Machina. Issuing criticism between auditions, his lines adhered closely to the dense academic syntax of Rosenberg’s essay, and consequently leave no lasting impression on the audience’s experience of Lear’s entrance.

These problems manifested more acutely in the second performance, a misguided attempt at elucidating Goldberg’s Dover Cliff and the Conditions of Representation. Mostly, Ho and Borgia entertained indulgent readings of the three most difficult scenes of the play–namely Lear’s railing against the storm, Gloucester’s blinding, and Edgar’s theatrical deception–with often cringe-worthy repercussions.

Dover Cliff seemed to have no unifying purpose except to push the limits of artistic interpretation to ludicrous extremes. With heightened (and over-rehearsed) involvement of the production crew, the storm scene was staged to pulsing disco lights and a “funeral march of man-made music,” devolving into predictable farce. In the middle of the play, a bewildering discussion between the actors on which instrument to use for the blinding ensued, trivialising the potency of Goneril and Cornwall’s cruelty, and Gloucester’s suffering. To complete our wretched experience, an overly enthusiastic James Page decided to embellish his set with a large black penis spouting water, apparently to illustrate the sexual undertones of Shakespeare’s imagery. These elaborate stage experiments amounted to nothing more than a tedious compendium of antics and miscues that was long on banalities, and short on insight.

Fortunately, Ho and Borgia managed to salvage the play by the end with a sparse rendition of dialogue between Edgar and Gloucester on voiceover in a pitch dark theatre. This provided a much needed counterpoint to the bizarre theatrics on display a few minutes ago. It was sustained outside the theatre later on as a taut and intensely silent portrait of bodies caught midway in action, capturing tragedy as it was about to strike.

The final performance, The Lear Universe, was a fitting mix of the production’s best moments and most dismal flaws. A sterling rendition of King Lear’s tragic conclusion opened the show, followed by an elaborately staged curtain call. After introducing an extended cast, Ben Slater, our “moderator of the evening” sat them down for a post-show dialogue. But they would not take real questions from the audience, and kept enigmatically silent until a planted audience member piped up to “break the silence,” prompting the cast to launch into an adaptation of the play’s conclusion, interspersed with commentary from a variety of critical sources. These false endings were repeated for the next two hours, allegedly to invoke Wilson Knight’s comment that “(the play’s) philosophy is continuously purgatorial.”

Thankfully, this repetitious performance allowed a few moments of dynamic commentary to break through, including a flawlessly-timed introductory sequence illuminating the conflicted morality of Lear’s universe, and a charming enactment of Nahum Tate’s happy ending, cavalierly appended to the tragedy.

Unfortunately, these achievements were eclipsed by the play’s frustrating sense of contrivance, borne out of the artists’ glib expectation that their audience would find the criticism more urgent than its presentation. Planting “actors” into the audience may have had some conceptual value, but having them engage in stilted debate on the semantics of the Quattro and Folio versions to jumpstart the production’s own assessment of its merits was simply dull and uninspired. Such gimmickry reached its peak when a teenager emerged from the stalls to contend that perhaps King Lear aimed for a “representative ideal of its own representation.” There was very little point in grounding the play in a Question-and-Answer format if it was devoid of the very elements that crystallised dialogue: spontaneity, interaction, and real questions. Very often, these scripted “questions”contained their own thinly-veiled answers that provoked Rae, Tan and some of the cast into more elaborate pontification on stage, prescribing instead of facilitating discussion. It was this hellish cycle of didacticism that seriously marred the performance.

Early on in The Lear Universe, I remember that Rae had ominously proclaimed, “There is only one voice to be heard, and that is one’s own.” This gave me the worrisome hint that Ho and Borgia did not entirely know how to boil this wealth of material down into a play as they were too caught up in their own voices to let alternative voices in.

Amos Toh has contributed poetry and theatre reviews to The Straits Times and online arts magazines The Flying Inkpot and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. He was also a judge for the 2008 Life! Theatre Awards.

1. Balfour, Brad. The Transformation of Felicity Huffman. popentertainment.com. March 2006. [↩]
2. Rosenberg, Marvin. “Lear Enters.” The Mask of King Lear. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992. [↩]

LWC: We all repeat ourselves, but some of us worry about it more than others. Perhaps that’s the difference between you and I. I think that you worry more than I do — about repeating yourself, among other things. Sure, I repeat myself too; I am making a small career of repeating myself when it comes to writing about your work, and about your worrying. I like to think it goes with the territory. Over the years that we’ve known each other, over the years that I’ve been engaging with your work, watching and listening to your films, lectures, performances and installations, again and again, and then attempting to speak back to them via my own writing — this whole process lends itself to revisits, reiterations, and revisions. Much like in your work: you have these central preoccupations, which you return to over and over again; preoccupations which are evident in your latest Lear productions.

But before we talk about the upcoming performances, a few things about the first one, as a way of introduction. Early in 2007, along with collaborator Fran Borgia, you co-directed King Lear — The Avoidance of Love, a live audition/ film shoot/ lecture/ theatre performance. Let me just say that again, or rather unpack it all. The project was framed as a film, but enacted as a play. In making the film/ play, you asked your actors to come to the theatre and prepare to audition for certain roles in Lear. That was the gist of their instructions. Not much discussion, let alone any rehearsals, of what might actually unfold during the live performance. The actors know their lines, of course; after all, it is Shakespeare’s Lear. On the one hand, what we get is a theatrical performance where actors pretend to audition for a film shoot of Lear. On the other hand, there is no “real” film shoot. The audition is the thing itself. And unlike most auditions, this one is done in front of a theatre audience. And that’s what’s being filmed. There are no second takes.

Early in the performance, the first actor called to audition, Janice Koh, introduces herself as Janice — the actors all play themselves — then does the speech that Lear’s eldest daughter, Goneril, says to the king. It’s from that famous scene where he summons everyone to court, and before handing over the throne to his daughters, first demands their declarations of love. Janice nails her lines. And, then, the two actors playing the “film producer” and the “film director”, they both say: that was a splendid performance. So good in fact, that they’d like to see it again, and done exactly the same. Janice obliges, and to the delight of both the pretend and real producers, directors, stage crew and audience in the theatre, she nails her lines again, a near perfect reproduction of her first performance. What happens to Janice doesn’t quite happen to the other actors auditioning — they’re not asked to repeat themselves so quickly in succession — but those same lines are said so many times, in so many variations. Watching the play, one loses count how many times the Goneril, Regan and Cordelia speeches were made.

But your Avoidance of Love is not just a repetition of Lear, one of the most repeated plays in the history of theatre, or a play about repetition, or even an unrepeatable performance about repetition (since the actors cannot repeat their not knowing how the play/ film will unfold). It’s also a rehearsal of a famous essay on Lear, by the American philosopher Stanley Cavell. In fact, the title, “The Avoidance of Love”, is taken from the name of Cavell’s essay. And your character of the producer, played by theatre-maker and theorist Paul Rae, spends a lot of time expounding Cavell’s arguments.

Cavell wants to offer an alternative interpretation. Why does Lear abdicate his throne, and to such obviously scheming and conniving daughters? Typical interpretations attribute this to some lack of clear thinking on his part. But Cavell suggests: “My hypothesis will be that Lear’s behaviour in this scene is explained by … the same motivation which manipulates the tragedy throughout its course, from the … abdication, through the storm, blinding, evaded reconciliations, to the final moments: by the attempt to avoid recognition, the shame of exposure, the threat of self-revelation.” For Cavell, the avoidance of love is what motivates Lear. Perhaps we can return later to Cavell, but let’s talk now about the new projects. There isn’t just one more Lear, but a series, and they all, like Avoidance of Love, are entitled after important essays on the play.

HTN: For me, Lear is a profound investigation of what “performance” and “play-acting” mean. Therefore, it is a self-reflexive work of art, which, as you know, is the kind of art that I seem drawn to. The three chapters of what we’re calling The Lear Project are each named according to a canonical essay about Lear. These new chapters follow in the trajectory of our previous presentation of The Avoidance of Love. This is because we believe that it is, today, as interesting to stage a version of Lear as it is to stage an essay about Lear. Like The Avoidance of Love, which was an audition for the roles of the three daughters of Lear, all three chapters of The Lear Project are designed to exist around the text of Lear, rather than to perform the play directly. Hence, an array of performative situations that surround the “proper” presentation of a play — situations such as the audition, the rehearsal, the post-show discussion — these situations, you could say, take the place of the play.

LWC: This has become a recurrent strategy of yours: to substitute the making of the thing for the thing itself (one of my favourite of your works, Episode 3 of your documentary series, 4 X 4 — Episodes of Singapore Art, is ostensibly a documentary on a famous performance art work by Tang Da Wu, but instead we get a “behind the scenes” look at the documentary as it’s being made). Besides this, however, in your various Lears — from Avoidance to Project — you could almost say that this canonical play is being re-placed by canonical essays about it. So this time you come at it from both sides: not only does the “making of” replace the thing, but the “talking about” replaces the thing too. Could you tell us more about the essays that figure in the Project?

HTN: The first of the three parts of the Project, Lear — Lear Enters is based on an essay of the same name by Marvin Rosenberg on the canonical performances of King Lear by some of the greatest actors of the stage. Then Lear — Dover Cliff and the Conditions of Representation is based on an essay, likewise of the same name, by Jonathan Goldberg. Goldberg’s essay is considered one of the most important post-structuralist readings of the representational limits of Lear. And finally, Lear — The Lear Universe is based on an essay by the great Shakespearean scholar, Wilson Knight. In that essay, Knight attempts to provide a unified metaphysical image of the world inhabited by Lear.

LWC: What does it mean to say that “today, it is as interesting to stage a version of Lear as it is to stage an essay about the play”. Or don’t you mean it the other way around? That it’s as interesting to stage a play about an essay on Lear, as it is to stage of version of the play? What I hear you saying is that it’s almost impossible to stage Lear again; anyone contemplating that task must feel like a character from Samuel Beckett: what is there left to say? Though, of course, the whole thing about Beckett characters is that this “nothing new to say” never stops any of them from going on and on — it’s as if the nothing new is the very condition of their speech. To stage a performance of Lear anew is a daunting task; one can only repeat what’s already been said — how can another Lear be interesting?

The literary critic Harold Bloom has argued that Shakespeare “invents the human”. With apologies to Bloom, it’s as if Shakespeare has pride of place in being something of the origin of English theatre, and yet, he also represents a climax, its end-point. Hence we are at something of an impasse. The condition of modern and contemporary theatre is that everything else after Shakespeare, in English, at any rate, is just a footnote, or commentary. That is, if you think the Bard is like Plato, of whom Alfred North Whitehead said: “the safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”. To stage Shakespeare yet again is already to be consigned to making mere commentary on him. If that’s the case, then why not let’s make this commentary explicit. Let’s stage plays about commentary on Shakespeare.

HTN: Well, the scholars, historians and critics who interest me most are those whom I feel most powerfully reconstruct the objects they explain. Strong interpretations always miss the “mark” — or more specifically, they go over it. What interests me in interpretations is precisely this “swerve”, an interpretation which opens up and constructs new possibilities.

LWC: A question is: does an essay make interesting theatre? Or, rather, is there a public for such a mode of theatre?

HTN: I want to stretch the limits of what it means to make theatre, to be theatrical. I also want to try and disseminate certain scholarly and critical intelligences to a wider public sphere — to rescue them from academic specialisation. This interest began when I started doing the lecture performance 2 South Seas, 3 Chairs, 4 Suits, where I attempted to present art history dramatically and accessibly, while hopefully maintaining its subtlety and complexity. However, let me clarify — I don’t think art or literary history, theory and criticism “in themselves” need rescuing of any sorts. If anything I believe them to be more complex and sophisticated than ever. They are probably immensely healthier than I am [ … laughs]. But where I live and work, in Singapore, the reality is that these forms of intelligences barely have a foothold in the “narrow-cast” of academia, let alone the “public” where they are almost totally inconsequential.

A friend of mine, who is a theatre director based in Brussels, once said to me: “it does not matter if you do not like the theatre. It is more important that the theatre likes you.” It’s a paraphrase of something Jean-Luc Godard said about cinema. What my friend means is that it doesn’t matter if an audience member does not like the theatre which he or she finds “difficult”. More important is that contemporary theatre likes its viewers so much, it believes that they are intelligent and willing enough to engage in deep conversation with it.

LWC: What of the question of appropriation, which you don’t raise explicitly, but which lingers in the background. There are many appropriations at stake: within the play itself, and in the contexts of Lear and its multiple publics, from the schools to the university. Who can stage Lear? Who can play Lear? I can anticipate European audiences and commentators fixing on the question of Asian actors playing Lear. Although, personally, that’s something that I don’t really think is all that interesting, or rather, it’s not the most interesting thing for me to talk about.

HTN: Of course, this is an issue I’ve thought about, this use of “Asian” actors, but like you, it’s not what’s most interesting to me about the project. I make no apologies for coming from Singapore and working through Singapore, but I think I have something more to say than speaking just about my Singaporean-ness.

LWC: Let’s get back to talking specifically about the Project — tell us more about some of its parts, which you are staging at this year’s Singapore Arts Festival.

HTN: Like Lear — The Avoidance of Love, all three parts will feature a minimal, skeletal cast and crew, around which will float a great number of other Singaporean theatrical icons and talents “passing through” the stage on each night of the performance. And also like Lear — The Avoidance of Love, each of these performances cannot be repeated, although they are each carefully woven and dramatically interwoven into a “live” film shoot. Hence, like The Avoidance of Love, each of the Project performances will enjoy an afterlife in the form of a film.

The first performance, Lear – Lear Enters, will be an audition for the role of King Lear by three of the better known Singaporean male actors. Each of these actors will make their entry into the first scene of the play, where they will perform with a fixed cast. There, these three will find each of their gestures subject to the most intensive kinds of scrutiny, analysis and judgement, augmented by the power of video’s capacity for the close-up, the slow-motion and the freeze frame. One of these Lears will be chosen to continue on the second performance, along with the permanent crew and cast (the Director, the Producer and the Assistant).

The second performance, Lear – Dover Cliff and the Conditions of Representation, takes the form of a rehearsal, presentation-cum-discussion with the “multi-media” designers of the play. Structured around three scenes that have often been considered “un-presentable”, the designers are constantly confronted by the demanding Producer and Director into transforming their designs. As a result, the performance takes the form of three different stage set-ups for each of the three “impossible scenes”.

Taken as a whole, the Project is a sustained inquiry not only into the text of Lear, but also the limits and boundaries of theatre. We hope that Lear Enters is understood as a way to showcase the intelligence and craft of Singapore’s finest acting talents — I say that unironically — as well as an exercise in training the audience’s perceptual attentiveness to the minutest subtleties of acting. Dover Cliff and the Conditions of Representation becomes a way to engage not only with the profound themes of blindness, self-reflexivity and representation within the text, but also an engagement with the concrete infrastructure of every performance: sound, set and lighting, as well as the invisible crew that are responsible for their operation. The final part of the Project, Lear – The Lear Universe, in turn deals with the question of interpretation and reception, and ultimately ties the theme of multiplicity in the reading of the text into fissures within the text itself.

Interestingly, Lear was not a single play, but rather two versions written by Shakespeare that combined a number of pre-existing texts; there is the [F] or Folio version and the [Q] or Quattro versions. The history of the play’s performance is fascinating. For one stretch of this performance history, close to 173 years, the Lear that was presented to the English public was neither the [F] nor [Q] versions but rather a version re-written by Nathaniel Tate, who transformed the unredeemed savagery of Shakespeare to a sentimental version capped by a happy ending — neither Lear nor Cordelia dies, and Cordelia was married happily ever after to Edgar, and so on.

LWC: I’d be interested to see your take on the Nathaniel Tate Lear.

HTN: [Laughs … ] Maybe after we’re done with the Project.

LWC: It’s been said — by scholars as well as theatre-makers — that King Lear is one of the most challenging roles open to any (male) stage actor. And this is because Shakespeare has written a role that is contrary, contradictory, and paradoxical. To borrow the words of the poet Walt Whitman, the role of Lear is “large — it contains multitudes”.

HTN: The challenge of playing Lear is, for the actor, determined from the very moment he enters the stage. For whether this Lear would be a titanic force of nature, a powerful king, a senile old man, a spent force, or a kindly father — all this would be determined by how the actor enters upon the stage: with authority, with majestic strides, a mad giggle, a limp, or as a “normal” man. Does he wear a beard? Does he hunch? Does he carry a walking stick? Does he carry a sword? Does he wear a crown? Does he come hand in hand with his daughters? Does he kick the fool around? Does accept help? Does he shout? Does he whisper? Does he whimper? And each of these decisions will in turn profoundly affect the entirety of how the play is to be interpreted. Is Lear a family drama, an allegory of politics, a metaphysical poem about the return to nature, a profound essay about love, or a savage diatribe against the blindness of man? Each of these meanings and narratives — we will attempt to show — is always already embedded, enfolded, into the smallest gesture of the actor playing Lear, when he enters upon the stage, to divide his three kingdoms up between his three daughters.

LWC: I want to ask you about the so-called “un-presentable” scenes that figure in Dover Cliff and the Conditions of Representation.

HTN: The “un-presentable” nature of King Lear almost always concerns three keys scenes within the text. First is the scene where Gloucester (often interpreted as Lear’s thematic double in the play) is literally, and brutally blinded by Cornwall. This scene is considered so savage and tasteless, that it was for many years excluded from performances.

The second has to do with the blinded Gloucester attempting to “smell/ His way to Dover”, or rather the Dover cliff, the edge of Britain, in order to commit suicide. Along the way he meets his son, Edgar, whom he had earlier, blindly wronged. Disguised as “Poor Tom”, Edgar pretends to lead his father to the Dover Cliff, and through the power of his vocal descriptions, creates in blind Gloucester not only the illusion that he had indeed reached Dover, but also that he had somehow survived a suicide attempt. It is obvious why such a scene is considered “un-presentable” on a stage. Not only does it stretch the limits of plausibility, but the literal presentation of the scene is likely to look absurd and comical, against the grain of the tragic narrative. However, I’d like to believe that this scene is a profound meditation on Theatre. For Edgar is himself like a director leading his own father on, in a play within a play, a play which is also a self-reflexive investigation of the limits of visual representation (and blindness), the power of language, and above all the power of the imagination — for Dover exists only in words, in the minds of Gloucester and the audiences.

The third scene that creates major difficulties for staging is the famous storm in which Lear was caught. The image of Lear stripped both to his mental and physical barest in a tragic “return” to nature is crucial to the play. It reveals at once the physical vulnerability of Lear and the internal fragility of his mind. However, this scene is almost impossible to present — for practical reasons. To suggest the full force of the storm by means of visual and audio effects almost inevitably detract from the performance of the actor and the audibility of the text. Yet, the opposite strategy of minimising the external storm to focus on the storm manifested by the Lear’s lines is often equally unpersuasive — for it cannot evoke strongly enough the vulnerability of Lear before the forces of the external world.

So part 2 of the Project once again attempts to expand the audience’s sensitivity to the nuances and intricacies of theatre, this time focusing on the various elements of stage design. It’s also a small tribute to intelligence and work of crew members normally behind the scene’.

LWC: Thank you, Tzu Nyen, for this conversation.

HTN: No, Weng, thank you. Perhaps we can close by returning to the Cavell essay, and quoting from him. In “The Avoidance of Love”, he makes a comparison between Lear’s tragedy and our own — the “our” here referring to the “us” of modern society. With Lear, and classic tragedy, the hero is tragic because while he is capable of love, the conditions of that love are not possible. “People capable of such love could have moved mountains; instead, it has caved upon them. One moral of such events is obvious: if you would avoid tragedy, avoid love; if you cannot avoid love, avoid integrity; if you cannot avoid integrity, avoid the world; if you cannot avoid the world, destroy it.” In contrast with this “classical chain”, the tragedy of our times differs “not in its conclusion but in the fact that the conclusion has been reached without passing through love … Our problem, in getting back to beginnings, will not be to find the thing we have always cared about, but to discover whether we have it in us always to care about something.”

1. This is not an actual interview with Ho Tzu Nyen; moreover it’s not the first time that I’ve faked, in print, a conversation with Tzu Nyen. I’m repeating myself: for a piece that I did for the Australian magazine Photofile — which had as its theme, “Even Better than the Real Thing” — I cobbled together a dialogue from other actual interviews that Tzu Nyen had done and from texts that he supplied to me. I kept my editorial manipulations to a minimum, and resorted to invention only once in a while. Tzu Nyen and I thought that for this particular occasion it might be appropriate to repeat once again that game: to simulate conversation through the text, and have that take the place of a “normal” interview, one where the persons would actually speak to each other. [↩]

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 to alienate them. The drastic changes in mood and theme from one scene to another in Nothing, for example, are convincing because they reinforce the play’s exploration of variously dysfunctional ways we cope with a failed relationship, or the imminent death of a lover. Unfortunately, in the case of Circus, logic appears to be inconsequential, and is recklessly eschewed for madness.

This multi-disciplinary collaboration between Noor Effendy Ibrahim, Rizman Putra, Sabrina Annarhar, Fredi Sonderegger and Emanorwatty Saleh aims to convey several observations of torture through subverting the traditional aspects of a circus, attempting a daring theatrical experiment reminiscent of Cake’s earlier efforts. Abandoning most conventions of the stage, this unusual conflation is also an artistic apologia of sorts; the message that seems to unify Circus is that there isn’t and shouldn’t be one. Unfortunately, the artists’ perceived “message” fails to conceal the fact that they have no conceivable idea of how the production should unravel or, more fundamentally, why it should.

To be sure, the production’s flaws have very little to do with the artists’ individual talents. Local indie singer Sabrina’s smoky, mellow vocals imbue the production’s interludes with a haunting poignancy: she is the sort of songstress that can sing a phonebook and make it sound good. But with nearly indecipherable lyrics like “I am having sweet coarse hair / an added bonus cigarettes and coffee / I cup your millipede and winged cows / with Teflon coated psychedelia”, which doubles as the written introduction to the play, she might as well have been singing just that. Similarly, one could wax lyrical about Fredi’s mastery over the bass trombone; but his performance could just as easily pass off as a sterling solo rendition, or random notes strung together during practice that sounded good for no particular reason.

Circus takes significant liberties with plot, theme and structure at the expense of cohesiveness, attempting to shock and unsettle with no discernible purpose. When asked about the play’s construction during the talkback, Effendy offered Sabrina’s song interludes and the artists’ untidy sketch of ideas (reproduced in the programme) as guidance for the action on stage. The songs we already know are painfully obscure; a page hastily scribbled with words like “sensation”, “spectacle” and “epilogue” even more so.

The result is an untamed expressionistic beast bloated with too many sequences, theatrics and layers squeezed into a running time of barely under an hour. One minute the artists, running on the spot with cages on their heads, would be screaming “Torture!”; the next they would be on their backs stamping the floor, laughing deliriously and throwing milk and sawdust at each other. And as if this wasn’t messy enough, one artist or another would put on a clown suit and play an instrument, or suddenly erupt into boisterous dance or song.

Not all parts of the play are as indulgent; in fact, several moments offer fascinating insights on torture. However, with little focus or direction, the Circus troupe conceals such potentially intriguing issues with bizarre logical twists that arise only because they want so desperately to believe that these amount to theatre. In one such sequence, Effendy whips the ground with stunning force and intensity, his body clenched with incommunicable pain and frustration. Eventually, he seems to realize the futility of his actions and ties the leather rope around himself, quivering with exhaustion and defeat. Although fertile with ideas of aggression and self-alienation, the artists have no notion of how to explore them. Instead, Rizman proceeds to strum furiously on his guitar, singing, “Johnny, I’m really sorry, there’s nothing left to do but sing!” Ironically, this encapsulates the play’s essence, or the lack of it.

These disparities expose a more incriminating neglect. An interview with youth.sg ominously entitled “Circus: No Plan, Just Spontaneity” reveals that the group will “react and respond to the environment during the performance, creating some unexpected moments that will make the experience memorable”. This was reinforced during the talkback, when the artists consistently asserted that Circus was a no holds barred experiment, intent on pushing the audience’s expectations and the limits of the stage. However, such casual artlessness is false basis for the artists’ lack of a “plan” or any coherent rationale. If every movement or speech on stage can mean anything the artists or audience want it to, there are no limits to what is considered valid and sensible discourse cannot occur. Thus, experimenting for experimentation’s sake ends up ringing rather disingenuous here. Consequently, the production does nothing to inform the audience of the artists’ reasons and motives, except to dump large amounts of abstract ideas and emotions which are never defined or elaborated upon.

Circus is a grave lesson in the perils of re-inventing theatre. As agents of change, artists should persistently question and re-evaluate artistic and social conventions. However, if the artist’s duty is to merely indulge in his slightest whim and fancy with no regard for the audience’s ability to keep up, then art becomes impenetrable, and particularly ill-suited to the live, shared experience of theatre.

Amos Toh will read Law at the National University of Singapore in August 2008. He is also a reviewer for the theatre and dance magazine The Flying Inkpot.

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 performance is that there is no director and no directing involved, so we are not restricted or limited by strict guidelines and structures. As such, we really get to enjoy what we were doing.

Could you tell us more about the difficulties you faced in the production process?

Effendy: We started off with a time constraint of an hour (for the entire show) consisting of four to eight segments of about ten minutes each. Each of us was in charge of one particular aspect of the performance. For example, Freddy was in charge of “mood”, Effendy in charge of “sensation”, Sabrina in charge of the interludes and Rizman in charge of the “spectacle”.

Rizman: Other constraints we faced included the amount of time we had to collaborate. We had a really short amount of time when we could practise together.

Effendy: As for stress, we are supposed to be feeling stressed now because we are so short of time, but we are not.

Rizman: Stress comes on that day itself no matter how much we practise. The audience may have reactions that cannot be expected.

Effendy: There is an element of vulnerability that is sort of exciting, because it gives you a loss of control. We are working towards imperfection, rather than perfection, and that is a challenge.

How do you think the audience will react to Circus?

Effendy: We cater to different audiences. We hope that they enjoy what we are doing. I mean, some people may give up because they may not understand what is going on.

Rizman: Everyone’s experience is totally different, so we cannot explain what is happening in the space. So we hope that our audience will be brave enough to expect the unexpected.

Do you think the audience will be able to understand what you are trying to convey through Circus?

Effendy: Don’t underestimate the audience. Don’t think that they are stupid. Sometimes artists try to commercialise their art so that it caters to a wider audience, but it only ends up with the watering down of art. There needs to be a meeting point between art critics and others who appreciate art in their own ways. Most people who can really appreciate art are those who do not have an art background. Art critics can be cynical.

Rizman: As a matter of fact, children are fun to work with because they come with an open mind, and they are easily engaged.

What advice do you have for youths who would like to pursue a career in the arts?

Effendy: Don’t (Laughs). You may give up halfway.

Rizman: Actually, there is nothing wrong with giving up halfway.

Effendy: What I mean is that you need to be sure what you are getting into. The thing is to make the best out of it, and enjoy doing it. You need to have the mindset that you are not gong to make a lot of money. It is quite a struggle. My advice would be to get a proper job and study well.

Rizman: Being an artist should not be a job, it should just be an additional part of you that you enjoy.

* * * * * * * * *

Lim Wei Sheng is a JC1 student from Raffles Junior College. He likes everything to do with music, from piano to singing to composing. Most of all, he likes new, neurotic and interestingly provoking ideas. Thus experimental theatre, despite being rather frightening to him, turns out ultimately to be, in a warped way, rather relishing.

Charissa Tang has somehow always ended up dealing with publications for the past four years of her life. She loves learning about new cultures, and enjoys trying new things. She developed her interest in theatre only after entering college, but has never actually been involved in the production of one.

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 moves through the cycle once more. At times, she stands still to witness. Dreamt about her. Waiting for this dream. Forget what I can forget. If I have an extra ticket, will you leave with me?

A new image is projected on the screens behind her. It is video footage of the woman in a bedroom. There is a man with her, facing away from the camera, washing up in the adjoining toilet. He leaves the house.

On video, the woman dances through the rooms of the house, the same familiar dance we’ve seen her perform all night. The woman on stage, however, is motionless. Her image dances alone.

2.
I must be honest. I did not understand this piece when I watched it. I found the imagery opaque; the language of the accompanying programme loftily abstract and unrevealing: “dreams of the future and the past”, “bit by bit”, “byte by byte”, “seme by seme”.

I’m in thorough agreement with Life! reviewer Tara Tan when she notes, “it is unclear what message it is trying to sell.”¹ But I’m shocked by her dismissive summation of the work as “a stellar example of art for arts [sic] sake; stunning but with little substance”.

In fact, Dance Dance Dance is one of director Choy Ka Fai’s most conceptually solid works to date, bound together with measured structure, minimalist restraint and personal sadness – quite unlike the brutual carnivalesque of his early works such as Design For Death. There were many in the audience who intuited this poetic structure, who loved the piece for its craft and soul. And then there were people like me and Tara, who were dumbfounded.

A big problem was one of communication: Dance Dance Dance was, in fact, not a dance at all: it did not stretch itself in research of the potential of the human body, limiting rather than expanding the talents of performer Joavien Ng. Rather, it was a work of drama, following a basic narrative with a carefully shaped beginning and end (indeed, a dramaturg was involved) with a very human plot driving the entire piece. Yet the highly stylised nature of the work - the extreme dissociation of performer, text and voice; the stark contrast between moments of bare minimalism and colourful spectacle — makes it difficult to judge the work by conventional standards of theatre.

For me, this performance resembles conceptual art, in that it only comes together when I’ve grasped its sources, its motivations and its broader context. It’s a show that I’m only able to enjoy after the fact. And yes, I believe that’s problematic.

3.
Dance Dance Dance is, unsurprisingly, based on Haruki Murakami’s novel of the same name. The book tells the story of a man who goes on a quest to locate a woman named Kiki with whom he had an intense affair four years earlier at a hotel. On his return to said hotel, he finds it changed, opulently renovated, with only the name and address still the same – yet linked to the worlds of the past and his subconscious through a mysterious dark passageway that randomly appears and disappears. The characters he meets thereafter are all somehow linked to Kiki, but all their clues eventually lead to dead ends. It’s a tale suffused with an air of dreamlike wandering, of existential impotence, and vast, diffuse regret.

Choy’s production is rooted in the same vein of sadness: the piece is structured around the gradual reconstruction of a memory, a lost event, suggestive of love, that ultimately materialises with the final video clip. The dance passes from the bare stage to the furnished apartment on screen, and we witness the pre-recorded past, more real than the present, more alive.

This sense of nostalgia is foreshadowed by the bits of broken text (also drawn from the book), by the soundbyte in Cantonese, drawn from In the Mood For Love by the perennially moody Wong Kar Wai. And there’s no doubt that the journey our protagonist undertakes is poignant in its imagery: she starts out vulnerable and naked, and while the additional accoutrements may be tools and signposts on her path to her destination, they also act as constantly renewable signs of displacement: she is not where she was ten minutes ago, and that in itself is disorienting.

And yet the cumulative effect isn’t emotional. With the trappings of technology and the signifiers of high conceptualism, everything comes across as so damn cerebral it’s frustrating. By the time you’ve realised you’re supposed to feel something, that something isn’t there anymore.

This, I think, is a great flaw in Choy’s work. He abstracts and abstracts. Consider his previous work, Drift Net: though inspired by a case of bloggers being arrested for sedition, it finished as a dance-and-multimedia fiesta with neither political rage nor specific human character. This is fine art, yes. But it lacks drama. If there was heart in the piece, somewhere along the way it turned into liquid crystal.

4.
I’d like, for a moment, to describe my individual experience of this piece, before I did all the background research. First, that pleasant sense of disorientation/wonder on arrival, being handed the origami-style programme, entering the performance space and seeing the jagged, toothlike seating arrangement made of stacked tiers.

Then the show itself: the intense dimness of the light as the performer began her movements, already obscured behind that screen, the bizarre focus on only one figure throughout so much of the show, my mind racing to interpret based on the scant information supplied.

What I came up with was: it’s about defining the self. The woman dances to describe herself, to assert her identity. When the situation changes, she must define herself once more; she must repeat the steps to locate herself in a shifting world.

Then the hyperreal projections began, apparitional spectaculars I’d later be able to identify as re-imaginings of scenes from Murakami’s novel. The performer now stood still, for a good long time; the world moved around and she didn’t. She’s lost, I thought. Then the video of her and her mysterious gentleman friend appeared. She’s lost, I thought, and so am I.

While I missed the emotional core of the piece, it turns out I wasn’t that wrong about the existentialist thrust of the project. The book Dance Dance Dance seems to derive its title solely from a piece of advice the mysterious Sheep Man advises the protagonist as they meet in the unearthly space of the pitch black corridor. “Dance,” he says. “Yougottadance. Aslongassthemusicplays. Yougotta dance. Don’teventhinkwhy. Starttothink, yourfeetstop. Yourfeetstop, wegetstuck. Wegetstuck, you’restuck … Yougottaloosenwhateveryoubolteddown. Yougottauseallyougot. Weknowyou’retired, tiredandscared. Happenstoeveryone, okay? Justdon’tletyourfeetstop.”²

My sense of puzzlement as I watched this might be a good thing, really: the mind is being forced to dance, working around the odd angles of the piece. Remember, there aren’t that many theatremakers now who’re really pushing to create strange, difficult works; experimentation often limited only to stylistics, preserving a narrative centre that’s digestible by everyone.

Yet the mind is lonely and demands discussion. The performance needed a talk-back session, badly; some avenue more formal than a post-show cocktail where both sides of the stage could share with each other their conflicting impressions, their creative processes, their frustrations. (Talk-backs have usually been part of the 72-13 performance process, and I can’t say why they were missing this time around.)

As a director, Choy is taking commendable risks and challenging his viewers. But if he wants an audience to grow with him, he’ll have to help them along: perhaps he’ll want to articulate his ideas more clearly, on paper if not on stage; perhaps he might also consider re-emphasising the emotional content of his work, all the better to draw his viewers into his universe. It is possible, I believe, to be sophisticated and complex, yet accessible by sheer dint of will.

Theatre — more than conceptual art — is about gathering people in a room, about community. Somehow, the performer must make contact. Otherwise, she dances alone.

1. Tara Tan, “Superficial beauty”, The Straits Times 7 April 2008. [↩]
2. Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance, London: Vintage Books, 2003. [↩]

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 the fact that the cast of characters is mainly young or youngish people and the oldsters in the assembly allow themselves to be played broadly — as they were here. Finally, P&P is a period piece, something young actors usually love to throw themselves into. As a bonus, the period in question is distant enough from us to keep others from feeling proprietorial about it.

The period that this play visits is Regency England, a roughly two-decade stretch of the early 19th century. Britain at that time was a society that bore a number of intriguing similarities to present-day Singapore: like the Island Republic, Britain in the early 19th century was a nation which had just undergone several decades of rapid industrialisation, transforming it from a largely agrarian and maritime country into an economic powerhouse. These changes produced a flood of new wealth, which jostled with the old money for prestige, influence and social position. For instance, in this play, some members of the old aristocracy sneer openly at the Bennett family because Mrs Bennett’s brother has actually stooped to making his comfortable living as an attorney.

Coupled with these changes were a swarm of social frictions and confusions as new money, new social dynamics and new, “dangerous” influences from abroad brought rapid changes to the country. Strong, deeply held traditions and time-encrusted customs persisted, but they were frequently challenged by those who questioned the value of many of these traditions and customs. The result: a rather civilised clash of pride and prejudices from different sides.

ACSian theatre directors Geetha Creffield, Michelle Wong and their cast were evidently able to key in on these similarities and use it to their advantage in bringing life to Austen’s world. As a result, the company did not seem to be thrashing about in a play completely foreign to them and their sensibilities.

Austen’s novel and this adaptation focus primarily on the Bennett family, a brood residing in a comfortable country home in Hertfordshire. As the Bennett offspring consists entirely of females, Mr and Mrs Bennett are intent on finding suitable husbands for their daughters to save them from penury or (perhaps worse) forced employment.

The drama, as such, springs from the attraction to and wooing of eldest daughter Jane by handsome Charles Bingley, who boasts both a fine pedigree and a sizeable fortune and the romantic jousting between Elizabeth, second eldest daughter, and Fitzwilliam Darcy, who just happens to be both wealthier and more handsome than Bingley, his best friend. But Darcy is much less congenial than his friend— some might even say abrasive. And then there’s the sub-plot of young British officer George Wickham, who’s ready to take any Bennett female he can snatch.

As the Bennetts are not independently wealthy and their blood is nowhere near the right shade of blue, aristocrats like Bingley and Darcy must overcome some social major hurdles if they wish to “marry down” with the two most appealing women in all Hertfordshire. But Pride and Prejudice is a kind of proto-romantic comedy, so everything works out in the end and true love again conquers all. Even the serial scoundrel George Wickham seems to achieve decency after he first runs off with but then finally weds the youngest Bennett daughter, Lydia. (In Regency romances, marriage had a way of turning scoundrels into decent fellows.)

It is not an easy piece to pull off successfully. The good news is that the ACSian cast was able to handle the work reasonably well — considering their youth and dearth of acting experience. Fortunately, they had the central role of Elizabeth Bennett covered by the best performer in this production — Lesley Sia. One has to combine natural charm, feistiness, stubbornness and a smidgeon of foolishness to build a complete Elizabeth Bennett — and never once make the character disagreeable. Lesley Sia would certainly not make us forget Keira Knightly in the successful film or Jennifer Ehle in the the highly popular British TV mini-series, but she did serve up a quite credible Elizabeth.

Nicholas Ngo’s Darcy was a bit more of a mixed performance. Early on, it seemed that the major source of young Darcy’s discomfort was not the limited sophistication of the country folk at the big ball, but the costume he was in. Stiff and tentative, Ngo seemed to be trapped in that costume and not quite sure how to get himself out of it. As a result of this, and the way he misplayed his lines, Darcy came off as not sullen but nasty in that all-important first scene. This created an even greater climb than usual for this character to get back to our sympathy.

As the show moved along, Ngo did recover from his early gaffes and ended up with an acceptable performance. As his bosom buddy Bingley, Dheraj Ramchandani had a tendency to bark out his lines in trying to capture the essence of the consummate 18th century English gentleman. He, too, managed to be acceptable after all was said and done, but there was nothing memorable in this Bingley other than his puppy-like energy.

A more believable and balanced performance came from Edlyn Ng as Jane Bennett, the object of Bingley’s desire. Ms Ng took the turns and jolts of Jane’s fortunes fairly well for a young performer.

A number of the smaller roles were ably handled, adding to the enjoyable quality of this production. The standout here (though not necessarily the best) was Frances Lee’s bravura turn as Mrs Bennett. Lee was quite enjoyable in the role, and made her presence strongly felt in almost every scene she turned up in. One has to especially admire and strongly praise the way Lee was able to strain her voice from start to finish of this long evening in order to effect the shrill quality of Mrs Bennett speech. That annoying voice is a major part of the character and her family’s shaky social position.

More nuanced performances (in smaller parts) were turned in by Sarah Ann Lee as Mary Bennett, Lian Kim Selby as Caroline Bingley and Jasmin Wong as Charlotte Lucas. Each of these actresses deserved a strong nod of praise.

The same goes to two of the male performers in supporting roles. Gideon Yap’s Wickham was more consistently successful than either Bingley of Darcy here, while Mark Cheng proved a rather reliable anchor as Mr Bennett. Young Master Cheng’s pater familias somehow bore a passing resemblance to the late British actor Robert Morley (who would have been quite good in this role himself). One unfortunate loss: Frances Lee, who was otherwise one of the show’s main assets as Mrs Bennett, allowed her histrionics to bury Mr. Bennett’s wonderfully funny closing line about sending in any other young men who may want to ask for yet another daughter’s hand in marriage. This was a clear example of one actor stepping on another’s moment.

Other aspects of this production merited mixed praise. Chia Yu Hsien’s set design was quite admirable, simple, but effective. The stage started off festooned with silhouettes suggesting the Regency period, and Chia’s overall arrangement allowed a play with many scene changes, and the resulting set changes, come off with barely a seam showing.

The costumes were more suggestive of a time in the distance past than authentic, but they worked — with one exception. Lady de Bourgh (played by Rebecca Kwan) comes out in Act II decked out like an upper-class 1920’s lady, making her look like she had just wandered in from some other play and was trying to hide with that embarrassment with great gusts of peevishness.

The artistic direction, apparently a joint effort of Geetha Creffield and Michelle Wong, was mixed. As suggested above, the directors were able to get acceptable to quite good performances from a large number of young actors, no small achievement. On the other hand, blocking and general movements were a bit stagey throughout, which added to a sense of strain and artifice. One puzzling strategy was, to have key characters take a stance at some distance from his other during pivotal confrontations, thus dialling down the power of those encounters.

There were also a few other directorial miscalculations. For instance, music and dance are an important part of the story (as they were an important part of early 19th century British social life). The ACSian production opened with a dance — but as pretty much the whole bounteous cast had assembled, there was too much traffic on stage for the scene to work well.

Rather than having lively 19th century music, the directors opted for contemporary music and dance. This was not disturbing in and of itself; you could readily accept that here were young people enjoying themselves and connecting in a way natural to them. However, there were too many dance scenes used as transitions through the evening. By late in the second act, these dance numbers seemed rather extraneous, more distractions from the action than adjuncts, but still they went on. And on a related note, it was a mistake to have Mr. Bennett dancing in the early ball scene while Mrs Bennett stands off to the side as an observer. Both host and hostess would have taken their positions to the side in the society being portrayed here.

One other rather unfortunate directorial choice: at a most important point in that early ball scene, one of the guests delivered a truncated rendition of the Cyndi Lauper hit “Time After Time”. The singing was quite pleasant itself, but it made it rather hard to catch the important exchange going on at precisely that point between the central scoundrel George Wickham and the Bennett ladies. This was just one example of where frills infringed on substance in this show. A show which was, for all of that, a very nice effort.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Within a fortnight of ACSian’s foray into Jane Austen territory, a new theatrical venture with the imposing Anglo-Saxon name of Wessex Theatre took on an even bigger gun in the British Lit cannon with its Shakespeare in Love.

Actually, a number of the faces in Wessex will be familiar to habitués of Stage Club productions: this group is an outgrowth of that venerable Singapore amateur theatre, founded by members who apparently wanted to pursue their theatrical interests on a more professional basis.

The show they’ve set forth with, a frisky Shakespeare anthology piece, was actually done in an earlier incarnation (in 2000) by the Stage Club itself. This time, as with the earlier show, the pieces were assembled and stitched together by Wessex co-founder Phil McConnell.

When you take on the Bard, you either set yourself an impossible task or you guarantee yourself success. By taking on some of the easier challenges Shakespeare offers, Wessex guaranteed itself a reasonable success.

The show had eight main components to it, key scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, with smaller bits of the sonnets and speeches from other plays thrown in for seasoning. The eight main components were themselves drawn from seven plays, one of them a famous play within a play.

The show opened with a nice solo rendering of “When I Fall in Love”, sung by Paul Hannon, another of the group’s founders. While it wasn’t exactly Elizabethan, it was not at all jarring and it set the mood for the evening nicely. I am not sure if, in choosing this tune, the producers were embracing the notion that all is fair is love and war, but this song does come from an early 1950’s war film.

The show then shifted from song into Theseus’ speech from Midsummer Night’s Dream about “the lunatic, the lover and the poet/ Are of imagination one compact”. This then segued into a scene from the same play, wherein Demetrius and Lysander both pursue Hermia while Helena despairs. From there, the show jumped about largely at will, following inclination rather than any logic or thematic connection.

Dramaturg Phil McConnell (that seems to be the most appropriate term for the role he played in this show) made some interesting and praiseworthy choices. For instance, he scratched some too-obvious selections from his list, such as the done-to-death Romeo and Juliet or Twelfth Night. From the rich body of texts where unlikely lovers are pulled — or thrown — together, he sidestepped the wildly humorous Taming of the Shrew and chose the wry, nuanced scenes from Much Ado About Nothing where Beatrice and Benedick are drawn to each other despite their own deeply held disdain for love and marriage.

McConnell also selected two compelling scenes from Measure For Measure, that quintessential problem play, where love is seen to be both liberating and life-threatening, often at the same time.

But not all of the dramaturg’s decisions were to be applauded. For instance, he only included that one short lovers’ scene from Midsummer Night’s Dream. At first, I thought we would come back to this thread later to see how the criss-crossing relationships develop throughout the play. The scene doesn’t really work as a stand-alone piece; in the event, it came off as a rather limp opening to this compendium.

Rather than follow the four lovers in their dizzy journey to joyous weddings, McConnell went with two other scenes from the same play: those where the rude mechanicals are assigned their parts for the star-crossed playlet they plan to offer for the Duke’s wedding and then that wonderfully disastrous performance itself.

This was a bit of cheating actually, if we are charting Master Shakespeare on love. True, the Pyramus and Thisbe sketch deals with love, but the scene is more a comic jab at bad theatre than a real look at love. Having said that, it is also clear why the Wessex team chose these scenes: they were little comic gems as they performed them and proved the top audience-pleasers of the evening.

They also displayed some of the only truly imaginative directorial concept in the production. After a platter of sequences with standard directorial approach, McConnell and cast dug into interesting corners with these two famous bits. For instance, the rude mechanicals were recast as schoolboys of widely varying enthusiasms while Peter Quince served as the weary faculty member heading their drama society.

The other scene in Shakespeare on Love which offered a novel concept was a chunk from Antony and Cleopatra where the queen of Egypt awaits her lover Antony, only to receive reports of his forced marriage to a prominent Roman lady.

In this scene, moved from the early days of the Roman Empire to the Roaring Twenties, Cleopatra was cast as a rapidly fading flapper clinging to her past as a legendary lover, suggesting Sunset Boulevard on the Nile.

I doubt that either this interpretation or the one for Midsummer Night’s Dream would hold up for the whole play if it were extended to the entire work, but as interesting forays in this anthology, they worked nicely, offering a refreshing and engaging respite from the standard stagings of the other segments.

Starting out with juicy texts from Shakespeare is one leg high up on a successful show, but then you need a cast that can handle the Bard or you could be facing a disaster. For this opening production, the Wessex troupe was able to assemble a reasonably good cast that was well able to handle Shakespeare, at least in the portions that got dished out in this show.

The best in show was Justin Lee, who was convincing and accomplished in all six of the roles he handled. (Actually, he was rather stiff in one of those roles–but he was playing a wall there, so it was quite fitting.)

Lee was especially compelling as Angelo, the dark-hearted judge of Measure For Measure. This is a part that requires layers of tight emotions, held together with deceptions and self-deceptions. Lee was able to capture all of this and made his Angelo loathsome, threatening … and a tad sympathetic. No easy achievement, that.

Lee was aided in these scenes by Julie Wee, who deftly handled the role of Isabella, the committed ultra-virgin who emerges from a convent to plead for the life of her brother. This brother has been caught committing fornication with his fiancée, in a gothic Vienna where all fornication has been declared a capital crime. Wee was touching and convincing as Isabella, providing a strong moral balance to Lee’s Angelo.

Julie Wee was also pretty solid in her other three roles, and really proved her acting chops as Robin Starveling portraying “moonshine”. As Bill Ledbetter (as Bottom) took Pyramus way over the top in the rude mechanicals’ playlet, Wee was a brilliant witness to the mayhem. With just a quick jerk of the head and a stunned look, she added another sharp dimension to this scene, which proved one of the most successful of the evening.

Bill Ledbetter’s contributions to this evening were a strange compact. In his first turn, as Lysander, he was quite a dud (as opposed to a dude). Reciting his lines with a vague, tentative tone and moving about unsurely, he was the main reason why that opening scene was such a limp exercise. At that point, I was wondering what he was doing in the show.

By the time he next emerged, as Benedick in Much Ado, it was clear what he was doing there. Ledbetter handled that love cynic with polish, assurance and a splendid sense of comic timing. In his final appearance, as Nick Bottom in the two Rude Mechanicals’ scenes, Ledbetter stretched himself towards the heights of comedy and made Bottom one of the hits of the evening.

Cordelia Fernandez Lee proved a splendid foil to Ledbetter’s Benedick in Much Ado. Her Beatrice was a wonderful blend of fire and softness, an assured woman who will only bend her will when it is her will to do so. Fernandez Lee was fine in her other two roles, though she did rush her lines a bit as Cleo’s maidservant in the Antony and Cleopatra scene. But as these were only supporting roles, we sadly never got to see her at full force again in the show. (Speaking of support, the two main characters were nicely supported by Musa Fazal and Steve Armstrong in the Much Ado confrontations.)

After delivering that sweet opening song, Wessex co-founder Paul Hannon proved that he can act at least as well as he can sing. In a weak segment from The Tempest, his Ferdinand was clearly the performance that kept the whole thing floating. The young lover’s admission that “For several reasons, I have loved several women line” was delivered quite effectively by Hannon, making it sound more like fate than a character flaw.

Later on, he proved effective support as the Messenger in Antony and Cleopatra and was a howl as Flute playing an outrageously camp Thisbe.

The reason why that Tempest section was one of the show’s three weak spots was that Ferdinand simply cannot carry the scenes alone: he needs a strong Miranda and Prospero to share the burden. (Even if he is the one carrying the heavy lumber.) As Miranda, Lily McConnell had a tendency to rush her lines — sometimes rushing quite a bit, in fact. And though she did show some feel for the character, she never really connected with Hannon’s Ferdinand — which turns the Tempest into something tepid.

Tim Dore was rather adequate as Prospero, but you need much more than adequate with that character around whom just about everything else pivots. Elsewhere in the evening, Dore did a decent job reading snippets from the Bard, but he really came into his own as the weary schoolmaster Peter Quince. Despite the strength of Bill Ledbetter’s Bottom there, Dore managed to keep a steady hand on the helm of that scene and was one key reason it was so damn effective.

Like Cordelia Fernandez Lee, Maureen McConnell had three minor supporting roles and one moment in the spotlight. The latter was as Cleopatra in that Jazz Age version of the role. McConnell was good in conveying the sense of a former ingénue unwilling to give up that role, but she was something less than credible in those moments which called for Cleo to erupt into fits of violent temper. Luckily, those weak moments were short enough to make her one big scene fairly successful.

Stephanie van den Driesen, on the other hand, was successful every time she walked out. Her spurned Helena almost made that opening scene from Midsummer Night’s Dream work and her later incarnation as schoolboy Snug and his reluctant and apologetic lion was one of the reasons the last two sections from the Dream worked like a dream.

And then there was her Desdemona. No fault of hers, but the Othello scenes were one of the least successful portions of the evening. These scenes were also an example of how some fairly commendable talents — Musa Fazal as Othello, Steve Armstrong as Iago, van den Driesen as Desdemona, Justin Lee as Cassio and … oh yes, Shakespeare, could come together in an unsuccessful manner.

Musa Fazal has a natural physical awkwardness that he can actually use to his advantage in many roles, but here it worked against his Othello. Moreover, this was accentuated by the costume he was thrown into: padded shoulders and tightly buttoned uniform gave him an appearance like the Frankenstein monster performing in Arms and The Man. The overall effect was to undercut the cut-to-the-quick reading he gave to the lines.

Steve Armstrong was better as Iago, though his reading was pitched too much at a hectoring, almost bullying tone. This Iago was just too strong, pushing Othello as if he were his commanding officer rather than vice versa. We saw none of the evil cleverness, the conniving that makes Iago such a convincing and despicable villain.

As mentioned, Justin Lee’s Cassio was admirable, and Stephanie van den Driesen was sympathetic and believable as the fated Desdemona. But as the Othello scenes in this show focused on the interaction between Iago and his too easily manipulated General, the segment did not really work until Othello entered Desdemona’s bed chamber to send her into an eternal sleep.

The evening closed out with bits from Sonnets 116 and 130 as well as Puck’s little speech calling for applause.

The production values were low-budget and pretty much unobtrusive. The set was minimalist and weighted towards the purely functional. The lighting, too, was little more than functional; none of the lighting effects contributed much to the scenes they served other than to keep them illuminated.

The costumes were also minimalist or, in the case of Othello, unfortunate. Except for the Cleopatra and Rude Mechanicals’ scenes, the direction focused on forming strong characterisation and effective reading of the lines with scant attention to the visuals.

The accompanying music was one technical aspect which did add value to the show, at points quite nicely. For instance, Edvard Grieg’s folksy, upbeat “Wedding Day at Troldhaugen” served as the transitional music in the Much Ado About Nothing scenes, while strains of Tchaikovsky’s love theme from Romeo and Juliet played over the Pyramus and Thisbe playlet, a perfect bit of ironic counterpoint to the fiasco the rude mechanicals were presenting.

There was one strange note in the use of music here: Ariel’s song from The Tempest (“Full fathom five…”) had little ethereal about it, save for the flute playing. The effect that it was supposed to have on Ferdinand was therefore more puzzling than enchanting.

On balance, the Wessex Theatre company can take a bow for a somewhat successful début — though by no means a runaway success. This edition of Shakespeare on Love would have been more praiseworthy if it had been structured a little more tightly, perhaps with clear movement between one scene and the next or a definite thread tying together the different parts. And if the problems in the first Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello and Tempest scenes had been more carefully addressed. (For instance, the latter probably would have been better if Phil McConnell himself had stepped in as Prospero.)

But it was an enjoyable, mildly impressive show that bodes well for the future of this ambitious fledgling theatre. Now that they have cleared the Bard, let us see where they go from here.

You think I should be used to it,
But even after a lifetime,
I have yet to be familiar with my moist,
Temperature-driven clothes match-made to me by the sun.

2.
Lonely Planet welcomes us to you
As the land of a thousand smiles.
Mine must be the one not marketed for now, sir, as
You are not worth our trademark hospitality.
You wear me down with your
Bottomless haggling–

You might as well bargain my pride.

3.
I can tell you are not local,
I can tell by the things you do
Only in Bangkok
And only behind closed doors.
The trade I’d admit that
Keeps my table filled,
Our stomachs happy,
And a heart from breaking
If my girl ever takes my place.

4.
I can speak a smattering of English
I am sure you can understand.
But I still greet you in Thai
For pseudo-cultural purposes.
I shall smile to maintain travel guidebook expectations.

But frankly, farang, I am quite tired of smiling.

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 to see. But this play starts out in total darkness. We in the audience hear two of the central characters talking (mainly exposition, as it happens) and planning how they are going to make this a perfect evening that will put the final seal on their engagement to be married. These two characters, as we overhear, are struggling sculptor Brindsley Miller and his middle-class fiancée Carol Melkett.

Suddenly, the lights come on and we see the actors staring out in bewilderment. Within moments, we learn that in that world up there on the stage, the lights have just gone out. There’s been a power failure in Brindsley’s building and most of the next, very entertaining hour will be spent with those two and a small parade of other characters caught in the dark, leaving us, the audience, the only ones who can see what’s going on.

The half-dozen characters who join the pair to share the darkness are like a thin cross-section of 1960’s English society. In arranging this assembly, Shaffer was able to squeeze in one of his signature themes: the clash of cultures and how that clash can be both beneficial and destructive.

In this case, Brindsley himself has a fairly working class background, though he has pursued a very un-working class profession (as least for British lads) — sculptor. Also, he has decided to marry up.

Carol is not too far up, however; she comes from an endangered section of the middle-class: her father is a life-long military men, now retired, known to friend and foe alike as “the Colonel”. As the action unfolds, Brindsley dreads meeting this “monster father” because he may not consider the young artist “a suitable candidate for husbandry”. To make this meeting more pleasant and increase his chances of daddy’s approval, Brindsley has “borrowed” some furniture and artefacts from a neighbour, an art and antiques dealer, who has conveniently gone away for the weekend.

When he arrives, the Colonel quickly fulfils Brin’s dire expectations. He comes on strong and readily offers his judgement about the young man’s sculptures: they would make good garden implements. As it happens, Brindsley is also expecting a visit from a well-known and eccentric art collector, the painfully wealthy German Georg Bamberger. Bamberger also happens to be extremely hard of hearing, which adds an extra comic dimension to the loss of vision everyone suffers from the blackout.

But the young struggling sculptor also gets a number of unexpected visitors on this evening (as so often happens in farce). One is his neighbour Miss Furnival, the repressed, teetotalling daughter of a Methodist clergyman. The next to arrive — not only unexpected but very unwanted — is Harold Goringer, the art collector whose own flat (also now in total darkness, of course) has been emptied by Brin and Carol — without Harold’s knowledge or permission.

Even more unexpected and more unwelcome (at first) is the lovely Clea, whom Brin keeps speaking of as a former girlfriend. As it turns out, Clea is not all that former, and her arrival threatens to scuttle Brin’s engagement to the well-heeled Carol.

Also turning up a little later are the aforementioned Bamberger and Schuppanzigh, a master electrician who has come to get the power flowing again. And since Schuppanzigh is himself German, he is, of course, immediately taken to be the millionaire German art collector who can launch Brin’s career with a single over-priced purchase. Never has an electrician been so fawned over, but Schuppanzigh takes it to be British graciousness towards someone about to bring them back into the light.

The whole arrangement is too convenient for words, but in the logic of the farce, it is all rather likely, almost inevitable. Plus, having most of the play transpire in the supposed dark, Shaffer is able to make all the farcical elements rather believable and alive. For instance, any attempt to light a flame or pull out a flashlight to see in the dark has to be extinguished quickly by either Brin and Carol so that A) the all-too-trusting Harold won’t see that his furniture and precious art works are now adorning Brin’s flat and B) nobody else will see that Clea has arrived a bit later to resume her place in Brin’s life — and bedroom. To tangle the threads even more, we quickly learn that Harold is gay and has been long been harbouring hopes that there might be something mutual in his affections for the much younger Brindsley.

A good farce needs to be calculated almost as well as a good mystery, and Shaffer makes few stumbles as he carefully lets the many threads of this farce unwind. (Actually, there are many stumbles, but they are all intentional as the characters fumble their way in the dark.) Before long, we can sense that Brin and Carol are actually not meant for each other, and that the better match for this young sculptor is Clea, who shares his class background and passions. As everything crashes to a conclusion, things all work out more or less for the best, in the time-honoured tradition of farce.

The Stage Club, under the assured direction of Nick Perry, handled this difficult material quite admirably, though not flawlessly. Let’s start with the few negatives and work our way up into praise: Some of the physical jokes about the darkness could have been sharper. I’m thinking, for instance, of the segment where Brin hands Carol the phone, hits her with it and then gets himself tangled up in the line. A sequence like this has to seem as if it occurs naturally. If it comes off as something that’s been rehearsed, it is not nearly as funny. In this production, it was the latter.

But aside from such matters, the cast was quite up to their assignments. Nick Cheadle proved a lovable fool as Brindsley and managed to gave the part good contours that made the comedy even deeper. As fiancée Carol, Anna Vardy was also admirable, nicely shuffling together confusion, cunning and charm to give us a Carol that we rather like — up until the moment we switch our allegiances to Clea.

Barry Woolhead has in past Stage Club productions proven himself a deft hand at taking on British working-class types and making them winning elements in any show. Cast here as the Colonel, he showed that he could also handle upper-middle toffs quite effectively, though I would give the nod to his less stuffy creations.

As Harold, David Banham looks like a well-groomed, sartorially sedate version of Quentin Crisp. He delivered the character very well, combining a sense of hurt dignity and comedy. (I have seen this character portrayed as a flaming, effete über-aesthete who does not so much get laughs but instead gets laughed at. Banham gave us a quite sympathetic Harold, who was also quite funny through most of the action.)

The pleasantly repressed Miss Furnival came through nicely in the work of Mini Elliot. Elliott was both credible and humorous as she got progressively drunk during the events. (It goes without saying that Shaffer saw to it that Miss Furnival’s requested lemonade would get mixed up with a stiff alcoholic drink in the dark and that she would quaff said booze as if it were a soft drink.)

The most polished performance here came from Stephanie Fend as Clea. Fend looks like a cross between a young Diane Ladd and a young Michelle Pfeiffer, with a pinch of early Angelina Jolie thrown in. She used that face well, adding cheeky subtexts to all her moments on stage and was pitch-perfect in delivering her lines — even though she is apparently the only non-Briton in the cast.

However, Fend occasionally failed to convey that her character was moving about in total darkness. (Also, a number of things she does, like tapping the Colonel on the other side of his shoulder, would have been nearly impossible in total darkness. These moments show that she, and/or the director, were sometimes thinking outside the play.)

The two “Germans” in this show (Steve Clark as the cultured electrician and Russell Bennett as the wealthy art collector) came equipped with clunky stage-German accents: a grating Kraut-laut, as it were. Both characters were delivered ery broadly, bordering on caricature. But that was true to the script, as Peter Shaffer obviously took the least care in creating credible characters with these two “krauts”.

For a play like this, with its heavy insistence on visual humour, to work well, you need a strong stage crew and director Nick Perry and his cast were ably served by the Stage Club crew. Oh, and kudos to the prop department, which managed to turn up a BOAC flight bag. (BOAC was an airline that got merged into British Airways was back in 1974. The Stage Club props room must boast quite a hoard of wonderful theatrical antiques.)

As Black Comedy is just a long one-act (often paired with Shaffer’s White Lies, the dark comedy that was this play’s original companion piece), the Stage Club put up two other British comedies to fill out the evening. This pair of curtain-raisers were billed as “Light Tragedies”, but that billing was