Lee Weng Choy talks with Ho Tzu Nyen¹

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. [↩]