Getting Fucked
review by Zhuang Yisa

When a member of the audience is so angered by a production that he wants to walk out of the theatre less than half-way through it, it is often because this person feels insulted. He wants to say to the theatre-makers: do you think I am really that stupid?

What is unconscionable about Ng Yi-Sheng’s play, 251, is the treatment of its titular subject, pornstar Annabel Chong. (251 refers to the number of partners Chong performed with in one of her films.) The sense I got when I watched the show was that Annabel Chong functioned solely as a pretext to a campily conceived rant against the perceived flaws of Singaporean society. “Camp”, here, may perhaps be read exclusively with the connotation of trivialisation.

The point is not that that an Annabel Chong story and socio-political critique should remain mutually exclusive. Rather, what is displeasing about Ng’s play has to do with this following consideration: whatever happened to — for want of a better expression — the human aspect of Annabel Chong’s story?

What I got, and I can safely assume the experience was not very far removed from that of most other members in the audience, was a miasmic concoction replete with unoriginal stabs at a Singapore predicated on mindless conformity (Annabel’s parents urging and coercing her to excel in her studies out of fear of disgrace in a success-driven society) or bourgeois sexual repression (the shock of Annabel’s parents registering on their faces like a white glaze over porcelain, hardening to cracks, upon discovering their daughter’s secret identity). I do believe art demands much more that half-baked didactic expositions.

Given the nature of 251’s publicity, which had been tantalisingly tagged with the line “Welcome to the Intimate Life of Annabel Chong”, one would expect, at the very least, to leave the theatre with a sense of having learnt more about the human being behind the porn avatar Annabel Chong.

One would have gained a deeper insight into her being, in the same way, say, as one would gain an insight into the life of Camille Claudel in Bruno Nuytten’s Oscar-nominated film — even if what one experienced might potentially be something totally made up. Unfortunately, the play did not even remotely live up to this expectation.

Not only did the titular character recede into the background as the play’s larger agenda of public education took over the stage, the manner in which it was staged was soulless and unimaginative: constituted by vignettes, each segued into the next with an alarming disregard for musicality, which belied a mechanical sensibility analogous to that which informs the “method” of local artist Brian Gothong Tan, whose “art works” are some of the least functional furniture you can ever find today.

Before I proceed further, allow me to quote at length what was written in the programme:

“251 leaves room to question the possibility of understanding Grace [Quek] and the phenomenon of Annabel and aims to expose our national psyche and our attitudes towards adult films, alternative lifestyles, sex, creativity and individuality. More crucially, it challenges the definitions of a ‘national hero’? … Can Annabel Chong be considered one too? Or is she merely a renegade and an exception to the rule or is she symptomatic of our wanting to break free from our society’s seemingly conservative Confucian values? Is she Reckless Rebel or Radical Pioneer? Porn Princess or Media Maverick? National Pride or National Shame?”

Sad to say, these concerns were only dealt with in a touch-and-go manner: the sense I got while watching the play could be analogously circumscribed by the experience of listening to a poet who wants to share with his audience his philosophy on love by simply going on stage to recite just one word, “love”, as loudly and as dramatic as possible, and to little effect.

Another problem I had with the play was its comedic touches: they served only to trivialise its subject matter. What was particularly irksome was the part of the play where the acting ensemble took turns to assume multiple stereotypical roles of gossip-mongers who were incited by the scandal of Annabel Chong’s shady porn dealings.

I am not trying to suggest that comedy is necessarily a gesture that would undermine the gravity of what a play means to say, or what any artistic expression wants to convey for that matter. What I am suggesting is a need for an element of intellectual rigour in the artistic process. A counter-example to 251 would be the highly tragic vision of Czech novelist Milan Kundera, the infusion of comic elements in whose novels serve only to amplify the tragic quality of the characters’ lives.

The prescient feeling I got when I left the theatre was that Annabel Chong had really gotten fucked again. Indeed, what 251 had done to her was really an act of violence, and I do have some issues with that.