Projek Suitcase 2006: Police + Thief
by Teater Ekamatra
23 - 25 March 2006, 8pm
The Substation Theatre

Teater Ekamatra’s latest production Police + Thief is a doublebill of scathing and scatological, social critique of the underlying madness beneath our everyday lives on this island we call home. With the general elections around the bend, Police + Thief perhaps acquires added significance on that account.

Kalbun (Dog in Malay) kickstarted the night of polemics with its insistent and forceful bites. Written and performed by Muhammad Najib Bin Soiman, Kalbun was a performance piece that was part dramatisation of and part devised-response to its eponymous poem:

Dogs are animals often associated with the quality of loyalty. At other instances, dogs are often deployed as metaphors for an enslaved and disenfranchised ignominy. An uneasy tension lies within this symbol. The words of the poem are rivets that nail the glaring contradictions of its subject in its place like a flag wind-floundered at the height of its pole: the poem suspends the narrator’s pride while he imagines the world - not anew - but as a form of review that perceives everyone as dogs. It is an act of social leveling.

Mr Najib was certainly an angry man on stage. Dressed in quintessential Matz attire and wagging a prosthetic “tail”, he presented to the audience a provocative image of ethnic appropriation gone wrong. He incited a mélange of pity and disgust from the audience and challenged them into reviewing the way they responded to the sight they witnessed on stage. I am not sure if the treatment of subjects of displacement and disenfranchisement with regards to the Malay community provided any new perspective on these issues. But even so, that should not be a point that demerits the play. The regretful thing about Kalbun had to be its absorption with its own obsession: while one was able to feel a real sense of urgency in its exploration of the phenomenon of Malay ethnic marginalisation in Singapore society, Kalbun fell short of painting a comprehensive picture that explained how it was that such diminishment of a people came about.

The second half of the evening belonged to Elangovan’s P. Elangovan’s theatre has always been of a fiery nature and watching P was akin to being subjected to the ordeal Catherine Deneuve’s Severine goes through in Belle de Jour: mud-slung by shit, Severine reaches a point of ecstasy. As far as I am concerned, there was something interestingly sadomasochistic about watching this, or any, Elangovan play, especially when he gave free rein to his motifs of shit and dog. Disgust was part of the experience of witnessing the dramatisation of these crude scatologies, until you realised there was not really a more apt metaphor to give form to what the playwright had to say.

P is a fable about a giant piece of extraterrestrial shit that fell on to a kingdom in which the citizens had been forbidden to pass motion - the decree of the emperor. It turned out the piece of shit actually was the emperor’s own pile of waste, and when the truth was uncovered, the emperor died. At the heart of this blackly humorous play is its eponymous empty signifier: P - when silent, it is simply a letter in the alphabet; when given a sound, it becomes an aural representation of shit in the Tamil tongue; when perceived as part of an acronym, there is no limit as to the possibilities: P for Politics, P for People, P for Phallus, P for Pee, P for… so on and so forth. Within this singular symbol, with which Elangovan had chosen to name his play, is an incentive for multiplying significations. There was a birth-giving episode in which the act of the mother’s labour was conflated with the act of defecation: the mother cried “P” (shit) at the moment of the baby’s birth, and that became the baby’s name. Interpellation, anyone? Could this also hint at the hollow values society has conditioned its individuals to swallow?

Like the earlier Flush, P somehow managed to walk a tightrope between overt symbolism and social critique. Though I have a feeling that whatever it had to say could have been shortened by a scene or two, P was nonetheless an effective piece of drama with a fluid execution that should be largely credited to the intense stage presence of veteran Ahamed Ali Khan. Mr. Ahamed’s narrative and gestures demanded an intent and emotional involvement from the audience.

Similar to its earlier companion piece, Kalbun, P offered a similarly circumscribed perspective in its indictment of societal hypocrisy. Also, while it was intelligent in the permuting of its “shit” motif, given its lengthier duration, well, let us just say that there was only so much “shit” one can take. But all-in-all, it was good shit: the vitriolic polemics of Jelinek, the irreverence of Rushdie, the insistent rhetorics of Soyinka and the perverse humour of Kafka - mix them up, and you can play police-catch-thief with your own blighted social conscience.