a project by Ho Tzu Nyen and Fran Borgia
review by Ng Yi-Sheng

What are we watching?

Why are we watching?

These are questions that Singapore theatre does not ask enough. We’ve become conservative in an age of commercial success, relying on revivals, imports and sensationalism to sell our tickets, and when we do experiment, we seldom ask more than, “Who am I (based on my national/generational/sexual identity)?” or “What can I do with this cool multimedia/puppetry technology?”

Enter Ho Tzu Nyen and Fran Borgia. In 2006, the two artists proposed a work for development under the Esplanade Theatre Studio’s Sparks 4 programme, which operates with an aim of “Challenging Set Notions of Performance”. They began with a simple premise: instead of yet another dramatic rendition of a Shakespearean classic, why not attempt a staging of a critical essay of a play?


The Workshop Presentation of “King Lear: the Avoidance of Love” thus begins as a literal performance of excerpts from the text of the philosopher Stanley Cavell’s “The Avoidance of Love”¹ — first as a voiceover during a video collage of different film versions of “King Lear”; then live, as a monologue by actor Paul Rae, as a video camera tracks him from the dressing room to the stage itself. Nothing radical has happened yet — video has become a common component of theatrical mise-en-scène, and non-dramatic texts have found their way into performance before.

What follows, however, is a singularly bizarre departure from drama as we know it in Singapore. Paul is joined by Tony Yeow and Elizabeth Tan, and the three (in the capacity of Producer, Director and Casting Director) hold auditions for an imaginary future production of “King Lear”. One by one, prominent actresses from the local theatre scene enter and audition for the parts of the three daughters of Lear. Janice Koh, Tan Kheng Hua, Karen Lim, Noorlinah Mohamed, Neo Swee Lin and Amy Cheng step up to before the panel and the camera crew, answering the Director’s questions and reciting the monologues of Regan, Goneril, Cordelia.


We, the audience, start to giggle. We’re disoriented at the strange dislocation of categories before us: sure, the meta-theatre of the audition setup is still identifiable as theatre, but the actresses on stage are playing themselves, without rehearsal — they banter playfully with the audition panel, with Kheng Hua recalling her days acting with Tony in Michael Chiang’s classic 80’s musical “Beauty World”, and bubble with spontaneity in their critiques of the text and its characters — some auditionees confess that they do not even like the play. So there are spots of reality within this theatrical array — but even this reality contains theatre: the audition pieces themselves from Act One Scene One of “King Lear”.


The audience is perplexed. What are we watching?

How are we watching?

The first scene of “King Lear” is the scene of his abdication: before he divides his territory between his daughters, he demands that they praise their love for him in court. In his essay, Cavell points out the theatre of such a ritual: what is demanded is not a true declaration of love, but a ceremonial one – an act of drama.

Likewise, we the audience find ourselves in the position of Lear, judging the actresses, weighing the respective qualities of their performances. We relish the precise exactitude with which Janice performs Regan’s monologue three times in a row and take points off when Amy pauses too long in her delivery of Cordelia’s words. Without having lifted a finger, we’ve been transformed from passive spectators into theatre insiders — implicated in the very process of selection and elimination in casting — an imaginary audition panel for an imaginary production.

And yet we also enjoy the moments when unrehearsed reality forces its head into the play — when Swee Lin brazenly waves to her husband in the audience, or when Noorlinah surprises the audition panel by reading all four roles of the scene, including a booming-voiced Lear (for which she has to whip out a cheat-sheet of dialogue from her pocket) — even the tense moments when the video crew has to stop to change tapes on their camera, and become the unexpected focus of the piece.

Of all three daughters in “King Lear”, Cordelia alone loves her father, and she alone refuses to play the game of declaring love in overblown, theatrical terms. We love these odd moments as we love Cordelia: they suggest a triumph of the truth over absurd, illusory conventions.

But do we truly love Cordelia? Lear’s banishment of Cordelia his traditionally attributed to senility, yet Cavell proposes that Lear, far from being senile, is fully aware of the truth of her love. He simply cannot allow such an uncomprisable love a place in his court, where lies and half-truths are necessary constructs.

Tzu Nyen and Fran provide us with four separate candidates for Cordelia, but none can satisfy us. Karen Lim and Amy Cheng both audition for the role, but having been revealed as actresses, they are too tinged with drama to accommodate the innocence of the part. In her role of Casting Director, Elizabeth Tan proposes herself for the role when she tells them she once played Cordelia in a school production. When she is ignored, she stands in the spotlight, intoning, “Poor Elizabeth, poor Elizabeth” — a sincere imitation of human drama which jars with our demands for art, for eloquence, for craft in acting.

Strangest of all is the case of Leah Low. A recent graduate and an unknown face in theatre, Leah played the role of Cordelia in the Sparks 4 Treatment Presentation of “King Lear: the Avoidance of Love”.((Treatment Presentations for Sparks 4 works were presented on 9 September 2006. These were shorter versions of possible works for development; dramatized proposals, as it were. Of these proposals, two were chosen for further funding: “King Lear: The Avoidance of Love” and Wilson Goh’s “Dichterliebe”. Both were presented at the Sparks 4 Workshop Presentation.)) Paul refers to her in his capacity as Producer, trying to urge the unconcerned Director to recast her. Leah only appears at the end of play, lost in the same pool of light that surrounded Elizabeth. She is not given a chance to audition, and thus frustrates our desire to see her act.

She is silent. She performs by not performing.

How are we watching?

Why are we watching?

Cavell points out in the second section of his essay the peculiar illogic of drama; how we can sit back and allow terrible things to happen onstage without rushing onto the proscenium to rescue characters in the midst of death throes (neither do we attempt to persuade the Director to cast Elizabeth or Leah, thus indirectly dooming them to obscurity). This insane suspension of belief once empowered audiences — Aristotle saw tragedy as a purgative of fear and terror, restoring psychic health.

Yet today, he argues, when tragedies of the world are delivered to our postbox every morning, the passivity of theatre becomes dangerously immobilizing — the gulf between ourselves and the drama grows as we dismiss the theatre as mere entertainment. Tzu Nyen and Fran monkey with this divide of disbelief — but rather than answering Cavell’s challenge to cause audiences to confront characters on stage, their finished work flirts more with the philosopher’s suggestion that drama as we know it is dead.

The artists note in their programme booklet that the auditions of “King Lear: The Avoidance of Love” will not mimic reality television. But the fact is that much of the frisson of the show is dependent on its use of celebrity: the big names of the stage that weathered the growth of theatre in the late 80s and 90s. Tzu Nyen acknowledges that he’s using his actresses as readymades, each imbued with the power to summon a complex web of associations with the greater history of local theatre gossip. It’s telling that most of the audience laugh knowingly when Noorlinah admits having acted in Theatreworks’s “Lear” without ever reading the original play — “Ah, but you see, that’s the cleverness of Keng Sen! You don’t have to read the work to understand it!”²

And of course, celebrity is one of Singapore theatre’s greatest marketing strategies today. Advertising campaigns centre around the faces of the handful of famous names in our drama scene, and an English-language media zealously interviews directors and playwrights to promote our productions, even holding an annual awards ceremony (while giving comparatively little attention to visual arts, dance, or rigorous criticism of any kind). It’s a happy coincidence that three months after the production, the Esplanade would present a “King Lear” featuring a genuine Hollywood movie star, flown in at an incredible expense, with top-tier seats going for a whopping S$400.³

In effect, we’re experiencing many theatre productions the same way we watch the auditions of this show. Half the time, we’re experiencing the play’s idea; the other half, we’re gazing at the stars.

There are probably a score of other ways to understand “King Lear: The Avoidance of Love” — particularly in the context of Tzu Nyen and Fran’s other works, including the TV series 4 X 4 — Episodes in Singapore Art, and the experimental music video The Bohemian Rhapsody Project. Meta-commentary — the core of contemporary practice — easily generates halls of mirrors into which infinite Alices may plummet to retrieve new conclusions.

But it’s this meta-commentary, querying the very medium of the texts one is exploring and creating, that’s become lacking in our theatre. To avoid hubris, today’s theatre must ask difficult questions of itself.

What are we watching?

How are we watching?

Why are we watching?

Are we watching?

“King Lear: The Avoidance of Love”, was performaned at the Esplanade Theatre Studio, on 31 March 2007.

1. Published in Stanley Cavell, Must we mean what we say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. p 267-253. [↩]
2. Noorlinah refers to Ong Keng Sen’s role in directing Theatreworks’s “Lear” in 1999. This was a performance that roughly followed the lines of the plot of “King Lear” using actors from a variety of pan-Asian performance traditions, including kabuki and Beijing opera. [↩]
3. The Royal Shakespeare Company (UK)’s “King Lear” was staged at the Esplanade on July 19-21, 2007, starring Ian McKellen, featuring as part of the Singapore Repertory Theatre’s main season. Tickets sold very well. [↩]