Richard Lord

For a long time, Romania was known as one of those small European countries (well, relatively small) that regularly produced more history than it could consume locally. Then, over several months stretching from the end of 1989 through early 1990, this production was stepped up considerably and Romania suddenly became a lab for the human soul in extremis. Towards the end of this period, British playwright Caryl Churchill, director Mark Wing-Davey and a team of Romanian theatre students from London’s Central School of Drama, went off to Romania to survey the scene and get inspiration for a play on the situation there. They observed, spoke to a wide range of Romanians, workshopped and wrote. So, a good deal of that stormy history gets spilled into the resulting play, Mad Forest.

Mad Forest is a strange, intriguing piece of theatre. For one thing, the two central antagonists in this drama are never actually seen — except as caricatures served up by other characters. These key villains are the late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauescu and his loving consort and partner-in-crime, Elena.

Just to give a quick background (necessary for getting any kind of handle on this play): Ceauescu was the Communist ruler of Romania from 1965 until his violent overthrow 24 years later. Starting out as a kind of folksy, benevolent dictator in ‘65, Ceauescu (and his wife) become increasingly malignant as the years dragged on. By the end of their run, the regime and the society it ran bore more resemblance to the Marx Brothers than to Karl Marx. If you can imagine the Marx Brothers adding splashes of surveillance, torture and murder to their shtick.

Following the opening of the Berlin Wall and the decision of East Germany’s Communists to allow true opposition parties and free elections, the Red dominoes started to fall rapidly throughout Eastern Europe. But the one that went down with the largest thud was Romania; a thud and a lot of blood.

Mad Forest casts a sharp but cold eye at this ugly chunk of history leading up to the overthrow of the Ceauescu clique and the confused aftermaths of that overthrow. (The Ceauescus were replaced by a group composed almost entirely of high Communist officials who had been earlier demoted by the couple. The whole thing turned out to be more of a palace coup than a revolution. It was not until 2004 that the country was able to thrash its way to something like a full democracy. )

The structure and tone of the play, especially in the first act (there are three acts here), quite resembles the approach used by Bertolt Brecht in his punchy anti-Nazi play, The Fear and Misery of the Third Reich: short scenes, most apparently unrelated, track the sad nature of daily life in this surreal dictatorship.

The early scenes establish the routine oppressiveness of Romania before the fall of the Ceauescus. In the first scene, two soldiers sit slightly apart, morosely smoking. As they start to talk, one rises and turns on the radio to a near ear-splitting volume. They go back and continue their exchange, which we cannot hear, though we can see from their faces it involves some sharp disagreement. Welcome to an 80’s rewind of Eastern European Communism: this was a common practice in many East Bloc nations, where any discussions touching on political topics needed a wall of loud music, or bathtub taps running full blast, to offer cover from government snoops.

This scene rolls on with one of the play’s central characters arriving with a friend. These two young women bring gifts of four eggs and a pack of American cigarettes. (Both valuable commodities there.) They offer the smokes to the soldiers; the male soldier at first refuses: he is too much of a patriot to accept the decadent Western brand — apparently. But while the three woman chat and joke, he leans over and helps himself to one of the cigarettes. This causes the women to start laughing. Angered, the soldier grabs one of the precious (we will later learn how precious) eggs and smashes it on the floor.

Shorn of all dialogue, this scene captures the ingrown bitterness, the self-contempt that Romania’s brand of Marxism had produced. The scenes that follow present other sharply drawn examples of how the Romanian people were broken, bent, twisted and corrupted by the corrupt regime that ruled them for almost half a century.

One of the strongest of these scenes involves a cynical angel (played by Candace Rosario) and an anguished Orthodox priest (Ghazali Muzakir) facing off. To the priest’s surprise, the angel still harbours sympathies for the Iron Guard, Romania’s home-grown fascist movement (in some ways the most vicious of all Europe’s fascist movements of that period.). After an awkward round of give-and-take, the vignette ends with priest begging the angel to “Comfort me.” This is the desperation of the desolated.

This scene is at the same time one of the strongest in Act I and a prime example of the play’s underlying flaw. There is a clutch of rich themes in this confrontation between priest and angel that just beg to be explored further. But the structure of this first act, with its vigorous hop from episode to episode, precludes any such exploration. For this reason, Mad Forest offers a lot of breadth, but is a little short on depth.

The second act, or section, looks at the four days of the revolution. Here there are no scenes as such, but rather a series of quick monologues wherein students, factory workers, a flower-seller, a soldier and a Securitate officer (the secret police) give quick, snapshot accounts of what they experienced during those swirling, exciting and frightening days. (The flower-seller, who met her future husband when she was 14 and wed soon thereafter, suddenly felt that “I was sorry that I marry so young.” Others were sorry they only had one life to lose for the revolution.)

The last section of Mad Forest seeks to blend the formats of the first two acts. There are, again, a series of largely unconnected scenes, culminating in the wedding of two of the main figures from the first act. Indeed, the wedding brings together most of the character we met earlier. One key difference between the scenes in the first and last sections: in the first, the language was clipped, elliptical, edged with cautious notes. In the last section, people speak more openly, more forcefully — but apparently to no better end.

This third section of the play opens with a late-night meeting between a female vampire and a dog. This is a clever touch, as vampires are both a Romanian tradition (Transylvania is part of modern Romania and the name “Dracula” was a title given to the bloody ruler of southern Romania, Vlad Tepes) and a metaphor for its politics. The vampire has been drawn to this scene by the rich smell of blood, a scent vampires are especially sensitive to. The dog is homeless, abandoned — a telling symbol of far too many Romanians in the dismal wake of the stolen revolution.

But this third section does seem like here is where they threw in all the other interesting ideas from the workshops that didn’t fit in elsewhere. Thus, we get something like “Topic: Food Shortages” — when Lucia returns from America and is describing it, she becomes ecstatic about the food, especially the plethora of fruits and vegetables.

“Topic: the actual overthrow and execution of the Ceauescus”. The “rescue” of Ilena Ceauescu is staged as a comic farce. Now this bit really seems like a theatre-class exercise. A better treatment of this subject is when a family group stages their own makeshift version of the assassination of the dictator couple. Not only was it better, but it seemed much more organic to this third act.

One other vignette that does fit the play well — and is powerful in and of itself — involves a dinner table confrontation between an idealistic art student and his parents. The father is an architect who has spent most of his recent time and effort working on the “people’s Palace”, a pet project of the ruling couple, while the mother is a schoolteacher. We have, in fact, met this mother before, back in one of the duller bits from the first act, where she was giving a stock lecture on the glories of Romanian socialism and freedom under the Ceauescus. By this third act, she speaks of her past and the fear of losing her job. Her post is threatened, she realizes, because she was “Twenty years marching in the wrong direction.” Her husband asks if there isn’t someone they know who can help them. She replies that “We don’t know any more who we know.”

The corollary to this lament is they do not really know any more whose ass they should lick. Their artist son is determined not to lick anyone’s ass any more; this is the main source of the tension between them, a tension that carries through all the way to the wedding scene. The wedding reception itself is broken up into a series of short snippets (like those in Act II) where old wounds are reopened and new grievances sounded — alongside all the usual formulaic good cheer tossed around at weddings.

Ah, but the finale presents a wonderful coup de theatre: to cover up bad feelings between several of the guests, all in attendance are called into a lively dance. Suddenly, the angel from the first act and the vampire from the beginning of this last act come out and start dancing together. The dancing becomes more energetic, a lot of this energy obviously fuelled by alcohol, then turns almost frenetic, as they go round and round. Characters shout out lines they had recited earlier in the scene. But the last word is given to the vampire: “You have to keep moving, faster and faster .” They do; only the lights going down ends the party. They just keep going around in circles — much like Romania in the months after the ‘revolution’.

(I have learned that it was director Jonathan Lim’s decision to have the angel and vampire not only reappear, as stated in the text, but also to join in on the dance. These two — the only figures who are above and beyond human dreams and human suffering — are also the only ones in this production who enjoy the dance, who do not see it as a duty.)

At first, this play would seem to be both a logical and a puzzling choice for a company like Young and W!ld, which is at heart an innovative actor-training programme. For a cast of 13 young actors looking to further learn the rigours of their craft, Mad Forest provides an excellent range of roles with spotlight moments that allow each performer to demonstrate her or his chops — and a good many times for each.

What would be puzzling about this choice is that the turbulent history of distant Romania is not exactly a burning issue for most Singaporeans some 27 years after the events captured here. And before you even worry about a present-day Singapore audience relating to this material, there is the question of how do you get young Singaporean actors to connect to the scarred characters and situations they portray. And I mean connect at a level where the force and power of this play and its issues comes through as vividly as they need to in this work.

It is clear that director Jonathan Lim really wanted to challenge his young cast by throwing them fully into this emotional maelstrom. Not to mention the challenge he had brought upon himself. The very good news is that both cast and director met the challenge beautifully.

I never once had the sense here that I was watching young Asian players squeezing themselves into the skins of Romanians. No, this talented cast brought life to almost every moment and, for two intense hours, created a world where all the characters became real, and intensely so. Prime credit here must also be given to the director Lim. This fellow obviously did his homework very well. Indeed, over a three-month period, he had his actors exposed to the history of the period, had them watching films such as The Lives of Others to give them points of reference, then brought in locally based Romanians to coach them in accents and cultural byways.

About those accents: Lim wisely decided not to push too far the Alienation Effect of having Asian actors in these roles. He forced his actors to speak like they were Romanians. A great danger lay here, of course: a fake Romanian accent can sound like a bad comic’s take on Dracula. But in this production, the accents were clearly there, but subtle enough to escape the dangers of self-parody. True, some of the accents did dip at times to the level of mere flavouring, but for the most part they were clear and effective.

The Young and W!ld production was full of the little grace notes that make a scene feel so real. A functionary (polite term for a government flunky) reports on something a superior has said: “He had a very…interesting idea”, with the pause before ‘interesting’ and the lilt given to that word telling us so much about the system these people were working in.

The corruption in the system that corroded the souls of both victims and perpetrators is revealed beautifully in a scene where a young, pregnant woman goes to a doctor for an abortion. While the doctor (played pitch perfect by Audrey Luo) lectures the patient on being a slut and how abortion is illegal in Romania, she passes sheets of paper with the cost of the operation and (apparently) the time and place of the procedure. The young woman (also splendidly played, by Daphne Ong. nods apologetically and passes money to the doctor. The dialogue continued in absolute, deadpan counterpoint to what we just saw with our eyes.

Another telling scene played very well involves three friends in a tavern trading jokes about the country and its leaders. The feel in this scene was fiercely real, with the laughs coming freely, but then quickly tamped down as the trio did not want anyone to see them laughing too hard and ask them just what was so funny: in totalitarian regimes, extreme mirth is extremely suspect. (Later, in Part II, a female student doctor mentions that during those first days of the “revolution”, “For the first time in my life, I felt free to laugh.” The thematic echo there from this tavern scene was striking.)

But it was not just the fine work with voices: even more impressive was the uses of faces. Director Lim had a splendid gallery of 13 interesting faces to work with here, and the actors used their faces masterfully to add layers of subtext to almost every scene. From Daphne Ong, whose face is the quintessence of innocence, we got a wide range of innocence, from wounded innocence to stoic corruption. Along similar lines, Judy Ngo explored the possibilities of innocence in the roles of a emotionally worn-out nurse and the flower-seller. Ghazali Muzakir brought a different facial language to roles as diverse as a desperate priest, a worker sharing wine and raucous laughter with friends and an abandoned dog. Audrey Luo worked the same magic in a handful of roles; at times, it took me a minute or two to recognise here was the same actress.

Jasmine Koh proved wonderful at expressing hurt and anger; Tan Shou Chen was splendid as either a secret police officer or a young engineer wounded in the street battles of the early going; Meanwhile, Eleanor Tan and Jonathan Lum brought in so much weariness with spoiled lives to the roles of the teacher and her architect husband, you thought you had known these folks for some time.

The vampire (deliciously played by Isabella Chiam) was charming, seductive — and frightening for being so charming and seductive. As this vampire recalls the nightly act of drawing blood from her victims, the acting suggested something like post-coital relief. And Jonathan Lim pulled off an inspired casting ploy by having the Securitate officer from Act I reappear as the vampire in Act III. (Chiam was also very strong at expressing a student involved in the days of the shooting and the resistance.) Director Lim also made good use of the faces in other scenes in Act I where part of the cast stood lined up across the rear, serving as backdrop to the main scene. What was absorbing here was how each face made a commentary on the action going on downstage, but each commentary was different, appropriate to that character in the background.

Then, in Act II, the actors used their full bodies, often sprawled motionlessly upon the floor, as commentary upon the slaughter being described in the quick monologues.

Several of the actors here are far too young for the characters they play in some of the scenes - yet they still managed to pull it off with aplomb: the middle-aged figures are filled with the increased gravity and worn-out feel that comes from having lived far too long under an oppressive regime. There was not a weak link anywhere in this cast. And I was trying to find one I could cast a sharp stone at.

The set was, fittingly for a play on endgame Romania, sort of gray-on-gray Stalinist Butcher Block minimalism. (This set was a simple collaboration of cast and director). The lighting design, by Kala Raman, also leaned a bit towards the functional, but did its job well. Lighting effects very nicely set off the scene where Lucia is changing for her wedding, for instance.

If I could fault Jonathan Lim in any way for his work here, I would say he could have taken a scalpel to the script and removed some of the vignettes in the third act that were less effective (my first candidate for removal: the abduction of Elena Ceauescu), and also trimmed some of the smaller bits from the wedding reception that were rather inconsequential and served to do nothing but slow down the scene. Indeed, despite all the energy and commitment the cast brought to these closing minutes, there was still a sense of things going more slowly here. But just a slight sense, I admit.

For a number of reasons, this is the first review I have written in many months and I have not seen a lot of shows since June. But it strikes me that this show clearly deserves a number of “Best” nominations for the year. To name just the obvious three: best director, best ensemble acting, best production. If they fail to secure nominations (to say nothing of wins) in the first two categories, there is something seriously wrong with the nominating process, as well as the judgement of the judges.