Business Times Review 10 June 2006

June 10, 2006

DRAMA BOX'S A STRANGER AT HOME
An aesthetic tableau fraught with tension
By CHEAH UI-HOON

FACED with an avantgarde play, it helps to have some - or rather, many - clues along the way. For Drama Box's A Stranger At Home, the first vital clue was the first English subtitle, 'A Mind Map', flanking the stage just before the play started.

Another prior clue - one much less oblique - was director Kok Heng Leun's preview of the play, as seen in media reports, that A Stranger At Home is a deconstruction of local academic Quah Sy Ren's works.

Which should have been a red flag, signalling that one should have a good idea of Quah's works before viewing the play, especially as it was almost like an ode to the writer. Which is fine and good if the novelist/ playwright concerned is someone whose works are as well-known as those of Oscar Wilde, but not when they aren't.

A Stranger At Home then - although quite an 'atmospheric' play, in which theatre, music and film were poetically woven together - appeared, at worst, an obscure stringing together of random stories with only a tenuous connection, and which didn't necessarily segue into or overlap one another at meaningful moments.

At best, Kok crafted an aesthetic tableau with five actors on the stage - replete with sounds and beautiful abstract images - which had an artful pensive mood to it, while also being fraught with tension from start to finish.

A Stranger At Home - which needs no little deconstructing itself - started with a student (Koh Hui Ling) bidding farewell to her wheelchair-bound professor (Li Xie) as she was leaving to study overseas. From there, they have correspondence, voiced by the actresses. As the student writes about her new discoveries and experiences, the professor in turn retreats often into her thoughts, imagination and memories.

The 'mind map' then refers to the oft random trails of thoughts and thought processes in the professor's mind - as the stories within the play segue in and out of a girl-girl-boy relationship, a Qing dynasty story of a rebel and a story of a bone collector.

Each story-within-the-story had a different 'personality' to it - whether it was the dramatic pathos of the triangular relationship (acted by Peter Sau, Yeo Yann Yann and Mindee Ong), the Qing tale told eloquently (by Mindee Ong) in hokkien dialect, or the graphic morbidity of grave exhumations, decaying corpses and cockroaches.

Local indie outfit The Observatory's music underpinned the mood on the stage, while film-maker Royston Tan's images provided a much-needed 'lively' counterpoint - think moving clouds, flickering flames, the ebb and flow of the sea, and leaking plastic bags containing live goldfish - to the monotonous, constrained movements on stage.

A Stranger At Home was unabashedly philosophical, with Kok's idea of a text-based play being emotive narrations of prose and poetry written by Quah in his works; rather than engaging dialogue. While the Mandarin lines could be appreciated for their poetry, the English summaries were just a little too brief.

Knowing and empathising with one of Kok's bugbears - how Singapore's old but iconic buildings are torn down and new ones rebuilt in their space - there were several poignant lines that resonate. As the student recounted all the buildings that are no longer around or have been moved, the professor states how this is equivalent to robbing her of her childhood. Our roots and sense of belonging, surely, are also linked to the physical space around us.

But in an island with finite and limited space, change seems to be the only constant that is accepted without question.

In the end though, the Qing dynasty rebel leads a failed rebellion. Which one could read as a pessimistic or fatalistic stance that individuals can do little to either effect change or stand in its way when it becomes a fact of life.