Tender was the night
Drama Box's A Stranger At Home evokes the realisation that things fall apart but hope persists
By Hong Xinyi, Arts Reporter
A Stranger At Home begins with a student bidding goodbye to her wheelchair-bound professor to study in New York. -- DESMOND FOO
THEATRE A STRANGER AT HOME
Drama Box Drama Centre Thursday
THIS Mandarin play is extraordinary in several ways, but its greatest achievement lies in its sustained evocation of a profoundly tender mood.
The production has a self-possessed reticence, a quietly intractable certainty about its artistic purpose.
The story begins with a journey: A student (Koh Hui Ling) says goodbye to her wheelchair-bound professor (Li Xie), leaving her unnamed island nation to study in New York.
Their correspondence - the professor mourns the island's lost histories, the student is entranced by new worlds - structures much of the play.
Other stories emerge, echoing the central theme of journeying. A girl (Yeo Yann Yann) returns to her rural hometown after wearying of life in the city, only to realise that some journeys, once undertaken, cannot be retracted.
Actress Mindee Ong narrates in poetic Hokkien the story of a young man from the Qing dynasty who is inspired by rhetoric to create a revolution but discovers that translating ideals into reality can be a messy business.
The interweaving stories in the play don't unfold as much as they bloom, softly and surely, with a bitter-sweet inevitability, like the gentle intimations of impending rain in an austere grey sky.
The cogency of its vision is all the more remarkable considering the many elements contained in the production.
Director Kok Heng Leun pieced together the text of the play by using excerpts from various plays and essays written by home-grown playwrights Quah Sy Ren and Ng How Wee.
The haunting music for the piece was provided by experimental rock band The Observatory, and film-maker Royston Tan conceptualised and shot the film images that accompany the cast on stage.
Projected onto a screen of gossamer - translucence placed in front of the actors, Tan's images weaved their own visual haiku of lonely nostalgia - goldfish glitter in a leaking plastic bag; old records spin in woeful revolutions; bare branches ache towards stark, clear skies.
Most of the time, the actors, music and images worked together seamlessly. There were moments, however, when all the things going on felt a tad distracting, especially when the screen kept being lowered and raised for different scenes.
The English surtitles were also more of a general summary rather than a proper translation of the intricate Mandarin script.
But one barely registers these imperfections. Moments of wonder surface so suddenly and vividly, they seem to leave luminous imprints tenderly on your soul.
In one scene, the student describes how, towards the ragged end of autumn in New York, she goes on a ferry ride to visit the Statue of Liberty. As the ferry heads back to Manhattan, the city's graceful skyscrapers soar before her in a resplendent panorama.
Later, in a lyrical counterpoint to Manhattan's iconic skyline, the student recites a list of all the places one can no longer find in Singapore - the old National Library, Satay Club, Van Cleef Aquarium, the National Theatre and the old Drama Centre at Fort Canning Hill.
Each name she calls is like an elegiac chime, marking a remembrance of things lost and never mourned. The lights are turned onto the audience, sitting in the new Drama Centre - the moment is both a question (do you remember?) and a prophecy (this, too, shall pass).
Kok structured this play in five sections, each named after a section of T.S. Eliot's 1922 poem, The Wasteland. It is not difficult to see why: With its pastiche of texts striving to articulate a sense of alienation, this play has a distinct affinity with Eliot's modernist epic.
But at heart, this play is a fundamentally different creature. Eliot ends The Wasteland with a despairing cry: 'These fragments I have shored against my ruin.'
A Stranger At Home, however, leaves you with an ache for something you never properly realised you missed. It relinquishes bleak despair for something far more potent - the realisation that things always fall apart, but hope foolishly persists.
A Stranger At Home plays at the Drama Centre today at 8pm. Tickets from $15 to $50 available from Sistic (tel: 6348-5555).
hxinyi@sph.com.sg
'It leaves you with an ache for something you never properly realised you missed.'
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