This was a workshopped version of the play by my friend Kelvin Tan which won the 2nd prize at the Shell Drama Competition in 1988. The original play is about two friends Clelland and Brinsley, a musician and writer, and how they navigate the essential antipathy of Singaporean society towards art making in Singapore.

 

The names of the two characters were Clelland Farleigh and Brinsley Bivoac, purposely name thus because Kelvin was struggling with the essential cultural contradiction between his identity as a Chinese person who created in the English language. In other words he was Chinese but he wasn't as well. Brinsley was also a recurring character in his plays as well as his novel "All Broken Up and Dancing".

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I work-shopped it over a period of 3-4 months with my Tamil actor friend Vadi Valagan and we turned what was essentially a 30-minute play into a full-length play. We retained the original plot but built on the characters and tried to deepen them. I also added in additional characters such as Clellend's mother, and his yuppie friends as well as abstract segments with a man reading the Chinese Three Character classic 三字经. Vadi added elements from his Indian background as well as feelings and inspirations from a long time relationship that had just ended. Maryann, who was acting as Clellend's mother improvised on the spot taking inspiration from the incidents in her life that was happening at that time. The reason I added the characters was because I wanted to give voice to the people surrounding the lead character rather than just hearing from his and his friend, the results were mixed but the impact was definitely there. This was the beginning of by working relationship with Maryann Ng, who would appear in my other plays and subsequent films.

 

The play was performed on the 2nd floor of the Chinese Opera Institute, where I was working at that time, and lit with basic garden floodlights, and the set comprised of piles of old newspapers. Because the play coincided with the publication of a critique we did of Eric Khoo's Twelve Stories, the audience turnout was rather large and the publicity given to the play was very good.

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The reaction to the play was generally good, however, for some reason it elicited an extremely hostile review by a theatre reviewer online who wrote a 6 page condemnation of the play. This was quite puzzling until I realized the reviewer was going through personal issues of her own that she felt was reflected in the play and for some reason felt attacked by it. The impact of characters speaking directly from the bone was almost too much for some people to take. It was too raw, too emotional and too real, because much of it was indeed real. Vadi, was was already a veteran of many Tamil plays and a writer and director in his own right said that he never felt like that in a play before. I was trying to channel the Theatre of Cruelty and in a sense I succeeded.

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It was also then that I realized that the approach I took towards theatre was one that was drastically at odds with the usual approaches by the local theatre groups, and for that reason some degree of hostility and enmity was to be expected.