Life is an Angel
Directed and workshopped by
Wong Kwang Han
Original Script: Kelvin Tan
Performance Script developed in collaboration with Chong Wee Yong and Francesca John
Cast
Brinsley Chong Wee Yong
Nancy Francesca John
"life is an angel, sometimes mythical, sometimes real"
The premise of this play was two students meeting one boring afternoon at outside the RBR in the National University of Singapore. For students at NUS in the eighties and nineties, the RBR or Recommended Books Room was a hangout to hangout, smoke, chill after studying intensely for hours in the library, it overlooked a rain forest directly below and was on the same level as the Central library. As they meet, they start to share aspects of their lives, much like the characters in Albee's Zoo Story, leading to the two of them to an unexpected conclusion. The idea is that sometimes it is much more comfortable to tell a stranger about your life then friends.
The original play was strong, there is a strong Ibensonic tension throughout the play and Kelvin m but I felt that something was missing and searched for additional elements in the improvisational work with the actors themselves. The tone of what we did was set by our first production Tramps Like Us. Kelvin had written a wonderful play but we had wondered what we could add to it and the result was a two-hour play. Similarly, what we produced was totally unexpected and in some ways unnerving, but that is the way of Artaud, the theatre of cruelty to which I owe an absolute debt to. The result was a play slightly over an hour, longer then the original script. The undercurrent of the dialogue is that sometimes there is more to what people are saying and they themselves may not realize it even.
This was the first production I took overseas, though not the first in which I performed in. The play participated at the India Theatre Olympiad in Orissa, and at the Shanghai Experimental Theatre Festival in 1998. Francesca's and Wee Yong's performances were outstanding and something I thought was very overlooked at that time, in Singapore theatre actors tend to be over the top and superdramatic which usually is taken as a measure of good acting here