Friday, March 30, 2007
This evening, Kevin, Pei Qin, PY and I watched Watching the Clouds Go By, written and directed by Robin Loon and presented by the 3rd year batch of Theatre Studies students. I had initially decided not to go watch the production, with 5 essays due and all that, but since PY wanted to go, I decided to be a good Lit student and support my fellow department-mates (in case you didn't know, English Language, English Lit and TS all share the same department - you can tell we're a dying breed).
The play was performed at the National Museum Gallery Theatre. I found the production OK for a student production but I still feel it wasn't very satisfactory. The actors definitely need to brush up on their enunciation. They were sounding too much like schoolkids trying to put on vaguely American / Brit accents to be 'theatrical' on stage. And for a play that's set in China during the Cultural Revolution, such accents come out plain weird. Moreover, I think the actors were nervous (naturally, it was their graduation piece, after all), and as a result of that the stresses on words came out a little stilted and wonky. The actors were also quite rigid and although in so far as this is a play about student revoluntionaries, they were ok at barking out Cultural Revolution slogans at each other and more often at the audience, but they needed a lot more subtlety. But perhaps I'm being overly critical here. After all, they're only students, not the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The structure of the plot was also a little patchy, with huge gaps in between scenes. First, we see Wei Ling begging Guo Ping to rejoin their "heroic" Red Guard group of cadres or face political punishment, in the next scene we see the student leader Lin Sheng condemning Guo Ping to death, and then a few scenes later, Wei Ling proclaims out of the blue that she has Guo Ping's child. And in the second act, Wei Ling makes the even more mystifying statement that she "was married once". I was like, when did that happen?
The scenes were also very short, each headed with a sub-title, and I think that might have contributed to the play's lack of emotional rapport with the audience. I suppose Loon might have wanted to represent the speed at which the Cultural Revolution spun out of control, but the extreme shortness of each scene made it difficult for the audience to develop sympathy for the characters before the next scene was announced in a highly declarative style, immediately destroying whatever suspension of disbelief the audience had managed to achieve (I'm assuming this play was intended to be a realist melodrama and not anything Brechtian).
But all in all, the play was not a bad effort. The music arrangement with live erhu and guzheng was very moving. And it was fun to see so many familiar faces on stage and in the audience. I think the department really got together to support the TS students. And that's really commendable, because ELL students should help each other, especially when we're so marginalized in school and in this technocratic society we live in. =)
And speaking of plays, I've had to study so many of them these few months. Strangely, drama constitutes a large portion of the texts for my modules this semester. I've read Greek tragedies, Shakespeare, Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Goethe, Peter Weiss and Dario Fo. I have not yet completed my collections of Pinter and Noel Coward from the previous semester. I have so many theatre texts at home, anyone who wants to put up a production can borrow the scripts from me, hehe. But I'm one of those "funny people who read plays", to quote Minwei (and she's "one of those funny people who read poetry", to return her compliment) so the reading of plays this semester has been very enjoyable and productive.
And guess what? Ian McKellen and the Royal Shakespeare Company is coming to tiny Singapore in July to perform Lear and The Seagull! This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to watch the RSC in the flesh and we have the SRT to thank for bringing them to our oft-neglected little city-state. I'm not a fan of Shakespeare, neither of Chekhov (he is SOOO BORING) and certainly not one of Ian McKellen, but I think I may be willing to pay a good sum of money to see something put up by the RSC and Trevor Nunn. I'll probably go for the matinees which do not have McKellen in the cast and therefore are two times cheaper, heh.
kaoru said at 9:36 AM
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