Saturday, August 23, 2008
I came back last night (or more accurately, early this morning) at 3am, and after taking an afternoon nap, I now feel conscious enough to write this post on our Lit students' outing to watch Own Time Own Target.
In the previous post, I mentioned that almost half the Lit cohort was going to turn up to support Laremy. Although some of the people who had bought tickets couldn't turn up because of work commitments (darn the neo-liberal economy's illiberal workers' welfare practices), some other people who could not make it at first turned up, so in the end the numbers remained about the same.
However, we were scattered all over the place and some did not stay for the feedback session after the show and as a result, I could not get the group photo I was so looking foward to taking. It would have been nice to have a picture of all of us together to commemorate this unprecedented event...
But on to my views of the show. I liked Laremy's second play Radio Silence the best out of the three plays featured in this triple bill. The reviewer from Life! called the play Beckettian, and I couldn't agree more. I liked the way Laremy pared the play down to its bare essentials, setting the action in a non-man's land and letting the audience watch how his characters grapple with the collapse of the entire system of rules and hierarchy which governs life in the army. Like Stefan, I felt that the play had great potential, but it was let down a little by the rather flat acting of Nick Shen as the driver Charlie.
The first play, Full Tank!, was madcap fun to begin with, but unlike Radio Silence, it was a bit too diffuse and unfocused in its direction. I felt that it touched on several topical issues of interest to Singaporeans, such as racism against Malays in the SAF, the incompetence of the authorities and being trapped in a system whose maintenance one is complicit in, and this is of course commendable but it could have done better with a stronger underlying structure to bring all these concerns together. The comedy was also a bit too amateurish and slapstick at times, detracting from the edge that the absurdist elements were supposed to give the play.
Nonetheless, Laremy did a great job for a first-timer and we were all very proud of him. The third play, which was a mini-musical by Julian Wong, was feel-good entertainment with charming songs and likeable characters, but it wasn't very original and didn't take its critique of the army's discrimination against male homosexuals and its discourse of masculinity far enough.
But perhaps I'm asking too much of a mainstream musical with a severe time limit, and frankly speaking, our brains were so dead by that time of the night that cheesy, accessible fare was a welcome relief after the chilling Radio Silence. The cast was also very talented and I'm really amazed by the way they could juggle so many vastly different roles in one single night.
All in all, OTOT was good fun and I'm really glad that W!ld Rice give Laremy this opportunity to showcase his work in a public space.
kaoru said at 4:45 AM
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