by Liana Gurung Qing Yu

Just kidding.

Now I wouldn’t go so far as to say that attending Haresh Sharma’s Poor Thing was a life-changing experience, but I hold that it was a near thing.

But firstly let me put this statement into context: I’m a relative newbie to the Singapore theatre scene, despite many friends who have been for several years deeply embroiled in their school’s drama clubs and productions, and despite having more than a passing interest in theatre (seeing all the photos of my friends on exchange attending this musical and that on Broadway is actually painful). Before attending Poor Thing I’d gone on a whim to Wild Rice’s gender-bent interpretation of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and after – riding the euphoria of Poor Thing and hoping for a similarly transcendental experience – Pangdemonium’s version of The Rise and Fall of Little Voice (accompanied by a friend who’d gone to see Fat Pig for a writing module and produced a shining review for it as an assignment).

All paled in comparison to the experience I had of Poor Thing in March earlier this year – and I use the word experience deliberately, because it was precisely that. Imagine attending a play that had a QR code that linked you instantly to the Facebook profile of one of its fictional characters and invited you to make a friend request; a play that, in the waiting area just before we entered the black box let roll a clip of the scene just preceding whatever awaited you within. Even the set itself when we went in was a stylised but concrete reproduction of a car crash, though other than the two cars (with working doors, no less!) the props used were minimal. It was clear that the focus was meant to be on the characters themselves, and that we were expected to immerse ourselves in the drama that was to play out between them.

And what characters these were. Best friends Jerome and Sharifah, while en route to send the former to camp for reservist, accidentally rear-end married couple Jerome and Alisha’s BMW while they are driving home from a dinner. The frustrated civility and initial awkwardness of negotiating the aftermath of a car accident – furthermore problematized by high-handedness on the part of the well-to-do couple and the irreverence of the pair of best friends – give way to wider societal concerns as all four characters realise they have less and more in common than they would have ever thought. Tension ramps up to breaking point as an all-out fistfight breaks out among the actors, with the audience left to look on rapt, wide-eyed and afraid at these characters rolling around on the floor before and among them.

Poor Thing marked itself as different from the previous plays I’d watched from the outset; firstly, in the breakdown of distance between actor and audience. The audience was scattered among the actors, some seated on the floor, others on the prop-bollards that ringed the scene. Secondly what differentiated this play was its lack of breaks or clearly defined ‘acts’; there was no intermission. From beginning to end it was a tight, taut, emotional one-hour out of these characters’ lives.

After watching Poor Thing I realised that there’s something special about a play written specifically for Singapore’s context; not one whose original script has been fiddled with in an attempt to make it more relevant to the Singapore viewer, but one that is explicitly concerned with issues that Singaporean society is facing and has been written with these in mind. It’s true that maybe Sharma was limited by the play’s own one-hour continuous constraint; a lot of these issues were glossed over (a criticism from the friend who’d gone with me that we primly agreed to disagree over). But on hindsight she had a point: homosexuality, race, class were all only mentioned in passing, and then only as tools used to stoke the fire of the characters’ rage before the play’s climax of an all-out tussle. But how smart was it (please pardon the fangirling) that all these issues were embodied in the characters and props themselves: homosexuality in the character of Jerome, race in their casting and language (how Sharifah’s character would break into lamenting Malay that provided a lot of the play’s more emotional moments, both humorous and harrowing), class in the cars of both sets of characters. Sharma hadn’t needed to say all this because he had already shown it in (what was to me at least) a beautiful harnessing of the economy of the play. Not to mention a nod to that age-old rule in writing about speech and verisimilitude: one of the biggest challenges writing dialogue is knowing what to include and what to exclude taking into account the characters’ varying levels of intimacy and openness, something I think was held to a fairly believable standard of reality in the play.

Perhaps it’s a trait of Sharma, but his ability to write so that it not only speaks to the Singaporean but speaks of him or her is, in my current humble sampler of Singaporean plays, exceptional. However, while I had an obviously great time watching the play, the friend I went with left The Necessary Stage black box with rather mixed emotions. For her I think the whole experience was a bit discomfiting – as much as she felt a part of the play, she was also apart from it. We all were; stepping back, I realised after the performance that we were an actual part of the scene. Not just because the actors used us as props, but because we were; as is visible in any photograph documenting the scene of an(y) accident, we were the ubiquitous bystander, watching on wide-eyed at the spectacle unfolding before us. It’s possible some of her dissatisfaction stemmed from a sense of violation, where “an audience wants to be an audience, though it has a desire to touch the entity on the stage – to touch, but not to be swallowed by or to become that entity” (Raz 259), the latter of which Poor Thing’s audience came perhaps dangerously close to. However, that is probably ironically the thing that made me enjoy the play the most, and that on hindsight I really appreciated the sheer intelligence of.

Ultimately the play was best enjoyed not only in the moment, where we were entertained by great dialogue (thinking back to that moment in lecture when Prof Holden spoke about how Haresh Sharma said at a panel that he didn’t simply write “Singlish” but speech appropriate to thesituation) and rich character portrayals, but also in retrospect, poking at its several layers and unearthing more and more meaning. For instance, though the play’s central, given focus was a commentary on social media I thought a wider reading might be its criticism of our culture of spectatorship, which we are, as we were in the play, sometimes tacitly complicit in. All in all I think the best thing any piece of art can do is trigger some sort of self-evaluation upon its completion (or even during its course) – something that, even if it didn’t for my friend to the same extent, Poor Thing clearly did for me.

Bibliography
Raz, Jacob. “Conclusion.” Audience and Actors: A Study of the Interaction in the Japanese Traditional Theatre. Leiden: Brill, 1983. 259. Web.