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>machine by theatreworks >reviewed by matthew lyon >date:
16 mar 2002 >tired
already? go home then |
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Tan Tarn How's latest playwriting venture tells the story of two itinerant repairmen, Rex and Heng - one good with words and the other good with his hands - who arrive unexpectedly at the flat of friends, Kim and Lina, and proceed, as one does, to fix their washing machine. But that's not all they fix. In an increasingly tangled web of lies and half-lies, coupled with some subtle excavations of the men and women's characters and some inconclusive probing into their pasts, the one thing that becomes clear is that each man possesses the skills to make one of the women feel whole, but also to make her feel empty: to fix her and also to break her apart. |
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>>'The set... was an ode to the hinge and castor... it turned out out be so versatile it should have been sponsored by Lego.' |
This versatility gave the play an almost televisual element, as it seemed there might be multiple cameras set up to monitor the various rooms, a la Big Brother. Director Jeremiah Choy often made incisive use of this factor, fuelling the sense of voyeurism by positioning his actors on the threshold between two rooms so that they seemed unsure whether to come in or go out and indeed, whether they were being watched. This led to some genuinely eerie moments. But Choy's staging was not without foible. Whereas he was able to capture what is best about television in his better scenes, in his worst, he dredged the depths of channel five. Actors inexplicably faced away from each other in the middle of conversations, forming shapes that gave us geometry when we wanted chemistry, and moreover, this sat uncomfortably with the naturalism of the dialogue. The 'walk to the imaginary window' technique was somewhat overused (and doesn't 'Days of Our Lives' have the copyright on that, anyway); and a scene where Heng toyed ineffectually with the innards of the washing machine miles away from where the appliance itself actually resided, just so the audience could see him better, revealed a lack of truth and of imagination. |
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Karen Tan was, by contrast, rather more perceptibly acting - although this can hardly be labelled a criticism, since she's very good at it. I must admit that it took me a while at the start to reconcile her more self-conscious approach with Koh's unaffected one, but by the end, she had convinced me enough that I could feel her need and shame and guilt from across the auditorium. Low Kee Hong possessed the suavity and some of the menace that his smooth operator suit-type required, but not the magnetism to make his scenes with the women believable. Moreover, he had significant problems with the timing of Tan's somewhat Beckettian dialogue, especially its interruptions and almost stichomythic, half-aborted exchanges - the end result being that he looked like he hadn't learnt his lines properly. And Casey Lim as "good with his hands" Heng was a solid, dependable presence, whose autistic pauses mostly hinted at underlying conflicts, but occasionally parodied themselves. An example of this came in a scene at the end of the play, when Heng was leaving Karen Tan's Kim. The dialogue went like this:
If intended as a parody, this was, I daresay, a very clever scene; but I suspect that wasn't the intention at all and it was, in fact, a rather uncomfortable lapse on the parts of all concerned. This scene was, however, very far from the norm, and overall I was glad to have seen an intellectually impressive and thought-provoking play that refused to take the easy options of cheap emotions or abstract plotting, and succeeded in taking itself seriously, and taking the audience along for the ride. |