Confronted
with the subject of paedophilia, we typically have two responses: either
we shrug it off because it doesn't seem to affect us or we condemn it
utterly, because it is so terribly wrong. Fundamentally Happy
articulates the emotional and social complexities of paedophilia magnificently,
examining the apathetic response while hammering every button on the
emotional console (tension, anger, hate, love, denial, pain) and exploring
the condemnatory response without arousing knee-jerk reactions of disgust
or condemnation in its audience.
Fundamentally Happy is also an epic yet fiercely intimate
tragedy of love and loss; it is about emotion and conflict as much as
it is emotional and conflicting. Approaching paedophilia with a calm,
fierce authority, Haresh Sharma channels a comprehensive vision through
a single person's story, recreating a specific and finite set of events
that transforms Fundamentally Happy into a spectacle adequate
to its incendiary subject matter.
Eric (Chua Enlai), a thirty-year old social worker, returns to his
childhood neighbourhood and looks for the home of his old neighbours.
He finds that the couple, Uncle Ismail (who never appears) and Habiba
(Aidli "Alin" Mosbit) are still living there, older and with children.
Habiba ushers Eric - and the deep, dark secret he brings with him -
into their house with enthusiasm. As Habiba and Eric fondly recall "the
old days", Eric shockingly reveals that Uncle Ismail is a paedophile
who abused him as a child - and with this information, he throws all
their lives into a series of emotional hairpin turns.
In something as seemingly unambiguous as paedophilia, we instinctively
delineate the roles of victim (child and family) and aggressor (paedophile).
Refuting this deceptive illogic, Sharma evinces the many faces of victimisation
through brilliant sleight of hand. Eric's strained reiteration "I am
blessed... and I do... I truly feel blessed" in his early effusive banter
with Habiba is already an ironic indication of his vulnerability, while
Habiba, in her startling insinuation that Eric seduced her husband,
cloaks her denial and desperation under the easy cover of aggression.
Perhaps, as Fundamentally Happy indicates, the real aggressors
are the strange paradoxes of human emotion. We not only feel the full
effect of Eric's violation but are also privy to his complicated emotional
response to Uncle Ismail: he is at once the predator of Eric's innocence,
the father he never had and the great love of his life. Like Habiba,
we helplessly grovel in denial, dismay and desperation as we struggle
with the realisation that this perverse connection between Eric and
Uncle Ismail is also genuine.
To say that Fundamentally Happy is about child abuse is accurate,
but incomplete. Sharma lifts what could have otherwise been a conventional
narrative of trauma and the faint hope of recovery into a vivid play
about the strangeness and awfulness of life. He demonstrates that being
a victim of a condemned passion is like being a traveller in a foreign
country who cannot speak its language. I shall long remember the pain
and bewilderment as Eric tries to claim his love and yearning for Uncle
Ismail, straining to express the tragically inexpressible.
In light of this, it is only natural that a torn-up Habiba says, "He
[Uncle Ismail] is Satan. But he is a also good man.", articulating one
of the most poignant paradoxes of the play in the simplest and most
searing way possible. Sharma and director Alvin Tan temper the inevitable
grimness of the first two scenes with remarkable tenderness and beauty
in the last: when Habiba takes off her tudung in the final scene, claiming
Eric to be her anak ku sayang (beloved child), it is one of the most
transcendental moments I have seen in theatre.
Admittedly, Sharma raises some big questions he cannot answer within
the compass of an eighty-five minute play. Habiba's defiant retort that
they found "girl" instead of "boy" porn on Uncle Ismail's computer could
have been a potentially compelling study of ethical relativism - is
having such perverse sexual relations with females (considered) more
acceptable than with males? This was one of several interesting ideas
raised but not satisfactorily pursued.
But what Sharma communicates powerfully is the mood of acute desolation
that permeates Chua's and Alin's portrayals of Eric and Habiba. Chua
superbly conveys Eric's frenetic isolation as his bottled-up secret
of juvenile sexual abuse threatens to explode and his reminiscences
take increasingly dangerous turns. He is a man in a nightmare, his face
contorting with terror as a hunted look clouds his eyes. An oblivious
Habiba, however, keeps up a stream of merry chatter, making Eric's rapid
self-destruction even starker. When Eric presses his face into Uncle
Ismail's freshly laundered shirts before the first scene fades out,
it is only apt that the stunned expression on Habiba's face is paired
with an anguished silence, articulating the cruelly ironic contrast
between the tenderness with which Eric's secret is communicated, and
its violent, perverse nature.
Lesser actors - and a less confident playwright and director - would
have made Eric and Habiba case studies from a psychology textbook, but
the power of their characters comes not from their status as victims,
but from the precise nature of their victimisation and their responses
to it. Chua and Aidli burrow deep into their characters, turning in
tough, lyrical performances that stay with you. Under Tan's polished
direction, even their seemingly minor vocal inflections and physical
movements reveal their characters' depths: Eric's sentences trail off
when he confronts his father's death, leaving pauses pregnant with the
tension of things left unsaid; while in the following scene, Habiba
nervously paces around the sofa, stalked by Eric's fierce accusations.
But that is not to say that there were no flaws in the virtuosic stagecraft
of Sharma and Tan. The ambiguous, almost careless leaps in time and
circumstance from one scene to another made for incoherent transitions,
which were understandably met with puzzled looks from the audience.
Nevertheless, this did little to mar what was one of the best plays
I have watched this year. It is a heartbreaking and utterly convincing
work of art, handled with clarity, simplicity and rare generosity of
spirit. |
"Sharma lifts what could have otherwise been a conventional narrative
of trauma and the faint hope of recovery into a vivid play about the
strangeness and awfulness of life"
Credits
Playwright: Haresh Sharma
Director: Alvin Tan
Set Designer: Vincent Lim
Lighting Designer: Mac Chan
Cast: Chua Enlai and Aidli "Alin" Mosbit
Production Manager: Isis Koh
Stage Manager: Joanna Goh
Sound Operator: Kevin Kwang
Lighting Operator: Jason Ng
Costume Co-ordinator: Molizah Mohd Mohter
Sets and Props Assistant: Jed Lim
Crew: Esther Teo, Resendos Yew
|
