Every pantomime
by W!ld Rice is an act of revenge. Remember how we grew up? We learned
our bedtime stories with Ladybird books and Disney movies, populated
by all-white casts of witches and fairies and giants.
If our parents felt like a big Christmassy singalong family drama,
we went to productions by The Stage Club. Those pantomimes were toweringly
colonial affairs - steeped in the nostalgia of British culture, they
were always conservative renditions of famous fairy tales, played almost
exclusively by white actors or locals in cultural whiteface, awkward
when they attempted to make reference to the 20th century or Singapore.
But something changed in 2003. W!ld Rice staged Cinderel-Lah!,
the first of a series of annual musical pantomimes adapting Western
fairy tales to local settings and themes. Since then, W!ld Rice pantos
have struck a balance between providing riotous family entertainment
for the kids and reflecting deeper contemporary issues such as domestic
worker abuse and political apathy. It's a new generation of pantomime,
decolonised and sophisticated - ultimately a delicious subversion of
the Anglophile genre of panto that served as our Yuletide staple for
so long.
Jack and the Beansprout, the fourth in this series, is characteristic
of the W!ld Rice pantomimes. It's a sugar buzz of fun, featuring overblown,
interactive drama that children should love - director Jonathan Lim
milks plenty of physical humour from the actors' efforts to negotiate
a supersized kitchen floor in the giant's palace. This sense of fun
often reaches out to adults alone - there are jokes about Royston Tan
and the Singapore Biennale, and loads of sexual double entendres that
rugrats will not comprehend unless they're corrupted already.
Yet the piece also seeks to make the pantomime genre socially relevant
to our times. Transplanted from its pastoral setting to an HDB block,
the legend of Jack and the Beanstalk finds new meanings within
a recognisable social landscape. Jack (Sebastian Tan) is ostracised
not simply for being naïve about magic beans, but also because
he's a Sec 5 normal student who has no job prospects. His mother, Widow
Neo (Ivan Heng in drag) works three jobs, borrows money from loan sharks
and has to pretend their cow is a dog in order to stay within guidelines
for keeping pets in apartments. It's like an Eric Khoo movie in campy
Technicolor.
W!ld Rice paints this landscape quite deliberately with its opening
scene, as Jack sits at the top of the apartment block and waves down
at us, pointing out the residents of the neighbourhood as they walk
down the aisles of the theatre - chorus members dressed as aunties,
tissue-paper-sellers and schoolchildren. This chorus of sartorial stereotypes
- the tudong lady, the sari lady, the maid in uniform - forms a live
backdrop to a number of scenes, enhancing the play's sense of rootedness
in a local setting. This sense is strengthened by Tan Ju Meng's cunningly
designed set, consisting of white panels with hand-drawn lines to depict
void deck pillars and apartment walls, rising and descending to describe
different locations.
There's also a meaningful reinterpretation of Jack's acts of theft
from the giant - traditionally viewed as a justified act of defiance
against a monster. As Widow Neo encounters sudden wealth from her son,
she embarks on the time-honoured track of conspicuous consumption, filling
her two-room flat with finery to prove her ascent into the upper classes.
There are echoes of the company's earlier play, The
Visit of the Tai Tai here - a criticism of Singapore's futile
materialism that often disregards ethics.
Mind you, Jack and the Beansprout isn't perfect. Adaptation
is a difficult business, not least in terms of plotting. Desmond Sim's
script featured too many expository or spectacle-focused scenes in Act
One, causing a slight lull in action - though momentum fully recovered
in Act Two. The giant's palace, compared to Jack's neighbourhood, felt
intensely alien and random as a setting - as did its most prominent
character, a manga princess heroine domestic worker who makes muffins
for the giant. And composer Elaine Chan and arranger Bang Wenfu's music
ultimately feels slightly manufactured and juvenile alongside the maturity
of the rest of the play's elements.
The numerous strengths of the play, however, outweighed these weaknesses.
The show's quality was assured through the high standards of its actors.
Ivan Heng was as outrageous as always (it'll be a while before I forget
the moment when he rushed onstage to chop down the beanstalk, wielding
a roaring chainsaw), while Karen Tan pulled off a gut-busting repertoire
of eccentric characters, including a Sri Lankan maid, a tai tai and
a magic harp. The use of a children's chorus and Tan Beng Tian's massive
puppets added a further dimension of fun into an already exuberant musical.
W!ld Rice isn't aggressively combative about their reclamation of the
pantomime genre; they tend more to the defensive. They're careful to
defend their directorial decisions - such as cross-dressing and risque
and political humour - with a full explanation in the programme of the
roots of the British Christmas panto. Tracing its roots all the way
back to commedia dell'arte, the company explains how "pantomime
is never politically correct... parents, royalty, political personalities
and public institutions are all figures of fun and targets for mockery".
For them, subversion is not simply a post-colonial aesthetic strategy,
but a universal feature of drama.
Singapore theatre's changed plenty in the last decade. Groups like
W!ld Rice have expanded audiences, streaming in from the local and expatriate
communities alike for theatre that's unabashedly Singaporean. In the
meantime, the Stage Club hasn't done poorly either - instead of a pantomime,
this year, their Christmas offering is The Miracle Plays, a
set of medieval religious plays that they're mining for their timeless
resonance.
Perhaps one could say Singapore-run theatre companies have shimmied
up the cultural beanstalk. But once they're up, they haven't killed
the British giant or robbed him - quite the contrary. They adapt the
palace so it's more human-sized, more livable for all. And the beanstalk
remains uncut - a connection between the palace and the ground. |
"It's a sugar buzz of fun, featuring overblown, interactive drama
that children should love... Yet the piece also seeks to make the pantomime
genre socially relevant to our times"
Credits
Playwright: Desmond Sim
Direction/Lyrics/Additional Script: Jonathan Lim
Composer: Elaine Chan
Musical Director/Music Arranger: Bang Wenfu
Choreographer: Erich Edralin
Set Designer: Tan Ju Meng
Lighting Designer: Mac Chan
Costume Designer: Moe Kasim
Sound Designer: Shah Tahir
Puppet Designer: Tan Beng Tian
Producer: Tony Trickett
Technical Manager: Teo Kuang Han
Stage Manager: Woo Hsia Ling
Assistant Stage Managers: Juraidah Rahman and Haironnisa
Karim
Sound Engineer: Sandra Tay
Cast: Sebastian Tan, Ivan Heng, Karen Tan, Aidli 'Alin'
Mosbit, Celine Rosa Tan, Gene Sha Rudyn, Candice de Rozario, Gordon
Choy, Jonathan Lum, Kathleen Oei, Isabella Chiam, Ivan Sebastian Cheng,
Duane Russell Ho, Cherie Choo, Anjali Hazra, Lim Shi-An, Valtino Philemon
Manen, Valvic Phibert Manen, Shanice Nathan, Rishi Rajendran, Vicknes
Vijay Vijayarengan and Pearl Wee Shi Yi
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