The first
ten minutes or so of First Family fixed a silly grin to my
face. The curtain rose to a defiantly two-dimensional, low-tech world
of shadow puppetry, a world of grand scope but limited means, where
myth fused with nonsense and was painted in broad black strokes on a
canvas of light. Three archetypes journeyed across the simple landscapes
of this shadow kingdom: the Emperor, the Harlot and the Rat. Each was
portrayed by a live performer wearing ornate but unarticulated headgear,
so that the archetype's thoughts and emotions all had to be transmitted
through the attitude of the body and head, and through sweeping gestures
of the arms. The result was a warm and human visual poetry which found
strength in simplicity.
The visuals were given forward motion by Darren Ng's cinematic, Chinese-style
score. The epic swells of his music superimposed grand emotions on the
shadow archetypes, telling us that these were people whose passions
could shape their world. The music promised us stories of empire and
majesty, stories for the ages.
And then the narration and the characters' voice acting deliciously
undercut this mythic setup. The narrator was slightly ironic and occasionally
disapproving. The Emperor was slow and bathetic. The Rat was puckish.
And the story was simply ludicrous, even by folktale standards: at the
prompting of a Rat, an Emperor finds the salvation of his nation in
the womb of a Harlot, pregnant with six daughters each fathered by men
from different cultures and countries. When the birth is difficult,
the Emperor climbs inside the Harlot to expedite proceedings, and when
finally the Harlot's waters break, the resultant flood drowns the Emperor's
enemies and a new era of prosperity is established with the birth of
the six daughters, the First Family, the defenders of the realm.
So the first ten minutes were rich and rewarding. The images were inventive
and strangely resonant, the music sculpted a world for the bizarre characters
to inhabit, and the actors were infectiously mischievous. There were
hints of satire (Singapore as a ragtag group of bastard children trying
to build a glorious nation) and the play had a pleasingly post-postmodern
aesthetic, in that its embrace of folktale was genuine rather than ironic,
but it still wanted to have fun with the genre.
But after this opening sequence, the play waned and never quite recovered.
The pace slowed and scenes seemed to repeat each other without progression;
the promising satirical and philosophical elements became confused and
blunt, even as they attempted to make incisive points; and the characters
began to seem interchangeable and even, in some cases, superfluous.
This was certainly not the fault of the actors, all of whom were up
to the task. The wonderful Goh Guat Kian grounded her physical and vocal
performance in the deep rhythms of the earth, becoming the Platonic
ideal of "Mother". Julius Foo as the duplicitous Prince used
his plastic face to great effect, mugging to the audience. Ong Kian
Sin, in drag as the artistic Fifth Daughter, externalised and embodied
femininity in a way that few people, male or female, can. And, best
of all, Oliver Chong played the talentless, ugly Sixth Daughter like
a manga caricature: all huge eyes, huge mouth and random, whiny outbursts.
Indeed, the Chinese-speaking cast was altogether more entertaining
than the English-speaking cast (the play was performed in English, Mandarin
and Cantonese with a distractingly ungrammatical English translation
inconveniently projected on either side of the stage). This is not because
the actors were necessarily any better (Karen Tan and Jean Ng are both
fine actors, for example); it is because the play's aesthetic made more
room for the exterior, physical performance style of the Chinese-theatre
veterans than it did for the relatively interior, psychological style
of the anglophones.
One almost powerful moment from late in the play hinted that, with
more work, these two styles could have been made to dialogue with each
other, perhaps producing striking results. After the First Family has
been defeated by the Prince in a kungfu showdown, they retreat to the
forest to lick their wounds, and they start infighting. Tan's character,
the cunning Third Daughter, accuses the Mother of always favouring the
useless Sixth Daughter over the rest of her offspring. Tan's sense of
betrayal is genuine and psychologically motivated, as is true of her
best performances, but it also has an exterior, performative element.
Conversely, Goh's reaction is a presentational distillation of evasiveness
and guilt, but it is also interior and deeply felt. The unstable fusion
of these two aesthetics produced a momentary frisson, but then the play
pretended it had never happened and went back to its default, somewhat
surfacey setting.
It was strange, in a way, that First Family didn't make room
for the anglo performance style, because it made room for so much else.
It made room, for example, for extended scenes in which the characters
simply played childish games or wandered around without contributing
to the narrative or characterisation. These were often fun and frothy
but, considering the mythic, folktale atmosphere so successfully instilled
at the start, I soon found myself wanting some substance to go with
the froth.
The play also made room for more characters than I could really keep
track of or see the need for. An attempt had been made to differentiate
the six daughters based on their personalities and predilections, but
with so many daughters to cover, the attempt was necessarily shallow,
meaning that the daughters' respective traits did not always show through
in their dialogue or interactions. And on top of the six daughters,
the play made room for the Mother and a Maid(!). Ang Hui Bin did a good
job playing the Maid, but structurally she was surely unnecessary and
her presence further slowed the progression of the story.
The play's leisurely pace and its profusion of characters resulted
in an extremely soggy midsection where different groupings of characters
visited a market, a theatre and a temple and spent too long in each
place with too little happening. Each scene was initially fun as each
had an amusing theatrical gimmick: in the market, carriages randomly
drifted past, letting us glimpse the private moments of their shadow-puppet
occupants; in the theatre, the actors were played by cast members facing
away from us with masks on the back of their heads, lending them an
awkward, declamatory style suited to a pretentious performance troupe;
in the temple, the monks spoke in unison with accompanying hand gestures,
giving the impression that they were the splintered voice of God. But
these gimmicks were not enough to sustain the circuitous and sometimes
unwieldy dialogue that often seemed to be deliberately holding up rather
than advancing the action.
Additionally, the play seemed to want to ask certain questions but
never quite got round to doing so, further diluting its focus. There
was an intimation that the First Family were complicit in the rape,
murder and enslavement of their enemies and their descendants, yet they
are clearly loving and supportive of each other. Equally, the Prince
is personally a bit of a murderous tyrant, yet he appears to govern
from sound, egalitarian principles. But I have made the issues here
too clear: in the play, they were little more than asides, merely hinted
at and never followed up, so that by the end they had been conveniently
brushed under the carpet along with equally provocative questions such
as "Is the West best?", "Is female authority preferable
to male?" and "Should we value compassion for the incapable
or respect for the competent?" The initial mention of each of these
questions was like an arrow to the heart of the folktale narrative,
and I would have loved to see the story bleed if the ideas had been
explored. But the arrow wounds healed instantaneously and the play sauntered
on.
Chong has been guilty of meandering before, for example in Furthest
North, Deepest South, but there he had Christina Sergeant's impossibly
inventive and razor-sharp direction to compensate (see my slightly too
negative review here).
Chong directed First Family himself, and while he was often
creative and displayed considerable flair for the visual, these were
not quite enough to paper over the cracks. Of course, Chong can also
be capable of sharp and illuminating focus (e.g. Spoilt
and Between
the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea) so let's hope that this script
is a minor misstep in an impressive body of work.
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"The images were inventive and strangely resonant, the music sculpted
a world for the bizarre characters to inhabit, and the actors were infectiously
mischievous"
Credits
Director / Playwright / Set Designer: Chong Tze Chien
Production / Stage Manager: Joanna Goh
Asst. Stage Manager: Cecilia Chow
Shadow Puppetry Designers: Ong Kian Sin, Rene Ong,
Oliver Chong and Ang Hui Bin
Lighting Designer: Lim Woan Wen
Sound Designer: Darren Ng
Costume Designer: Lim Chin Huat
Kungfu Choreographer: Lee Yeong Wen
Crew: Nurhidayah Mahadi
Cast: Goh Guat Kian, Low Kah Wei, Jean Ng, Karen Tan,
Ong Kian Sin, Claire Devine, Oliver Chong, Ang Hui Bin, Julius Foo and
Tan Beng Tian
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