Going to keep this short because I don't feel like I have much energy left already... Three posts, a few hours, a few hours left for homework and revision.. Argh. The houses performed in this order: BW, HH, MT, BB, MR. The theme was "Space". I didn't like like the explicit mention of this word by BB and MR, which ade it seem as though they had to do that in order to comply with the theme.
BW: Not an astouding performance, but I felt that it was pretty okay. Until I saw the other houses perform, that is. It was an act about androids wanting to be human - A lying wife, her pilot husband, an army of pseudo-humans. "Human package: Download complete." An ominous ending to the play, but the plot, on retrospect, seemed shallow.
HH: "Please Mind The Platform Gap" - what happens when the MRT breaks down with an unemployed female biased against foreign workers, a "foreign talent" (FT) who knows how to repair the train but whose advice gets rejected, a six-year-old kid who is dragged along to act as the woman's daughter to prove that she has a family to feed and sees the truth that the FT is just a kindly person with mouths to feed back in India; the train manager and her cronies, who soothe the public without actually doing anything useful (also the general public's view of Singapore's MRT operators); and a graduate rushing off to an interview? A not- very-deep inquiry into the state of the Singapore public system. 人生如戏，戏如人生。So as the play reflects real life, so does real life reflect the play... We seem to be caught up in this issue of foreigners stealing our jobs, our pay; different opinions on them, what the public perceives the transport operators SMRT and SBS to be.
MT: "Everybody Wants To Be Perfect" - A tale of a man who is pulled right and left, who aspires to be an actor but is driven to perfection by himself. Pressure and doubt pile on him by his fellow female lead, who snubs him for being only second-best and tells him to be content with that forever; his mother, who wants him to become a doctor (achieving A for everything: A lawyer; A doctor); his father, who s fine with him being an actor as long as he is perfect (since the male lead got a B, he replies that you can "B doctor, B lawyer, B actor" to his wife); the director, who says that he's merely okay; his childhood friend, who advises him to quit and remember how he tripped and fell as a prince in a primary school drama. He eventually succumbs to pressure, and becomes mad. A chilling, cautionary tale of how everyone- after all- wants to be nothing short of perfect. The male lead's acting skills helped too to me thinking very highly of this performance.
BB: "The Singaporean Dream" - Where the father is a civil servant whih absolutely no sense of romanticism, the mother puts up with her in-laws, the daughter is forced to become a civil servant too because of the iron rice bowl, but detests her parents for being plaid and content with their boring lives; the grandparents, who blame the wife for their son not speaking to them (when it's actually his own fault). They all put up with each other and it's apparently an nice happy family who gets along well until the truth is revealed with many thinly masked barbs at each other; the mother pushes the granddad out of his wheelchair at one point in time, which surely violates tradiotional Chinese Confucian ideals. Extremely bizarre ending where the daughter storms off, the grandpaprents and mother retreat to their own room, and the curtain closes on the dad.
MR: "Going Up" - A play using modern lingo as usual, and examines what might happen when young people, usually reliant on their phones to keep themselves company, are trapped in a lift. There is a guy who follows internet memes; a bimbotic girl who posts every random thing she does on Facebook, has many friends, but none of them with the possible exception of her "boyfriend" (also in the lift) ever follow what she says, in a sad scenario that tells us what has happened to modern-day connections, and a girl obsessed with Harry Potter, who incites some thought she says (to the same effect) that the boundaries between what is real and what's not - the online and real world - have been blurred. And people can choose to fool themselves into living only in the online world, but there is something about watching people reject the real world and being hermits in their own enclaves online that makes you wonder what this world is coming to. Yes, FaceboAll Is Well andok and Twitter are useful for communication, but not to the extent of virtually living in a world of SMSes, Facebook posts, Twitter feeds and Tumblr. We should accept that these are only merely tools and our place is in the real world where communication with real humans, with real touch and speech, etc, instead of a flood of information on Facebook feeds; people being reduced to piles of data and information; useless updates on what they've had for breakfast for that their cat just took a dump somewhere. In effect, MR's play is about the loss of communcation that makes substitution phones for actual communication in a lift extremely hard and gets us to think about these issues.
My verdict from first to last: MT; MR; BB; HH; BW
The judges' verdict: MT; HH; BW; MR; BB
BW: Not an astouding performance, but I felt that it was pretty okay. Until I saw the other houses perform, that is. It was an act about androids wanting to be human - A lying wife, her pilot husband, an army of pseudo-humans. "Human package: Download complete." An ominous ending to the play, but the plot, on retrospect, seemed shallow.
HH: "Please Mind The Platform Gap" - what happens when the MRT breaks down with an unemployed female biased against foreign workers, a "foreign talent" (FT) who knows how to repair the train but whose advice gets rejected, a six-year-old kid who is dragged along to act as the woman's daughter to prove that she has a family to feed and sees the truth that the FT is just a kindly person with mouths to feed back in India; the train manager and her cronies, who soothe the public without actually doing anything useful (also the general public's view of Singapore's MRT operators); and a graduate rushing off to an interview? A not- very-deep inquiry into the state of the Singapore public system. 人生如戏，戏如人生。So as the play reflects real life, so does real life reflect the play... We seem to be caught up in this issue of foreigners stealing our jobs, our pay; different opinions on them, what the public perceives the transport operators SMRT and SBS to be.
MT: "Everybody Wants To Be Perfect" - A tale of a man who is pulled right and left, who aspires to be an actor but is driven to perfection by himself. Pressure and doubt pile on him by his fellow female lead, who snubs him for being only second-best and tells him to be content with that forever; his mother, who wants him to become a doctor (achieving A for everything: A lawyer; A doctor); his father, who s fine with him being an actor as long as he is perfect (since the male lead got a B, he replies that you can "B doctor, B lawyer, B actor" to his wife); the director, who says that he's merely okay; his childhood friend, who advises him to quit and remember how he tripped and fell as a prince in a primary school drama. He eventually succumbs to pressure, and becomes mad. A chilling, cautionary tale of how everyone- after all- wants to be nothing short of perfect. The male lead's acting skills helped too to me thinking very highly of this performance.
BB: "The Singaporean Dream" - Where the father is a civil servant whih absolutely no sense of romanticism, the mother puts up with her in-laws, the daughter is forced to become a civil servant too because of the iron rice bowl, but detests her parents for being plaid and content with their boring lives; the grandparents, who blame the wife for their son not speaking to them (when it's actually his own fault). They all put up with each other and it's apparently an nice happy family who gets along well until the truth is revealed with many thinly masked barbs at each other; the mother pushes the granddad out of his wheelchair at one point in time, which surely violates tradiotional Chinese Confucian ideals. Extremely bizarre ending where the daughter storms off, the grandpaprents and mother retreat to their own room, and the curtain closes on the dad.
MR: "Going Up" - A play using modern lingo as usual, and examines what might happen when young people, usually reliant on their phones to keep themselves company, are trapped in a lift. There is a guy who follows internet memes; a bimbotic girl who posts every random thing she does on Facebook, has many friends, but none of them with the possible exception of her "boyfriend" (also in the lift) ever follow what she says, in a sad scenario that tells us what has happened to modern-day connections, and a girl obsessed with Harry Potter, who incites some thought she says (to the same effect) that the boundaries between what is real and what's not - the online and real world - have been blurred. And people can choose to fool themselves into living only in the online world, but there is something about watching people reject the real world and being hermits in their own enclaves online that makes you wonder what this world is coming to. Yes, FaceboAll Is Well andok and Twitter are useful for communication, but not to the extent of virtually living in a world of SMSes, Facebook posts, Twitter feeds and Tumblr. We should accept that these are only merely tools and our place is in the real world where communication with real humans, with real touch and speech, etc, instead of a flood of information on Facebook feeds; people being reduced to piles of data and information; useless updates on what they've had for breakfast for that their cat just took a dump somewhere. In effect, MR's play is about the loss of communcation that makes substitution phones for actual communication in a lift extremely hard and gets us to think about these issues.
My verdict from first to last: MT; MR; BB; HH; BW
The judges' verdict: MT; HH; BW; MR; BB
No comments:
Post a Comment