Featuring two plays, Candlelight and Wai?, Play Out: A Double Bill was an engaging and enlightening performance put together by NUS Stage as part of the NUS Arts Festival While the two performances differ greatly in style and content, both were impressive productions that shared underlying themes of human connections and unexpressed emotions.
Wai? by Judy Au revolves around agony of waiting as an elderly couple, Qing and Fong, try in vain to contact their only son whom they fear has been involved in a bomb accident in London.
Anxiety quickly turns into near hysteria for Fong as she realises she may have lost the son she has tried so hard to protect for the past few decades. Judy Ngo puts on a stellar performance as the trapped, frustrated housewife who suffers one emotional breakdown after another while recollecting the insecurities and helplessness that has plagued her over the years.
The play treads on a fine line between tension and calmness, alternating between moments of high tension when Qing and Fong quarrel, and moments of calm normativity when all that can be heard are the sounds of the television or radio. The contrast is striking, and effectively brings out how the couple’s emotions swing wildly from fear to self-reassurance and worry to regret as they wait for their son to call them.
Wai? successfully resonates within the hearts of the audience, especially in its strikingly realistic recreation of everyday Singaporean life. The characters converse in Singlish, punctuated by the occasional use of dialects, while the dialogue draws references from local issues such as education and marriage which would be familiar to any Singaporean.
All in all, Wai? is an easily comprehensible, yet poignant play that captures the triumphs and troubles of parental love and family affection.
Candlelight explores the concepts of story telling and the power of the written word through a series of anecdotes from the life of the main character, Jonathan and his daughter Jadene. The play conveys a strong message about the fluidity of joy and suffering through the elaborately staged movements of the actors as well as the poetical and impactful language in its dialogue.
The set of Candlelight is a minimalist one, with lighting used most of the time as a substitute for physical props. The varied use of lighting to represent concepts such as a coffin came across as creative and memorable, and had the added effect of giving the set an ethereal, almost surreal feel, much in line with the main ideas of changeand existence
One especially intriguing aspect of the play was the character of the Grandfather, a robed figure moving silently around the edges of the set. While the Grandfather remained silent throughout the duration of the performance, his presence was nevertheless an unnerving one to the audience, a physical representation of how he remains lurking at the corners of Jonathan’s mind even as Jonathan grows up.
Candlelight comes across as a play that innovatively captures the essence of otherwise abstract concepts through the use of stories which are heartwarming, sometimes humorous, and always thought provoking.
Image from: NUS Centre for the Arts