View Sample - Epigram Books

More documents

Recommendations

Info

xiixiiiof The Straits Times. Six of the Best draws its originating impulse fromthe indictment of American teenager Michael Fay for vandalism, anevent that sparked much discussion and brouhaha in the internationalpress. Even Home can be said to have been seeded in the context of anaging society with scant provisions for the elderly, while Machine, asprivately divulged by the playwright himself, was spawned of a midlifecrisis he personally underwent, when issues of fidelity and the dynamicbetween the sexes rose to the fore as a result of flagging endorphins,marital stagnancy and the andropause. With the exception of the lastplay, therefore, the rest are premised on momentous occasions that havegenerated much controversy. These plays therefore serve to encouragefurther constructive debate in retrospect, where time confers thenecessary detachment to prevent visceral involvement that clouds therational and impartial.If renowned historian E. H. Carr defines history as “a continuousprocess of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unendingdialectic between the present and the past”, then Tan engages in aparallel dialogue with historical events as a revisionist who sites hisplays within a notion of history less as trajectory than as a concatenationof forces against which their thematic matrix may be counterpointed fordeconstructive intent. By setting the dramatic present within the contextof a historical event, however covert the references, Tan attempts tounderstand the present from the past with the hindsight of criticaldistance. He also extends the dialogue to include his audience whichis provoked to undertake a similar exchange. Through identificationwith characters envisaged as the products of particular historical forces,the audience is inspired to re-think the situations being dramatised asinvested, informed onlookers.Yet Tan does not trade in the real in the Aristotelian sense ofstrong empathetic reaction leading to catharsis, but instead conjuresup a kind of heightened realism in his spatially ambivalent miseen-scène,deliberate anachronisms and conflagration of historicalminutiae. Hence, Tan uses familiar structures as a bridge into thedramatic experience of the conventional audience, then disorients thissame audience by subverting forms and overturning expectations.Unlike Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, Tan does not strive to distance hisaudience through defamiliarisation but rather involves them in a basicfamiliarity before provoking them into analysing the differences in thesurprising nature of his tropes and images.The prologue of The Lady of Soul and her Ultimate “S” Machine, setin a Nations Boutique uses the econ-speak of the retail trade, and framedwithin the shopaholicism, corporatisation and materialistic ethos of theaverage Singaporean, strikes an all too familiar chord. Except in thisinstance, the capital gains, the trade-in value, the appreciation andamortisation apply not to your usual consumer merchandise but tonations and their human rights track records. The burlesque sequencesthat punctuate the solemn, sober proceedings of bureaucracy in whichChris and Les resort to rap and vaudeville, put a parodic twist oncorporate presentations and pitches at board meetings. The committeesand subcommittees that ceaselessly self-propagate to oversee the mostbanal and hairsplitting of semantic equivocations in a policy paper aremerely the hyperbolic equivalents of what actually occurs at a moremundane level, but are no less mind-boggling and symptomatic of apervasive culture of relinquishing responsibility by pushing the buck.The First Emperor’s Last Days intensifies this schism between thefamiliar and the disturbing with its homage to a kind of Pinteresquelandscape, a basement in an unknown building where a seeminglyrandom group of archivists is assembled to write the biography of theFirst Emperor in his purportedly final days. The set reconciles the iconicwith the symbolic. Despite its everyday configuration of work-desks andcomputers, the room seems to “grow smaller as the play progresses”, sothe stage directions inform us. The ceiling soars to an unseen heightand takes on ominous undertones that signify the existence of someobscure, oppressive authority presiding over the characters, the unseenBig Brother monitoring and controlling their every move with an eagleeye. This is further made manifest by the fact that all correspondenceas well as all daily needs, from meals, and laundry to requests formedicine, are conveyed and delivered by means of a dumb waiter thatassumes centre stage as in that eponymous Pinter play. Where and towhom this dumb waiter reaches is never made explicit, in the same way
xivxvthat both the nature of and approach to the task which these denizensof the basement are consigned are not clarified. This fosters a scenariothat is fecund for mutual policing and surveillance, like Foucault’spanopticon. The characters believe, from hearsay and conjectures,handed down by predecessors (and often vicariously) that they are thebiographers of the First Emperor though they have no inkling as to thetemplate and scope of the memoirs required.Shrouded in mystery, this cloak-and-dagger business they areimplicated in causes them to second guess the boundaries and mutuallysuspect each other to be a snitch or stooge in the worse internecinemanner. First, Tang the newcomer is the latest suspect since no oneis sure why his predecessor was replaced. This enigma was given afacetious mock-heroic interpretation, that being that stylistic differenceswere unacceptable to the “Period Police and Comma Commissars”, asif punctuation constituted a pivotal issue. That objects like a suitcasearrive before its owner (himself doubled-over in the dumb waiter toreinforce the claustrophobia, spatial and discursive) enables the earlierdenizens to wager over the gender of their latest colleague among otherthings, as well as exacerbating the atmosphere of silent paranoia. Eventhe longest resident See Yew, mild mannered and seemingly innocuous,is under suspicion for the disparity between his skills and his allegedrole. For as Gordon propounds, does it not beg the question why a manwho is not technologically-savvy, who thinks the boot is the storagecompartment of a car and the monitor a species of lizard, has beenentrusted with the CD-ROM version of the biography?Spatial and temporal displacements lurk beneath the banalsurface of daily interactions and humdrum operations. Contemporaryappliances like shredding machines and computers are extant in a periodof history when books were being burnt, intellectuals buried alive, andthe value of the Great Wall in obstructing the northern barbarians isbeing questioned. References to Summer Palace, the Book of Songs, theAugust Records of the Kings of the Shang dynasty and the imperialexams of yore point unequivocally to a period in ancient China. Yetthe privileging of white horses provide the indices of contemporarySingapore with its hint of the alleged nepotism accorded the childrenof VIPs. The punitive measures doled out to dissidents—quartering byhorses, disembowellment and boiling in hot oil—are straight out of afeudal regime too, yet there is a hint of a modern democracy in thecivil service practices mentioned, with Aileen as the corporate highflyerdrafting white papers and Gordon with his track record of contentiouspolitical commentaries.If the spatial dislocation is glaring, the temporal markers areeven more cryptic and destabilising. From the beginning, it is alreadyintimated that the characters have no sense of time: they know the timebut are not sure if it’s the same time outside. Hence, they devise their ownsense of time by dividing it into the rigid binary of work and sleep. Theyhave a telephone but it is not connected except when a call is received.As “the drama” unfolds, the repository of history throws up allmanner of data that increasingly collide and conflict. One is told thatthe bubonic plague has gripped Europe, that Buddha has just gainedenlightenment, that Columbus has reached America. Simultaneously,one is also regaled with information about astronauts reaching themoon. The telephone and the word processor have been invented but thetelevision is still awaiting its breakthrough. Meanwhile, Brazil has wonthe World Cup. This juxtaposition of antithetical realities which seem tocoexist seamlessly is emblematic of a kind of metadramatic artificialitywhose transcendence of spatial and temporal specifics universalises thethemes therein while deflecting political immediacy and pointedness.Conspicuous is a lack of transparency from above, combined witha brutal, ruthless exercise of power by an Emperor who behaves morelike an oligarch and who thinks nothing of doing away with anybodywho offends him, even his own flesh and blood. The lack of guidelinesor precedents keeps the four biographers on tenterhooks, vacillatingbetween a tone of craven flattery (which as Gordon shrewdly pointsout, is the fastest and surest way of lowering the value of a biographyby turning the subject into a two dimensional caricature) or a morebalanced and comprehensive editorial portrait which risks incurring thewrath of the Emperor. By means of this tension and anxiety, Tan conveysa climate of fear and paranoia and links this to Singapore withoutspecifically naming the country. The paradoxes thus offer interstices
Page 3 and 4: TAN TARN HOWSIX PLAYSforthcoming vo
Page 5 and 6: viiPERFORMING RIGHTSCopyright of al
Page 7: xiTAN TARN HOW: THE PLAYWRIGHT AS S
Page 11 and 12: xviiixixwhat propels her may not be
Page 13 and 14: xxiixxiiiIn what might be termed sa
Page 15 and 16: xxviNoting the topicality of these
Page 17 and 18: 3PRODUCTION NOTESHome was first pro
Page 19 and 20: 6HOMEACT 1 : SCENE 1715101520253035
Page 21 and 22: 10HOMEACT 1 : SCENE 111151015202530

View Sample - Epigram Books

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?