Talking about Emily of Emerald Hill is a lot like talking to Emily. Of Emerald Hill.
It can be quite intimidating.
Or scary.
In a loveable kind of way.
But only if you get to see her once a year and not every day.
Or in this case, once every 25 years.
And why is that, you may ask? Baggage, dude, baggage.
This production had a lot of it.
Mind you, I’m not saying it’s the fault of the play itself. But staging one of Singapore’s landmark theatre pieces after 25 years by the original Emily herself, as the last play you’ll ever see in Victoria Theatre before it gets renovated, and coupled with the fact that a lot of those watching it have studied it in school and have probably watched The Little Nyonya and are caught up in this whole Perakanan revival thing of a year or two ago – that’s a lot of external baggage, don’t you think?
***
So first of all, my two cents on Emily of Emerald Hill without the baggage.
Margaret Chan was a sight to behold. It’s a mono-drama and she pulled it off plus plus.
Her performance just drew you into the world of this powerful matriarch. And while overall, I wasn’t crazy about the first half, she completely blew my mind in the second – as finally, her pent-up emotions exploded from her and you get why she’s the way she is. And only a cold-hearted a**hole wouldn’t be moved by the sight of Chan-as-Emiy withering away in her twilight years.
Oh, and I kinda liked Casey Lim’s subtle multi-media projections too.
***
And now for my two cents on Emily of Emerald Hill with the baggage.
If you’ve realized that I haven’t exactly mentioned what the play was about, it’s because you already know what it’s about – the rise and fall of a Peranakan matriarch, her suffering ways, her smoothtalking ways, her Iron Lady persona, her skills at cooking buah keluak (was it ayam or babi?)…
You could say Emily is a multi-faceted, complex character. But you could also say that it’s a multi-faceted, complex character that we’ve already expected.
The Emily I saw was well and truly an archetype (a rarity in local theatre, admittedly). And the way I look at it, archetypes can sometimes be an albatross around one’s neck.
With so many old productions being revived these days, it’s inevitable that the debate between Nostalgia and Relevance will again and again resurface.
And for all of Emily’s relevance as a domestic piece of drama (mother/son relationships, etc), what drove this production for me was really the former. (Something that was evident among the audience and the cast and crew in the talk-back session where a greater part of the chit-chat revolved around the Baggage I mentioned earlier.)
And finally, I might be going off on a tangent here, but another point:
Celebrating one’s culture is one thing. Flaunting one’s class is another. They can be so closely entwined that people sometimes think of them as interchangeable. But they’re not. And the class aspect of Peranakan culture as we know it is one that’s almost always glossed over in this pursuit of that one definable, uniquely Singapore heritage. (“Well, you know, they had all these jewellery, yadda yadda.”)
Emily of Emerald Hill is heard and seen from the perspective of one person. The Matriarch of a Peranakan family in the 1950s. The rest — specifically the servants and the market folks — are all invisible. What does it mean to applaud so vigorously a faithful staging of such a play in the context of Singapore today? Just something to think about.
***
I truly commend the Arts Fest folks for actively looking into and reviving noteworthy productions in Singapore’s theatre canon (as a vote of confidence for the work itself and a chance for a new generation to see it). I also give utmost props to the folks behind the show – especially Margaret Chan.
That said, I also think that it’s paramount for us as viewers to continuously interrogate these classics. Because it’s only by doing so that we’ll find their relevance for us today.
I mean, after you’ve finished getting all nostalgic about them, I guess.
COMMENTS