This blog entry’s headline doesn’t really reflect anything – except my tendency to come up with bad puns.
That and the fact that you’ll need to go and get tickets now because the only ones left are for Saturday’s matinee. But I’m not going to say it’s a pity should you miss Pariah because, hey, if Teater Ekamatra’s two previous blackbox shows Charged and Nadirah got a restaging at the Man Singapore Theatre Festival, then who knows?
Else, you can always fly to Kuala Lumpur next Thursday where the racially-charged production will be staged again (Malaysia’s Instant Café Theatre Company artistic director and Cake/TNS fave Jo Kukathas directs the piece on both runs and it’s an all-Malaysian cast).
Inspired by the idea of mashing up the late Yasmin Ahmad’s final film Talentime and the controversial 1971 novel Interlok by Abdullah Hussain, playwright Alfian Sa’at concocts a scenario of a multi-racial group of Malaysian student friends whose coming of age moment is sparked by the discovery of a missing page in one of the character’s copy of Interlok.
Continue reading ‘Race ya! Haven’t got a Pariah!’
Ladies and gents, the new logo for this year’s Singapore Theatre Festival.
As W!ld Rice artistic director and fest director Ivan Heng puts it: “Fierce. With good hair shampoo.”
After last year’s break to give way to the theatre company’s 10th anniversary season, their theatre festival is back and will run from Aug 3 to 21.
And you should now be calling it Man Singapore Theatre Festival.
Continue reading ‘S’pore Theatre Fest 2011! W!ld Rice has a new Man! Fierce!’
If I remember correctly, The Magnanimous Cuckold’s director Li Xie told me that the original one in the early 1900s was a straightforward farce. But she’s taken this year-end Drama Box production down the black comedy route, presenting it in a darker, more sinister way.
In this “very, very little town”, a mega-paranoid husband’s beauteous wife is every guy’s object of desire. The postman, the married policeman, they’re all sending her loveletters, courtesy of the town’s resident poet/letter writer, which is unfortunately, the husband himself. Paranoia grows and grows and grows until you get some pretty desperate househusband in Hysteria Lane. (Geddit geddit?) Continue reading ‘The Magnanimous Cuckold! Cheating wife?! Psycho hubby?!’
At the post-show talkback, director Zizi Azah Abdul Majid recalled sitting down with playwright Chong Tze Chien (who’s guest playwright for the Teater Ekamatra production) to talk about they wanted to do. “When a Malay and a Chinese sit down, they talk about race,” she quipped.
What they talk about and how they talk about it would, I would presume, be different from when two Malays talk about race. Or two Chinese. Or two Indians for that matter. Or Eurasian. Or… you get the point. Or to be more precise, when two folks from the same race talk about someone from another race. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Continue reading ‘Charged! Racism! Don’t flinch!’
