Jan 24 2010
Fringe Fest! Going bananas! Strange neighbourhood!
Here’s a suggestion. Let’s dub Noor Effendy Ibrahim the long-lost sibling of the Coen brothers.
It’s no secret that I have a preference for works that are strange, funny, dark, and generally make you uncomfortable.
And Teater Ekamatra’s Bilik Ahmad Berdaki, the complete (?) staging of Fendy’s trilogy (?) after 2008’s Bilik Ahmad, is all of the above.
The three black comedy pieces comprising BAB all follow the same idea of these creepy domestic worlds being turned upside down by the presence of an outsider. (All done by a great ensemble cast: Misha’al Syed Nasar, Saiful Amri Ahmad Elahi, Izad Omar, Anwar Hadi Ramli, Siti Zuraida Rahim and Gloria Tan.)
All are independent of each other but tangentially intersect since it happens to different households on the same street. (Think of movies like Babel or Traffic, an approach done to death in cinema, but something I would like to see more of onstage here.)
Not to repeat everything that happens onstage but the gist of the works are as follows:
In Bilik, a bunch of murderers (Fendy earlier said they’re cannibals but I think it’s an open-ended assumption on the part of the viewer) go about their daily lives boasting about their respective number of kills using their respective tools, while nonchalantly brewing coffee and discussing proper word choices (!) – until one of them does the unthinkable (bwaha!), leaves a survivor (Aisah) and brings her home! “What will the neighbours say!”
Ahmad, meanwhile, follows five dudes who all go by the same name and spend an entire day worshipping a bunch of bananas, asking for the time and deciding whether said banana is sweet or sour. Until neighbour Dahlia shows up and encourages them to eat it with sugar – in a very sexual way.
Finally, Berdaki’s household consists of these caged (and again, creepy) neat-freaks who “invite” a passerby for dinner. Said passerby is Aisah’s husband.
There was a comment during the post-show talk about how some of the characters weren’t fully fleshed out (or maybe the proper term is “spelled out”), but that’s one of the things I liked about BAB – you never fully grasp who the characters are, a lot of who they are are laid out on a purely suggestive level, and it’s all told in a wonderfully elliptical way.
So much so that even if I don’t “get it”, I “feel” it on a gut level.
I wish to see more of these works where skewed morals are enacted so nonchalantly, where stage becomes a flattened playing field where anything goes. As in anything.
Case in point are the number of straight-faced role reversals among the characters: A Chinese woman speaking in Malay, a Malay dude speaking in Hokkien, a man playing a woman, a woman playing a man. And of course the fact that every household is a deviant household.
BAB’s supposed to be a trilogy. But hey, I would love to see more of these strange families that live in this strange neighbourhood.
What say you, Noor Effendy Ibrahim Coen?
You can catch one final matinee show of Bilik Ahmad Berdaki tomorrow, Jan 24, 3pm, at the National Museum’s Gallery Theatre. Tickets (if there are still some left) are $27 from Sistic.
And that’s about it for the RAT’s online coverage of the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival. Until next year, stay safe, stay fringe!
