First off, kudos to Buds Theatre Company for daring to stage a triplebill of completely original plays by young unknown playwrights (they're actually still in university!). Secondly, thanks to them for allowing me to attend a dress rehearsal before the actual show.
Now for the plays themselves: I was extremely impressed with the beginning of Daniel Koh's Staying Over, and how it communicates the utter ethnological strangeness of the upper-middle class bungalow-dwelling Singaporean nuclear family. The inclusion of actresses from Migrant Voices and The Necessary Stage's Theatre For Seniors programme is an excellent touch, adding Malay and Teochew to the English language discourse. However, once we get to the central plot, the show loses focus – it is never clear why and how the protagonist decides to create a birthday play for the maid, and the actor playing him just doesn't assert enough stage presence. Good movement direction overall, though.
Leonard Choo's Maggie and Milly and Molly and May is lively and well-paced, but unfortunately it's one of those plays about suicidal gay men that rehashes every gay cliché in the book. True, it's extremely self-aware: the protagonist actually mocks the drama-drama nature of the exchanges going on, and there's a big load of comedy in the mix. Still, it gets on an out gay man's nerves. Oh yeah – the two lead actors here need to make their characters more three-dimensional, more human. Too artificial at present.
(I'm not including Nitin Venkateswaran's Rebellion in this review. It's only being staged on Friday and Saturday out of the four nights, but don't feel bad if you miss it, as it's there principally to give Buds acting students some exposure and the quality's still at a school assembly level. Sorry.)