Food, Sex and Death (2011), Review

By adelyn-1800, 28 May, 2022
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3.00
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out of5
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Ignore the provocative title - this production's mainly made up of short family dramas, tenderly scripted by playwrights Desmond Sim and Nandang Abdul Rahman.

There's some exceptionally good writing in Sim's one-act play The Durian Seller's Daughters, which captures the cultural rifts of "cosmopolitans" and "heartlanders" that arise in a family when a daughter returns home from studies abroad. Nick Dorian is particularly convincing here as the old durian seller, passive-aggressively resisting the wave of change that's come into his household. (Otherwise, the acting's still a tad raw.)

Nandang's pieces aren't terribly consistent: Assam Pedas Mama is sweet and poignant, though its dialogue seems occasionally too sophisticated to be genuinely believable. Kermit and Miss Piggy Have Tickle Sex is almost painful: its comedy makes very little sense in the context of the greater production, and the characters exhibit neither the speech patterns nor the easily mimicked voices of their famous Muppets namesaks. (Has the writer never noticed that Miss Piggy calls her boyfriend "Kermie", not "Kermit the Frog"?)

One also gets the sense that director Christopher Ling is trying too hard to be edgy, sandwiching heart-tugging sketches with bursts of discordant noise and flashing lights. Nor does the piece truly engage with the colonial architecture of the performance space they've been given. This production has bugs aplenty - but what makes it ultimately worth watching is that it's also got a lot of heart.

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Reading Duration
50 seconds
Teaser Name
Ng Yi-Sheng
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