The Boy Inside is way more than your conventional staged reading: it boasts spooky video projections, five musicians and a chorus of twelve, plus the acting talents of Aidli Mosbit, Julius Foo, Karen Tan and Tan Shou Chen. It's a touching, compact, character-driven piece, centering on a 12 year-old boy who suffers from eczema, that extends its scope to include a more general social malaise of living in an inflexible, prejudiced society.
It's a noteworthy debut from emerging playwright Wang Liangsheng. Still, I'm not completely sure if it works. Right now there's just a tad too much focus on the details of the treatment procedures for eczema, so that the play feels like an MOH-sponsored community performance at times - and the result of this is that the parallel issues of racism and single parents feel like distractions rather than expansions of a central theme. It's also fundamentally a rather simple, domestic piece - musical director Low Xu Hao and multimedia designer Loo Zihan's contributions are lovely, but incorporating them appears to have been a case of gilding the lily.