The Boy Inside (2012), Review

By adelyn-1800, 28 May, 2022
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3.00
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out of5
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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.

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Reading Duration
40 seconds
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Ng Yi-Sheng
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Whole date is confirmed