It's good to see that Buds is once again performing works written by its young members. The four short plays presented this year are a mixed bag, but they're infused with a certain spirit of resonance one tends to get when writers and performers come from the same community.
Dawn Teo's Daffodil has good dialogue and psychological depth, but of course the writing's somewhat overshadowed by director Serena Ho's decision to portray the eponymous pet rabbit via an actor in a gargantuan bunny suit - an apparition at once delightful and unnerving. Aisha's A Is For Abuse, B is For Blame and Flora Yeo's Forgotten Promise both tackle serious social issues: rape, dementia and familial breakdown. There are intense, effective emotional exchanges in each, but the actors have an unfortunate and frequent habit of shouting their lines to express their anguish or frustration - a tactic far less effective than restraint.
The piece I'm most impressed by is Confessions, written and directed by Al Hafiz Sanusi. It's rather more ambitious than the others: it's a confrontation between a eulogist and a deceased military dictator, leading to a wonderful game of power play as the dictator is forced to strip himself of his pomp and regalia, down to his vulnerable human essence. There's a rather good performance from Shrey Bhargava as the dictator, too - he's admittedly rather shouty, but in this case, it fits his character utterly.