It was only during the post-show dialogue that the production began to make some sense, and indeed, really interest me. That probably tells you more than enough about Times 5, a show that was meant to be an evocative exploration of the five tenets of Islam (Faith, Prayer, Fast, Charity, Prilgrimage) but turned out to be a series of disparate segments mixing, but not integrating, bland narration and movement.
Actors Siti Zuraida and Gloria Tan are delightful but perhaps too inexperienced to carry the weight of the roles they were cast in. They served as vessels to deliver director Helmi Zati's ideas about the sacrifice and suffering that Muslim women have been subjected to since Eve's aberration in the Garden of Eden. But for all their efforts, Siti and Tan lacked the stage presence and conviction to pull off the weighty abstractions and text. Their interaction was only believable near the end when the two broke the silence of most of the piece, laughing casually as they detailed the various prohibitions for women ("Not allowed to come home late", "Not allowed to touch myself down there", etc.). At most other times in the show, Tan came across as a sexual predator with her naughty grin and the suggestive poses she struck in her suffocating corset, and Zuraida seemed a meek little mouse in comparison. Neither persona was very engaging or served any discernible purpose.
Luckily, choreographer Sudirman Mohamed and his team of dancers managed to occupy my attention. On the sidelines of the Drama Centre Black Box, the dancers performed simple but elegant movements derived from daily actions such as a handshake or a wave. I was most engaged when the dancers performed a jaunty dance with their feet placed on top of suitcases that they carried throughout the piece, an indelicate metaphor for the burdens we carry through the journey of life.
But while the movement itself was praise-worthy, the fact that the dancers did not compliment the actors, even detracting from them and forcing us to choose between the two sets of performers, manifests the discordance of the various elements of Times 5.