Plumbing the Depths
The play achieves emotional resonance not via a gritty realism but rather, a curious concoction of garish folk culture, everyday banality and slick contemporary theatre wizardry.
Two things linger in your mind after watching Poop - life and death. They have been universal themes of art since time immemorial, but rarely do we see them treated in the manner seen in Poop. Within a short one-hour span, playwright-director Chong Tze Chien has crafted a piece which is whimsical and spellbinding, yet at the same time heartbreaking, probing straight into the wounds of anyone who has experienced the loss of a loved one.
The play was a sensation when it was first staged in 2009. While I missed the chance to catch it then, the restaging proves that it was worthy of the praise lavished upon it.
At the centre of the play is a family devastated by the suicide of the father (Julius Foo) and the approaching death of the cancer-stricken daughter, Emily (Jean Ng). The spectre not only of the deceased father, but also of death itself, pervades every aspect of their lives, trapping them within a cycle of depression. To break the cycle, the grandmother (Neo Swee Lin) convinces the child that her father has, literally, never left them, and organises parties to fill up the silence. But her endeavour is only a partial success. While the dying girl continues to dwell in the blithe, innocent world which is the anodyne to her physical pain, the project is repressive to the grandmother herself. Her pent-up sentiments are intensified over time and threaten to shatter the delicate facade she has constructed. There is also the mother (Janice Koh), whose despondency is the foil to her mother-in-law's resilience. Having not devised a coping mechanism for herself, she reteats into a vacuous shell and is continually possessed by grief.
It's hard not to feel for the pain of this family. But the play's strength lies not only in how their loss is expressed, but also in how bereavement, as well as its attendant notions of death, depression and familial ties, is negotiated throughout the characters' journey. The play is not one to wallow in sentiment; instead, it pursues an inquiry into the issues of life and death. What does it mean when a person dies?
In a dialogue between the grandmother and her deceased son, the pair quarrels over their divergent interpretations of afterlife. The agnostically cynical son scoffs at his mother's provincial convictions, which are mostly informed by Chinese and Buddhist mythologies - the kind you would find in the dioramas of Haw Par Villa. Perhaps as a reference to purgatorial torture in hell, the spectral son is presented in a dismembered form throughout the play. Within the darkened theatre, only parts of Foo's body, usually his head, are made visible under the spotlights. Meanwhile, a body double appears at the other end of the stage, enacting an isolated part of the character's body in tandem with Foo's facial expressions.
This representation also points to the dead man's pervasive but fragmented presence in the eyes of his surviving family members, who see him in the most mundane objects around them, from the fan, the breeze to the NTUC plastic bag they carry. Denizens of the netherworld also begin to infiltrate their living space, appearing in the form of creepy clothes suspended in midair. While the disenchanted mother appears oblivious to the ghouls sharing her MRT rides, for young Emily, the worlds of life and death are one. To a child experiencing the gradual effects of death working upon her flesh, the boundary between this world and the next is unmarked.
The tenacity of familial ties also comes into question. In one particularly poignant scene, the mother informs her mother-in-law of her intention to move back to Malaysia after Emily dies, confirming how the child is the only thing which ties the two of them together. Throughout the play, physical contact with Emily is also kept to a minimum. Even when the characters are written to be conversing next to each other, director Chong's blocking inserts a physical gulf between them, fracturing the theatrical space. Here, the family is presented as a fragile construction, doomed to collapse should a single piece of its structure be lost.
But amidst these tensions, there are moments of unity, especially between the two women struggling to keep Emily alive. The scene in which the two of them grab on to each other as they sob over Emily's departure is easily the most heart-wrenching sequence of the play. The moment conveys an unbridled personal pain as much as it suggests solidarity. The eventual fate of the family, however, remains uncertain.
The most impressive thing about Poop is how it achieves emotional resonance not via a gritty realism but rather, a curious concoction of garish folk culture, everyday banality and slick contemporary theatre wizardry. Ang Hui Bin's quirky toy theatre puppetry, Lim Woan Wen's edgy lighting, Darren Ng's eclectic sound plus the saturated palette of Oliver Chong's production design mix well to form a strange but beguiling spectacle.
But the bizarre aesthetic is not just a stylistic excursion, for it communicates the play's central understanding of its themes. In Poop, death is imagined not as a state of finality, but of perpetual indeterminacy. Underlining the melancholia is a fundamental confusion which seizes the family as they grapple with the ultimate unknown. The nature of afterlife can never be ascertained. The bereaved can never gain complete closure. There are no answers, only questions, puzzles and mysteries.
The outlandish choice of "poop" as the title and central motif of the play also begs closer examination. In the play, Emily is constantly afflicted by abdominal pains, spending much time seated upon the toilet in agony. In one scene, poop becomes her father, who pops his head out of the cistern and incites her to join him in the underworld. Poop appears to be a metaphor for Emily's compulsive consumption of the memory of her father. She feeds on his image to the point of internalisation, making it impossible to expurgate it when she needs to.
Among the cast, Neo delivers the most heartfelt performance as the conflicted grandmother. There is a certain honesty to be observed in the delivery of her lines: in the sequence in which she laments how she doesn't want anybody in the family to feel "sad" anymore, the meaning of the word is embodied in its very utterance. Her efforts at averting the intergenerational transmission of depression has left her crippled by spent frustration and haplessness. Koh's nuanced portrayal of the mother complements Neo and the tumult of emotions which they conjure forms the core of the narrative.
Meanwhile, Foo performs impressive work as the omnipresent father. The level of agility he has to achieve is demanding but the actor's training in physical theatre stands him in good stead. Ng is also generally competent as the young Emily, but her shrill, childish voice helps little in winning sympathy for the character.
There are other little weaknesses to the play. An extended sequence featuring the father playing a game of shadow puppets with his daughter appeared gimmicky and lacked the finesse that was expected. I'm also wondering if there was really a need to explain the specific reasons for the father's suicide, particularly since the story had developed to a point where it no longer mattered. There is also a sense that the play could have been stretched even farther, not only in terms of its length but also in terms of attaining the emotional catharsis which it aspired towards but only hit tangentially.
Nevertheless, Poop presents a vision of mortality quite unlike anything you've seen. This is a work which would provoke you in unexpected ways and make you appreciate your loved ones a little more - simply for the fact that they are still by your side.