Travelling Light
It seems the creative team didn't know where to go and so spun off in various forgettable directions.
Darren Ng's soundscape chirps with clockwork cicadas as it welcomes us to a towering construction site, which has been abandoned in the Drama Centre Black Box. But soon the subwoofers pound with the churning of Sisyphean engines, and four human figures, clad in surgical plastic emerge. It seems they are tasked with birthing the city of tomorrow. And indeed the city slowly rises: its buildings are winched into place and its transport infrastructure is laid down by its quartet of midwives. Ingeniously, we see Marina Sands Bay take shape when a model passenger ferry comes to rest on a trio of skyscrapers.
And yet the city seems unalive. Its vehicles are metal egg boxes and their passengers are mere geometrical abstractions. The midwives who guide its MRT trains out of its tunnels do so with gentle but funereal deliberation. Even its soundscape is uncommitted to existence - its grimy, clanking sounds tune in and out like stations on a shortwave radio. And is the sun that rises in the stage-right corner really the sun - or is it only the Singapore Flyer? Or, for that matter, is it actually the moon? Whatever it is, it shines wanly with dusty amber rays which lighting designer Lim Woan Wen contrasts with electric indigo backlighting, leaving the city caught between day and night and unsure which way to go. Indeed, everything about the city is ambivalent and crepuscular. It is a city of ambition without drive, of efficiency without purpose, of serenity without peace.
What wonderful stories the inhabitants of this precarious city will have to tell! Watching this first scene, I started imagining how the citizens' dreams of permanence would wither and die in the half-light, how they would be forced to become scavengers, living out of the suitcases of the play's title.
And then this didn't happen.
After such a deeply evocative set-up, it seems the creative team didn't know where to go and so spun off in various forgettable directions which failed to explore the thematic territory they had so strikingly laid out. So we watched Ang Hui Bin galumphing around as a mime artist performing for an unappreciative crowd. We saw a silent duet between a lonely girl and a red balloon which might have been her lover. We saw a quartet of citizens perform daily tasks with a sinister, mechanized efficiency, commanded by a disembodied voice. All of these were reasonably interesting situations (at least for the first couple of minutes of their overlong duration) but none of them were full enough to be called stories, and none were connected to the others, so instead of helping the play achieve focus, power and meaning, they all simply drifted away from each other, diffusing the impressive sense of purpose the first scene had built.
As you'd expect from The Finger Players, there were some interesting theatrical elements that briefly arrested the play's gradual slide. There was a highly unlikely but wonderfully expressive puppet made out of netting bags filled with eyeballs - but he had nothing in particular to do. The actors lifted parts of their costumes to reveal cancerous growths, vaguely in the shape of faces - but what did this mean? Indeed, the idea of cancer and the design motif of eyes kept recurring, but I honestly don't know why. Certainly they had little relation to the idea of transient rootlessness instilled by the first scene and suggested by the title; and indeed, the pile of suitcases that remained centrestage throughout was only ever used for the most banal of purposes - mainly to store puppets.
The cast was entirely competent but largely indistinguishable from each other, and, while this may well have been intentional, even when considered as a single unit they failed to achieve much that would stick in the mind. The lighting and sound, on the other hand, were striking. Lim's brave gamble in limiting her palette to essentially two colours paid off in unique and atmospheric visuals, while Ng's rusty, insidious industrial electronic soundtrack was constantly fascinating. Perhaps too fascinating, though: several scenes felt like they had been choreographed to fit pre-existing music, occasionally taking literal movement cues from bleeps and bangs in the soundscape, and as a result they felt constricted, overlong and predictable.
By the end I must admit to becoming rather frustrated with suitCASES. Though none of its fragments was by any means painful, and some were moderately interesting, the play seemed as it progressed to be more and more determined not to cohere. Maybe this was because of its wrongheaded avoidance of live speech, which limited its storytelling possibilities. Maybe it was the poorly defined and similar characters. Maybe it was its episodic structure. Because while I can think of plays that succeeded brilliantly while missing one of the above elements, I'm struggling to think of any that succeeded without all three. Even Twisted, a largely silent, episodic Finger Players show from 2005 that focused mainly on the story of a single puppet protagonist, defined that protagonist vividly at different stages of his life.
I guess I'd be less disappointed if the opening scene hadn't hinted at - no, promised - the kind of coherent, immersive, thematically fertile world seen in such masterpieces as Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and I'm Just a Piano Teacher. But in the end, suitCASES proved nothing more than a brief, shining triumph of the imagination followed by a long succession of mild failures.