Viewpoints Boom and wAve return to the London stage | Boom and wAve return to the London stage |
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| Viewpoints | |
| Wednesday, 04 November 2009 | |
Boom and Wave - A Tale of Two Eastern Stories
The play wittily ties a plot revolving around the pursue of maximum land usage: housing agents who sell dream homes, civil servants who deal with land planning, an old lady who refuses to move out from her old home, and a corpse who doesn't want to be exhumed. Under the guise of an unlikely mystery of identifying the nameless corpse (who Jeremiah, an officer from the Land Ministry, can talk to), the play deals with a subtler issue of en bloc sale, which older properties were sold collectively for redevelopment and huge profit. Playwright Jean Tay developed the story while she joined the International playwriting Residency at Royal Court Theatre in London in 2007. The play then subsequently premiered in Singapore in 2008. Yellow Earth Theatre's production, directed by Philippe Cherbonnier with a small cast of five, is its UK premiere (it was first featured in YET's play reading festival Typhoon 5 in 2008). Yet the play is not only about the impact of rapid economic development in a country like Singapore; it is also reflective of the fast-changing, multicultural environment there. An notable example is the use of ‘Singlish', which, as some members of audiences pointed out during the post-show talk on 21st October, could be quite confusing for the UK audience. Yet, it is this use of mixed languages that portrayed vividly the everyday life of ethnic Chinese in Singapore and delivered some of the most humorous moments onstage. For example, sentences are quite often ended with "lah" ("You see lah"/"I know lah"/"No lah"), which is evident Hokkien influence of on everyday conversations, especially when Mother is talking with Boon, the protagonist and a property agent. However, without the knowledge of a Chinese dialect, an UK audience may have no idea why the following dialogue is funny:
It is still relatively rare that an English-speaking theatre production would explicitly exercise dialogues influenced by non-English. Seeing this way, Boom is an interesting case in which multi-linguistic conversation is emphatically used. The play is written for a cast of seven, and YET courageously adopted it for a cast of five (Ashley Alymann, Jonathan Chan-Pensley, Tina Chiang, Louise Mai Newberry, and Jay Oliver Yip, who are also featuring in wAve, YET's other production in the same season). The experimental style of the play and its somehow surreal setting and short scenes are creatively elaborated in Boom, resulting in an energetic and hilarious performance that well delivers the sentiments sketched by the play. Lia W Liang has a PhD in Drama and Theatre Studies. She works and lives in London. PHOTO CREDIT: Manuel Harlan
As in the Greek tragedy, the play centres around the relationship of Jason and his wife, known only as M. In this version Jason is an apparently perfectly assimilated Korean-American, complete with Yankee accent and a propensity to shoot the TV with a handgun when his team isn't playing well; while M is a disaffected immigrant housewife, ‘fresh off the boat and straight in the kitchen', bitterly flavouring her husband's dinner with something a little less appetising than soy sauce. While we become increasingly aware of M's disaffection in a tender performance by Louise May Newberry, Jason, played with bravado by Jonathan Chan-Pensley, gets cast as the star in a film version of Miss Saigon titled Mr Pnom Penh and falls in love with his co-star, a clone of Marilyn Monroe. The play ably demonstrates the difficulties of a community struggling to adapt to a vacuous American monoculture while mourning the severing of its connections to the old culture at home which had given it meaning. It is an interesting premise and there is strong support to the leads from Tina Chiang and Jay Oliver Yip. However the play's insistence in explaining all this in terms of quantum physics and particle/wave duality was confusing and seemed to overload the play with quasi-intellectual baggage. Similarly Jonathan Man's direction served to hold up the movement of the play with cumbersome scene changes set to irrelevant music. Overall, I felt that inside an occasionally slow and portentous evening was a sleek, funny and ultimately moving drama trying to get out. James Yeatman is a Director for theatre group Kandinsky. He is currently developing a play about the Limehouse Chinatown. PHOTO CREDIT: Manuel Harlan Catch Boom and wAve at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, London, W6 with limited performance dates. wAve: 10, 11 & 14 November at 7.30pm All enquiries and bookings at 020 8237 1111 www.riversidestudios.co.uk
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Boom tells a touching story with a comical twist that reflects the impact of the soaring property market on ordinary people in contemporary Singapore. 
Meanwhile Sung Rno's wAve makes up the second half of Yellow Earth Theatre's autumn double bill. A Korean-American writer based in New York, Rno's play loosely uses the Medea myth to explore the tensions of the Korean experience in America. 
