Utter《优剧》

Not schooled in the art of writing or turning short stories into plays. But we've learnt to build plot points, get intimately acquainted with our characters, and turn it into a story arc. As part of the audience, it's intriguing to see how playwrights interpret and try to keep the essence of the short stories while adding stylistic flourishes to make it palatable for the stage. Very much like how not all of us like movies that have been adapted from the books, and on the other hand, we applaud how some movies have turned out better than the books.

Utter《优剧》is a "Singapore Writers Festival project that seeks to adapt the best of Singapore writing into different art forms like theatre and film." This round, it's a double bill of one Chinese play and two English plays adapted from two Singapore writers- Yeng Pway Ngon (英培安) and O Thiam Chin. We got tickets for the matinee, and off we went to occupy a row at the Play Den of The Arts House.

We began with Yeng Pway Ngon's 'Shadows in the Jungle'《影子森林》, adapted from 'The Studio'《画室》. I haven't read this book. It's still lying somewhere at home. So I didn't have the benefit of the read to compare to the staging. The actors were excellent. Playwright Lee Chee Keng (李集庆) gave his two actors really long lines to memorize and spout. I was most impressed. However, I found the storyline, to be a little typical of Chinese novels set in the politically-charged era of the communist insurgency during the 60s to the late 80s, the struggle between ideals, ideology, pragmatism and capitalism. It was a tad draggy. But the modern cafe set-up of garden tables and chairs on stage somehow didn't fail to bring us back to the Malayan jungles two or three decades ago. English subtitles were flashed at the back for the benefit of those who didn't fully understand the lovely nuances of the Chinese language.

I had difficulty reconciling O Thiam Chin's almost surrealistic stories played out by the actors. 'The Yellow Elephant', and 'The Girl Who Swallowed The Sun' are stories that caught my attention during the first read, and in view of attending the plays, I re-read them. Playwright Jean Tay meshed both together concurrently, coherently, and rather convincingly. The actors understood the stories and what they were meant to portray. But on stage, the magical bits of having a bright sunshine-yellow elephant in a HDB flat in Ang Mo Kio, was somehow lost, and trying to imagine the swallowed sun in the teenager while absorbing the visuals, was quite a chore. I was very thrown off by the seemingly random serving of coffee by one actor to the other 3 on stage.

Discussing what we understood from both plays, offering opinions about their treatment versus our thoughts and interpretation of the original stories provided for a most exciting dinner conversation that lingered long over the initial 3 bottles (750ml each!) of sake before beginning on the first course of the omakase.