Pangdemonium's 'The Mother'

Pangdemonium staged Florian Zeller's 'The Father' in 2018 (there's a beautiful film of it made and recently released, starring Anthony Hopkins), and 'The Son' in 2020 (Hugh Jackman and Laura Dern are slated to star in the film adaptation to be released in 2022). I watched 'The Father' and thoroughly enjoyed it, but opted to skip the 'The Son' because it wasn't a storyline I empathize with, so I don't particularly care for it. 

This year, Pangdemonium staged 'The Mother', often billed as the final of his 'trilogy' of theater works. My first set of tickets was on the weekend before National Day, not the date I wanted, and accessing the venue of Victoria Theatre would be highly inconvenient with the National Day Parade going on at the floating platform. Never mind; I was sure that the dates would shift. The entire production did. 

The entire show shifted to October, thanks to P2HA from July 22 to August 18. Pangdemonium finally got the show on the road. I shuddered to think of the losses they had to bear. Merrily trotted to a matinee at Victoria Theatre. Finally. I got to see a theater play live on stage!

Directed by Tracie Pang, the show stars theater darlings Janice Koh and Adrian Pang. They share such fantastic chemistry on stage and it's always such a pleasure to watch them act. I never tire of seeing them in the different roles that they effortlessly sink into and portray. 

I grimaced through many parts of the play. The audience saw the descent of Mother into self-destruction. We saw an unhappy woman who didn't like how her marriage had gone, and how her relationship with her son grew distant. The more she tried to hold on to everything, the more she ended up losing. We share the fragile pieces of her mind and what was left of it.  

The biggest takeaway for me, personally, felt like a reminder. It felt like the writer warning both men and women, but mostly women — women shouldn't just build their lives and identities around their husbands and children. Marriage can be shackles when we take it to the extreme. Should we? Or shouldn't we? 

We ought to uhhh... carve out our individual selves and be assured of it. We can't expect another to give us happiness. We make our own. I won't know how it is for the other women who have taken on the roles as mothers raising children, or if they expect anything in return, or what they expect of a family they've built. That's not a life I choose. My definitions are different, and my motivations are different. I'll have to ensure my own strength in order not to descend into a hell I have perpetuated, regardless of the triggers.