A commissioned work under the Esplanade's Huayi incubation program, 'Last Luncheon'《最后的午餐》by Le Jeu Studio (乐者工作室) is written, directed and performed solo by Alvin Chiam (詹辉振).
There is no dialogue to speak of. The narration and voice came from a cassette tape recorder. Wow. I had almost forgotten that cassette tapes could be recorded over repeatedly, and there are two sides to them. The tapes depict different stages in the narrator's life. What we audience see here, the setting seems to be 40 days after his wife has passed away. At some point earlier in their lives, they had a child who had died too. They grieved that loss, and it seemed as though they didn't have more children after.
Every day, an elderly man eats a can of luncheon meat, to keep a promise to his wife. Alone and adrift, he revisits past moments and memories, in search of meaning and closure. As the days pass, he gets closer to his last can of luncheon meat.
After decades in the scene honing his craft, Singapore theatre practitioner Alvin Chiam writes, directs, and performs in his first solo work, a rumination on the meaning of solitude.
Inspired by Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett, Chiam invites the audience on this groundbreaking journey with him. Choosing a minimalist approach, Chiam compels the audience to focus on him, to delight in his exterior actions, but more importantly, to look beyond that and see his character’s inner world.
'Last Luncheon' is a short play clocking in at 1hr 30 minutes. That was a relief compared to two other three-hour plays ('Rickshaw Boy'《骆驼祥子》and 'Human Condition VIII' 《人间条件八– 凡人歌》) I had watched. They were decent, but I didn't feel like writing about it or breaking it down. One was literally what I studied in school and had watched a few versions of it since Lao She (老舍) is like the preeminent name in Chinese plays. The other just went on too much like a Taiwanese soap; and family dramas are always annoying.
This play is paced slow, interspersed with monologues from the cassette tapes played or Hokkien/Cantonese/Chinese songs that came on, and obviously meant something to the narrator. The play also saw the actor boiling up instant noodles and eating them. Then towards the end, he opened up and fried up a can of luncheon meat. Wahhh. The theatre studio was filled with those smells. Nothing lingering, but it certainly triggered my craving for spam.
At the end of the show, theatre-goers filed out and were handed door gifts of frozen potong ice-cream. So old-school! Red bean was the flavor, I think. I was quite tickled, but I didn't take any. If they had handed out cans of luncheon meat, I would happily take it!
The playwright said, that he wanted to create a play that depicts how people tend to live in their golden years, a reality that faces many people who seemingly have a happy family even at middle age. Loneliness is a perpetual issue with the everyone, especially the elderly.
“It has been an unconscious goal to explore solitude since the very beginning of this creation; the sheer realisation that loneliness is ubiquitous, is silently by our side since the day we were born…When change hits us, there is grief, remorse, or emptiness…Solitude will take us into her arms. A quiet world as such, some remain vanquished, some are redeemed, while some may still be waiting…”
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