{"id":27232,"date":"2006-11-09T12:40:00","date_gmt":"2006-11-09T12:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/?p=27232"},"modified":"2024-03-14T11:56:33","modified_gmt":"2024-03-14T03:56:33","slug":"stiff-monster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/articles\/2006\/11\/stiff-monster\/","title":{"rendered":"Stiff Monster"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

Watching the KLPac production of Frankenstein in Lov<\/em>e, I was somehow reminded of a play I saw at a high-school theatre competition about 10 years back. It was a staging of Keris Laksaman Bentan<\/em>, a popular text about the assassination of Sultan Mahmud. Everyone had packets of rose syrup hidden under their costumes, and whenever a stabbing occurred, the stricken actor would squeeze his plastic bag: sticky pink water would gush out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These packets of ‘blood’ — more properly known as\n‘squibs’, most widely used in film to simulate gunshot wounds — were deployed\ntwice in the Pentas 1 performance. I’m pretty sure they didn’t use rose syrup.\nI don’t know. It was difficult to see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One doesn’t expect computer-generated ghosts and\nexploding heads in the theatre — this isn’t the movies, and a squib or two is\nprobably as sophisticated as it gets. But Grand Guignol theatre (prime examples\nof which include Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd:\nThe Demon Barber of Fleet Street<\/em> and Doug Wright’s Quills<\/em>) doesn’t need elaborate special effects to spook and\nrepulse, if enough care is given to convincing acting and evocative mood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For director Gavin Yap, the latter meant a darkened\nhall, with green and blue lights making criss-cross patterns on the floor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I settled into my seat for the Frankenstein in Love<\/em>‘s travesties, a\ngeneric horror soundscape began, and Douglas Lim shuffled about in the gloom,\nshifting what appeared to be dead bodies. Maybe this was <\/em>frightening — green and blue lights, coming to get me!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No, not really. I am tempted to call Lim Ang Swee’s\nlighting a stroke of genius: it tried to obscure everything onstage.\nUnfortunately, it didn’t hide everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Bad\nHalloween Party<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frankenstein\nin Love<\/em> is the twisted creation of horror writer\nClive Barker, famed for some of the best B-grade movies of all time, including\n1987’s Hellraiser<\/em> and the Candyman<\/em> trilogy. One cannot know why\nBarker chose to re-imagine Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein<\/em>,\nbut he does some interesting mangling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of a tragic Europe, the play is set in an\nunnamed South American country, in the midst of a revolution headed by\ncharismatic El Coco, the Boogeyman. The freedom fighters find a grisly\nlaboratory under the presidential palace: it belongs to Dr Joseph Frankenstein\n(here transposed into Jewish ethnicity — his bloodthirsty ways are rather\nweakly explained as a symptom of having experienced Auschwitz).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the end of Act One, we discover that El Coco was Frankenstein’s\noriginal Monster. The revolutionary’s budding love for Veronique Flecker,\nanother of doctor’s creations, is interrupted: the couple is captured and\ndelivered to Frankenstein, who promptly has El Coco skinned and left for dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this point in the KLPac performance, I realised why\nthe play reminded me of Keris Laksamana\nBentan<\/em>: it looked cheap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

El Coco’s skin, hung up on scaffolding as the first\nact’s set-piece, looked suspiciously like a deflated blow-up doll. The Y-shaped\nsutures on the creatures’ faces that identified them as Frankenstein’s\ncreations looked like they were done by a nurse afflicted with Tourette’s\nsyndrome — they were so huge the gloom couldn’t hide them. The costumes were a\nmix of Goth-surplus items and bandages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When people pay to go and see a play at the Kuala\nLumpur Performing Arts Centre, I don’t think they expect a Halloween party.\nWith Frankenstein in Love<\/em>, that was\nwhat they got — and a bad one, at that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A shame, since underneath all the lame makeup, corny\nspecial effects and tacky costumes were some pretty good lines: “Death’s\ngood, like the petit mort — a sense of a duty done,” gave the gore some\npathos; “I’m good with virgins, especially docile virgins who died\nearly,” elicited a few laughs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Undead\nActors<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We laughed more at the death of Cockatoo, El Coco’s\nright-hand man, the night I watched Frankenstein\nin Love<\/em>. Played by Michael Chen, this apparently tragic scene in the second\nact was made comic because of the performer’s inability to get into character:\nevery time he had lines, Michael would noticeably turn to address the seats,\ninstead of actually engaging whichever fellow actor to whom he was supposed to\nbe talking — and this tic extended to his supposed demise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It isn’t fair for me to single out anyone, though —\nand this was the real tragedy of the play: we never forgot that the people we\nsaw onstage were actors, mouthing their lines as if eating hot cardboard, more\npreoccupied with getting the words correct (some actually swayed back and forth\nduring their recital) than bothering about emotion or pacing. Lack of the most\nrudimentary elements of stagecraft — eye contact, for example — meant that it\nwas hard to determine who was talking to whom, unless the characters addressed\neach other by name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps training for the timing of those two squibs\nkept the performers from perfecting their roles. I don’t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rashid Salleh’s El Coco and Melissa Maureen’s Veronique made the one of the most passionless stage couples of recent times: they exchanged declarations of love twice onstage, and suddenly we were expected to believe they were star-crossed lovers –\u00ad whatever happened to foreplay and romance?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or heaving chests, for that matter? If either were\nmonitored by an electrocardiogram, I’m convinced they would have shown\nflat-lines. Sure, the monster and his lover are technically dead — but I doubt\ncorpses are supposed to be that stiff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One exception: Kennie Dowle, as Dr Frankenstein, stood\nout from the rest of the cast with his testosterone-filled swagger and dubious\naccent — the only performer who looked as if he was having fun with his\ncharacter. But his late appearance, in the last scene of Act One, could not\nsave this already undead production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frankenstein\nin Love<\/em> was Frankenstein’s monster itself:\npatchy, clumsy, made up of parts which did not fit. Worse, it was the monster\nbefore it received its spark of life — in essence, an amalgam of dead bodies.\nWhat the play needed was a bolt of lightning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, it didn’t strike. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

~~~ <\/p>\n\n\n\n

First Published: 09.11.2006 on Kakiseni <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watching the KLPac production of Frankenstein in Love, I was somehow reminded of a play I saw at a high-school theatre competition about 10 years back. It was a staging of Keris Laksaman Bentan, a popular text about the assassination of Sultan Mahmud. Everyone had packets of rose syrup hidden under their costumes, and whenever […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":6,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,3569,3535],"tags":[3623,654,1175,493,3029,2856,3625,3624,49,46],"language":[7523],"writer":[7593],"class_list":["post-27232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-review","category-theatre","tag-clive-barker","tag-gavin-yap","tag-kennie-dowle","tag-klpac","tag-lim-ang-swee","tag-melissa-maureen","tag-michael-chen","tag-rashid-salleh","tag-review","tag-theatre","language-english","writer-amir-hafizi"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27232"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38763,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27232\/revisions\/38763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27232"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=27232"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/writer?post=27232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}