We learn something new everyday. I\nfor example learnt that the new politically correct term for foreign workers —\nyou know, the people who tend our kids and clean our homes 24 hours a day (if\npossible, if not then at least 18 hours), clean the streets, serve us drinks at\nthe coffeeshop and put up our buildings, not forgetting those who keep our male\npopulation entertained when their biological needs come a-calling — is now\n“transient workers”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This piece of knowledge came\nespecially useful at the premiere of The Necessary Stage’s new work Mobile<\/em> which played at the Singapore\nArts Festival on 17 – 18 June 2006. You see, two blokes were chatting behind me\nbefore the lights went out and one asked, “I wonder if there are any\ntransient workers here tonight?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mind you, we were at the island\nnation’s spanking new Drama Centre at the equally spanking new Central Library,\nand until recently even I was ignorant of its existence. Still it’s not at all\na strange comment coming from a young Singaporean — young Singaporeans are\nknown to be ill informed at worst, naive at best — it illustrates the need for\nplays such as Mobile<\/em>. And The\nNecessary Stage have been doing a good job pushing the envelope and asking\ntough questions to an audience not used to asking questions by themselves. How\nmuch it has succeeded in changing things is not quite clear, but at least it is\ntrying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And Mobile<\/em> is an ambitious project in this respect. With its modest\ntask of exploring transient workers from a cross section of communities far beyond\nthe picket fences of Singapore, it finds itself caught in a web of questions\ntoo numerous and too complex even for itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As if the problems of transient\nworkers in our little corner of South East Asia were not bad enough, veteran\nwriter Haresh Sharma and director Alvin Tan (last seen in our midst in a\nsimilar cross-cultural experiment Separation\n40<\/em>) rope in the help of Thai, Filipino and Japanese companies, each\nproviding part of the migrant worker puzzle from their point of view, magically\nweaved together to form the final piece here in Singapore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The result is not as unpalatable as one might imagine — quite the opposite, Mobile<\/em> brilliantly pieced together the different perspectives with some imaginative directing, and what resulted was a delightful complement of regional flavours. I admit it is quite clever — adding to the rather bland flavour of Singaporean art with its penchant for sloganeering and officialese was a heady dollop of the Filipino love for melodrama and song and dance, spiced up with a hearty dash of the a wide-eyed naivety of the Thai and finished off with the Japanese’s obsessiveness and fractured sense of morality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Adding to the multicultural experience were the native languages that were preserved for most part in Mobile<\/em> — here is where my flirtation with Thailand and my drinking binges with the Pinoys helped tremendously, although in the end, there is something in the proximity of our communities that allows ideas to transcend linguistic barriers. To help things along TNS used subtitle panels located very conveniently\u00a0at the back of the stage so it was easy to read and to follow the action — the two panels also doubled as TV screens for the television studio and conference scenes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be honest, hearing authentic\nThai, Tagalog and Japanese was a welcome relief from the Singlish — after all\nthese years, Singaporean actors still cannot speak normally on stage. The\ncharacters swing from the extreme Queen’s Englishness to equally extreme\nSinglishness where every sentence ends with a “lah”, whether required\nor not, and the more the better. Throw in the vulgar hokkien Ah Seng who cannot\ncomplete a sentence without the expletive “c**b**\u201d and you have the full\npalette of Singaporean theatre expression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is why I prefer to watch plays in\nArabic than in English. And this is why Mobile<\/em>\nis so refreshing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So in the absence of the contingent\nfrom the Filipino Maid Association of Singapore and the Indian and Bangla\nRecreational Society (they don’t exist), the lights came on to a packed house filled\nwith arts students, arts and festival buffs and the theatre crowd in general,\nplus a number of rowdy youngsters who must have come because they heard there\nwould be female nudity in the play (there wasn’t any so they had to make do\nwith the mention of “vagina” by the Thai sex worker).<\/p>\n\n\n\n And on stage appeared two containers\nwhich would prove to be an ingeniously flexible set, albeit rather (and deliberately)\nnoisy one. Perhaps the influence of Japanese co-director Tatsuo Kaneshita — I\nsense a bit of Japanese sadism here — but the two containers, solidly built,\nwere purposefully slammed all through the evening — God help my ears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A potent symbol of the central topic\n— the container being the housing, sometimes mode of shipment, of transient\nworkers, also representing the forces of commerce that drive the need for\nforeign workers, the two cubes transform into cells, resort cabins in Phuket,\nshanty housing in Tondo, a brothel and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And around the two cubes weaved a\nseries of playlets surrounding the plight of a Thai woman who ends up as a\nprostitute in Japan awaiting deportation for having conceived a child by her\nJapanese boyfriend, a wealthy Filipino resort owner who is driven by skewers of\nconscience for having exploited his Thai “fisherman friend” (yes, it\nwas a cheap and very funny joke), a Filipino maid who is forced to abort her\nchild if she is to remain in employment in Singapore, ending cyclically with\nthe Japanese boyfriend who escapes the pressures of Japanese civility for the\nunbuttoned (literally — he strips off his business clothes in the end, but\ndon’t get your hopes up gals n guys) freedom \nof Filipino poverty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These disparate tales are threaded\ntogether by the running theme of a labour conference in Bangkok where two old\nfriends, Singaporean civil servant (Aidli Mosbit) and Thai NGO worker (Narumol\nThammapruksa), find their friendship torn apart by changing ideals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is here that the most caustic\nbarbs are wielded as Haresh Sharma and gang delight in taking potshots at the\n“powers that be” with witty one liners, backed by the omnipresent MS\nPowerpoint presentation, finally pointing out that politics itself is the very\nantithesis of public service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first half of Mobile<\/em> was rather heavy going with the\nlengthy tale of the Thai prostitute, touching as it is and with a brilliant\nverbal confrontation with “the wife”, but bogged down by the rather\nunnecessary meaning-of-life arguments with the Thai monk and a really\nunnecessary cat-fight. Mobile<\/em> really\npicked up during it’s second half with the riotous song-and-dance vaudeville of\nthe Filipino maid piece, whose dilemma about abortion, whether deliberate of\nnot, was as side-splittingly funny as it was tragic, played out as over the top\nas good taste allowed. However, I can’t see that pivotal line chorused by the oppressed\nmaids, “We are not c**b**s!” being repeated in KL. Not the most\nprofound statement of the evening, but it had me in stitches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the end a good dose of humour is\nwhat Mobile<\/em> really needed — it ended\nvery morosely with the Japanese wife celebrating her dead baby’s birthday and\nwith a whole host of questions left untouched. Certainly Mobile<\/em>‘s premise “to dig into the issues of labour migration\nand think twice about the lives behind the foreign workers in our midst,”\nremains with surface barely scratched.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps the net was cast too wide;\ncertainly the issues are well beyond the grasp of a single evening’s play with\nas ambitious a scope as Mobile<\/em>. But\nat least they have started asking the questions. And perhaps, by the evening’s\nend, the fellow behind me would have understood why there were no maids or\nconstruction workers in the audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mobile<\/em><\/strong> by The Necessary Stage is running at The Actors Studio Bangsar from Tue 20 – Thu 22 June 2006. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n ~~~ <\/p>\n\n\n\n CH Loh is a Malaysian in Singapore. He just quit his day job to become a freelance writer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n First Published: 20.06.2006 on Kakiseni <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We learn something new everyday. I for example learnt that the new politically correct term for foreign workers — you know, the people who tend our kids and clean our homes 24 hours a day (if possible, if not then at least 18 hours), clean the streets, serve us drinks at the coffeeshop and put […]<\/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":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,3649,3569,3535],"tags":[4291,2782,4294,4271,670,4292,49,266,4268,4293,550,666,46],"language":[7523],"writer":[7634],"class_list":["post-27798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-festival","category-review","category-theatre","tag-aidli-mosbit","tag-alvin-tan","tag-central-library","tag-drama-centre","tag-haresh-sharma","tag-narumol-thammapruksa","tag-review","tag-singapore","tag-singapore-arts-festival","tag-tatsuo-kaneshita","tag-the-actors-studio-bangsar","tag-the-necessary-stage","tag-theatre","language-english","writer-ch-loh"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27798","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=27798"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38884,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27798\/revisions\/38884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27798"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=27798"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/writer?post=27798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}