Director Glen Goei’s Asian adaptation of French classical farce Boeing-Boeing (originally written by French playwright Marc Camoletti) has worn well. It was first performed in October 2002 at Jubilee Hall, Singapore and then reprised again in 2005 at Victoria Theatre.

In its third avatar, this Wild Rice Production lives up to its raunchy reputation, and going by the audience reaction, it is already a resounding success.

The original play’s English language adaptation, translated by Beverley Cross, was first staged in London in 1962. It had a dream run of a total of seven years. The play, when it moved across the Atlantic, became a Broadway success. In 1991, the play entered the Guinness Book of Records as the most performed French play throughout the world. Is this a play or a bottle of wine?

The theme of the play—a philandering young man’s well-planned shenanigans and trickery of being betrothed to three different air hostesses at the same time and the fun and complications that such a set up leads to—seems to be a bit old now, as social ethics around marriage and romantic love have loosened even in Asia. Still, the hilarity that such a comic plot ensures finds favour with the audiences even today. The situational comedy has been so popular that even Bollywood adapted it in 2005 as Garam Masala, and hit the box office jackpot.

There is no change in terms of characters in the play. Adrian Pang plays the heartthrob Bernard and his three leading ladies are Emma Yong, Wendy Kweh and Chermaine Ang who are air hostesses with JAL, SIA and Cathay Pacific. Adrian’s English friend Robert is Daniel York and his maid Minah is Siti Khalijah.

The play’s first act, as far as I am concerned, is rather dull, with all the introductions and setting up. But right from the second act, when Adrian’s plans start to come unstuck, the play changes gear and actors come alive with their performances. The audience was in splits. I don’t remember the members of audience having so much fun during a play.

In terms of choosing devices or adapting the play to an Asian setting, this is a job well done. Emotionally vulnerable Junko’s Japanese accent, the tigress-like Singaporean air-hostess with her eye on the billionaires, and the delicate heart and hot body of the Cathay girl—all add to the mix of a heady cocktail. Pang pulls off his role as a bragging bachelor, clever with ladies and is complemented by his pal, York. Equally important is the maid played by Khalijah who causes laughter whenever she opens her mouth. The new super jumbo and the volcanic ash in Europe update the narrative with twists that eviscerate Pang’s plans.

The downside, if any, is the play’s predictability for even a first time viewer like me. Except for a handful of social and political comments (there is a line on Singapore’s democracy and a few barbs at the inflow of foreign talent and how the fear of paying maintenance to divorced wives keeps the economy stable), there is not much to make you wonder here, and there is nothing to absorb beyond the obvious on the stage, which, as you can guess anyway, heads towards a predictable denouement. There are no thought-provoking or intellectually amusing Woody Allen type monologues. Every scene is an interaction and highly verbose. Still, it works and if you want to enjoy a pure and simple comedy, this is it for you.

Catch this play at the Drama Centre Theatre, NLB, 100 Victoria Street, from 4 August to 4 September.

Download the play brochure here.

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In exactly 12 weeks The Asian Writer turns three and to celebrate we’ve got an exciting project up our sleeves.

We’re taking the best content and turning it into a collection – that any book lover will treasure. We want you to choose your best bits and pieces, quotes and favourite  books to go in the collection.

That’s not all.

The Asian Writer is inviting writers to contribute new writing on the theme ‘Celebration’ for a collection.

We’re happy for you to flaunt your talent and send us your poems, haikus, short stories, flash fiction and novel extracts for consideration.

If features are more your thing, we’re also looking for writers to comment on their fave book/ most inspiring author for a separate section in the collection.

We’re happy for you to send us your videos and audio for the online edition.

The collection will celebrate Asian literature and three years of The Asian Writer – which offers new and emerging Asian writers a platform to showcase their work.

Your entry needs to be under 1000 words and should include a short biography with web links (if any). A photo in high res is optional.

Email your entry to: editor@theasianwriter.co.uk with Writing Competition in the subject heading.

Entries close: July 31st, 2010

A selection of entries will feature on our website and in a collection that will be sold to support the work of The Asian Writer and its future projects. If you’d like to feature in the book in another capacity or have any questions please email me at editor@theasianwriter.co.uk

The collection will be published via POD and Yudu.com and will be available  in all good media outlets from August 2010.

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When I was asked to review Rajat Das’ debut novel (Paper Boat, Flame of the Forest) I approached the offer with skepticism. Why? I had little experience of reading a novel as long as 800 pages. Believe me, I have considered Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy many times in libraries and bookstores but that novel’s heft has always come in the way of my reading pleasure (and I prefer doorstoppers from Ikea). Man, don’t get me wrong. I love Seth, I love that Golden Gate man. What a charming writer! But I am happy having read his From Heaven Lake.

Similarly, I have great respect for grandpa Leo Tolstoy. But War and Peace? That’s for a time when I feel more grown up and a little less like Anthony Bourdain—intellectually footloose, carefree, and a little less ready for suffering—of any kind. Ditto for Don Delillo’s Underworld and Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (I tried the latter; it reads like well-written Bollywood kitsch).

I am one of those people who think a novel should be as long as Camus’ The Stranger. That novel is of an optimal length, a benchmark for me, apt for our attention-deficient generation. Look at some of the best loved novels by J M Coetzee, Hanif Kureishi, Bruce Chatwin, Junichiro Tanizaki and Ismail Khadare. They are not heavier than a Starbucks bagel. But they are great literature, good stuff to read.

You think I am just making some catty remarks, leaving my prudence in the basement of my foolish mind. But the fact of the matter is that I am trying to be honest. This brief detour of my toe-deep knowledge of literature, or my approach to reading, was warranted. I am no James Wood. Accepting one’s shallowness is humiliating but at the same time it’s liberating.

Now you know why I was so skeptical. Also, in an age when Joyce’s Ulysses is being read in twenty tweets flat, how can one save one’s brain from not developing a schizophrenia of sorts, attention divided between work, email, multimedia and social media (if you don’t believe me, read Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid?). To tell you the truth, before this internet era, I was able to read Tagore’s novels. In translation. There, I have said it.

Coming to Paper Boat, my expectation was for a saga in the pre-Independence India, set in the undivided Bengal of the early 20^th century. It already sounded boring because so many novels have been written tracing family histories in different parts of India. However, the novel’s title was intriguing. Paper Boat! Hmm…it sounded like a mini Titanic.

The novel claims it has been written in the Uppanyaas tradition of vernacular India—a novelty in this time of cheap thrillers and quick metro reads (though they have their own market, I admit). Clearly, here is an author with some gutsy ambition, I thought. The guy does not want an easy walk into the sunset, a rite of passage for many well-read and well-travelled Indians who find time to pen a novel or a memoir in their post-retirement days. Nothing wrong with that. Nirad Chuadhuri published his first novel when he was in his 50s.

So, with some expectation and with some trepidation, I began to read Paper Boat. I dipped in and out of it over weeks, even months (I am a slow reader and I read 3-5 novels simultaneously). What blew me away was the passion and hard work with which Rajat had put together this sprawling story. Even the language and diction that Rajat has employed in this work are in tandem with the era with which he is dealing in the plot—a pre-television era story with a pre-television era writing style. I could see his blood, sweat and sinews in the work.

In terms of plot, the story is about Nalini, a strong-minded feminist, who lives in Birat Gram. She is a beauty, a brilliant student, a fine debater: she is a perfect specimen of womanhood, flawless (that makes the character less realistic). There is a school romance, a near romp in the classroom and lots of talk among aunts and cousins about finding suitable grooms or brides. Then tragedy strikes and Nalini is on her death bed. But her daughter Rani tries to save her mother by performing an unusual feat. The story goes back and forth in time, narrating the story of Nalini, and at the same time, noting the social changes that take place in and around her in undivided Bengal.

This is a quintessentially Bengali novel: the author makes gentle observations, the characters are chatty, sometimes naughty too and there is enough intellectual banter to engage the reader.

What the novel suffers from is over-description. The novel starts with the description of the setting, the village of Birat Gram. It reminds me of Balzac. But Rajat’s Birat Gram is more complicated than Balazac’s Paris, in say, Old Goirot. Clearly, Rajat has overdone it and that richness of description, though beautiful, mars the flow of the story. The storm scene in the first part of the novel is marvelously written, but it tests one’s patience as it has been written in great detail.

This problem persists throughout the book. At one place, Rajat takes two pages to explain Bengali cuisine, and how it is different from European cuisine and so on. And here is an example of how meticulously Rajat describes a cottage: “The property was square-fenced, by razor wire in front, by brickwork at the back. The fence had horizontal rows of wires a foot apart. Columns of wooden poles, placed at intervals, took the weight of the fence. On the left, the fencing ended perpendicular to a sidewall; and on the right it ran six feet away from, and parallel to, the other side wall, ending further down at a wall that formed an L shape with the sidewall” (page 119).

Reading this passage, even a Martian would know what the writer is talking about. This level of description shows Rajat’s eye for detail but somehow it disregards the reader’s imagination.

Perhaps deliberately employed but the choice of Rajat’s narrative style makes readers like me go slow on the reading. We are used to reading novels in contemporary idioms. Read this: ‘Somnambulating to a washbasin at a far corner of the room, he splashed cool water on his recoiling face. He straightened up, to eye himself in the mirror hanging by a reluctant nail…’, page 55 (italics mine). Somnambulating? A reluctant nail? How about a shot of a reluctant tequila?

Another example: ‘To an informed, particularly from close range, mind, this gobbledygook palace was a cacophony in architectural noises,’ page 73. This stuff is deep fried in metaphors.

And this one is almost funny: ‘This aspect of her personality put the school’s code of discipline under pressure it hadn’t the hind experience to parry,’ page 92.

The novel is not just overwrought; it could have hugely improved with a healthy dose of editing (For example, ‘This lot was for those could not read…’, page 54; ‘He came to because rain, goaded by ferocious winds, was splashing his face’, page 57)– typos in the book that distracts one from the reading experience (Here is more: ‘But he not that someone’, page 59; ‘Her giggle was the single excess did not irk him spontaneously,’ page 115).

Nevertheless, despite its heft and turgidity, Rajat’s first novel is a remarkable work of fiction—it takes you on a tour of a time and a place that reads like a legend, with a cast of characters whose gentleness seems surreal in our insensitive times. Only you have to have the stomach for it.

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Solid Foundations

The Peruvian woman wasn’t sure where to get the mud we needed, but she set off up the dirt road, her young son in his red Winnie the Pooh sweatshirt and me, a volunteer with ProPeru, in tow.

Mud is one of the elements the community must have to successfully build clean-burning stoves. Our organization provides the materials and the instruction; the community provides the mud and labor. The stoves provide an alternative to the open wood-cooking pits traditionally used in the confined adobe homes that landscape the hills and valleys of the Peruvian highlands.

As a volunteer, it was my job to help the families build and assess the effectiveness of these safer, more economical and ecologically friendly options.

That’s how I ended up trekking through this small community, more than four hours away from the next major town via steep, rutted cutbacks in the Andes Mountains. Trailing this quiet native mother, we looked for the right quality of dirt to turn into the mud mortar that would bind the stove together.

Spanish is an official language of Peru, but the majority of this community spoke Quechua, a Native American tongue. The woman’s limited Spanish, paired with my own marginal skills, made our communication almost entirely nonverbal. She gestured and I nodded. She led and I followed.

After trying several spots-up side roads, behind homes, near animal pens- the woman found a good source of dirt and began hacking into the earth with her pickaxe. When she had loosened a good mound, her son and I helped scoop the soil into a blanket spread on the ground.

The overcast sky and mountainous altitude left the day chilly and grim, but we quickly warmed our bodies with the exertion of digging and hauling the dirt back to the mother’s home where she started to turn the soft, crumbled earth into hard-packed mud mixing in well-water, dried grasses and bits of gravel.

Meanwhile, I joined my partner, another female volunteer, who was destroying old the stone and wood stove in the woman’s kitchen, a detached six-by-six adobe building with a rudimentary door on one side and a small, open window cut on the opposite wall.

Clearing away the rubble of the former stove revealed a large piece of stone jutting out into what would be the platform for the new installation. We made slow difficult progress, our axe hits meriting little more than chips and scratches in the rock face. When the woman of the house came in she took over, unfazed by our obstacle. Hit after hit, the pickaxe held tight in her small hands, she chipped away until the area was cleared.

With our foundation prepared, my partner and I begin constructing the stove from preformed bricks, hauled over the mountains months before and stored in the community awaiting our arrival and instruction. The mother brought in fists full of mud for us to layer between the ceramic pieces. She continued her circuit in and out of the kitchen, assisting much yet saying little.

Half an hour later, we all stepped back: the stove, with its rough finish and blocky chimney, was complete. In limited Spanish, the Quechua woman thanks us saying our work is bonita, pretty.

Before we leave her home, I notice hairline cracks separating the mud where it has dried. Mud quality varies depending on where the dirt comes from and how it is made. The quality determines how the mud will dry to solidify the structure. I smooth my hand over the cool, grainy surface and hope that this mud will carry the strength of the woman who made it.

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International Waters: Singapore to Bintan Island

Bintan Island is by no means the most interesting or exotic of Southeast Asia’s destinations, but it does offer a lot of appeal for city-weary Singapore residents in need of a quick fix of sea and sand.  We make up most of the island’s visitors, and to get there we hop on a small ferry that bounces us through the China Sea for fifty minutes or so.  On board we are served instant coffee in Styrofoam cups, and on stormy days attendants walk the aisles handing out extra sets of sea sickness bags.  The windows in the ferry are big and give us panoramic views of idling tankers, fishing boats and the occasional dolphin, but we are not allowed to walk on the outer decks.  We are told this is for our own safety and comfort, but it feels more like a typically Singaporean attempt to keep us cocooned and consuming inside an air-conditioned bubble, cut off from any of the real experiences, elements and situations that this part of the world can offer

There is something about this ferry ride that creates a curious sense of being somewhere and nowhere at the same time.  My fellow passengers and I are in between so many places and spaces; in between our business suits and bikinis; in between the crisp tones of colonial English and the lilting melodies of Bahasa Indonesia; in between a glistening, compact city state driven by commerce and a sprawling, contested archipelago caught in a tug of war between past and present.

Having grown up on the popular tourist resort of western Canada’s Vancouver Island, I am used to this uneasy tension between a boat’s departure and arrival.   Ferries were our lifelines, the only way we could get off the island with cars, pets and more than twenty kilograms of luggage.  For many Islanders the big move to our province’s economic capital of Vancouver, in which we loaded up rental vans with boxes of books, clothes and record albums and drove to the ferry terminal in anticipation of the new life waiting for us in the big city, became a rite of passage.

My grandfather lived on another island off the Coast, a native reserve accessible only by a four-car ferry operated for free by the federal government.  The ferry ran 24 hours on demand, so when passengers arrived at the dock they had to pick up a radiophone attached to a tree and request a pick-up.  Then the two guys on shift for that day would fold up their newspapers, finish their coffees, put their card games on hold and go.  Sometimes this took as little as thirty minutes and sometimes, if the coffee was fresh and the card game particularly intense, a couple of hours. We the passengers always found ways to wait patiently, passing around flasks of homemade beer and talking about this year’s salmon run and hockey scores.

Maybe these memories of ferry travel are why, when I take my seat in the comfortable Emerald Class of the Bintan Island Ferry, I want to walk outside like I used to on the ferries of my youth, to race the length of the boat with my arms spread wide against the salty spray and to watch the ever-approaching landing dock  come nearer in anticipation of new beginnings and stories to discover.

Instead, I follow the rules, as one does when one lives in Singapore.  I store my bag safely in the overhead locker, watch the video that shows me how to put on a lifejacket properly, sip my instant coffee, open my laptop and begin to write.

October 2009

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Local Knowledge

Our fire siren can sound at any time and it gets all the dogs in the village barking.
If you can hear the siren down in Upper Ferntree Gully as well then it may be serious.
The stretch of Burwood Highway down out of the Yarra Ranges is called the Mad Mile.
In 1916 my village wanted a street lamp removed because it was ‘Made in Germany’.
A man with one arm can often be found drinking in the beer garden of The Bell Tavern.
There is no post office in Tecoma. We have a new postmaster (and his wife) in Upwey.
Upwey is named after a village in Dorset in the Wey Valley near the source of the Wey.
Thomas Hardy used it in ‘The Trumpet Major’ and ‘At The Railway Station, Upway.’
There are some things I can’t tell you because I live here. They are my neighbours.
I just won’t go to that restaurant again. Although it is usually busy as I walk home.
Once a year buckets of cheap daffodils appear for sale outside places of business.
We have daffodil farms close by, grown for their bulbs, the flowers are surplus.
I arrived in this village as the buckets of rare blooms appeared on the pavement.
They are my marker, one year since I arrived in Upwey. Then two years, and so on.
Our roundabout is a death trap. And the careless way cars swoop down Morris Road.
I saw a car full of young lads nearly lose it as I was waiting for the bus to Oakleigh.
They were drifting, about to roll, but somehow kept going and shot off unrepentent.
Twice in our first week the Give Way sign was smashed flat. The second time it broke.
My husband saw an older chap come in over the bridge going the wrong way around.
I have seen a cop car lurking up by the Fire Station. Poised to intercept offenders.
But enough of traffic. Enough of the boy racers up on the hill roads of a Saturday night.
The kids in our village smashed the myki machine on the station. It has been replaced.
Every week, fresh graffiti. The man in the overalls with the paint pot keeps on painting.
The kids smash the shop windows too. Why? We should sit them down and ask them.
The bus trip up to Mt Dandenong is a cheap thrill. You look down and see Melbourne.
But of course, we are Melbourne too. Look on any map. The hills are part of the city.
Our garden is vertiginous. We can’t do backyard cricket, we go in for bungy jumping.
The Mountain Ash forest, a parade of lofty, beautiful sisters, is an abiding presence.
As the fire season approaches our siren can go off at any time and all the dogs will bark.

Jennifer Compton was born in NZ in 1949 and now lives in Melbourne. She will be the Visiting Literary Artist at Massey University in Palmerston North in NZ this year for three months. Her stage play The Big Picture which premiered at the Griffin Theatre in Sydney and is published by Currency Press was given another production by the Perth Theatre Company last year. Recent work has been published in Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review and Queen’s Quarterly in Canada.

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Mongrel

I used to be
brown, with a tinge of yellow
and could never quite colour in the right shade of my skin,
skin dusted with hair that was
brown and black on my head,
with a tongue claimed by two civilisations,
though my heart could call neither its own.
Roots snarled over questions of origin, and what,
exactly, I was.

‘混血儿’ ¹
is what a bus driver called me when I tried to explain that
no, my parents weren’t Chinese, or Indian, or Malay,
or anything else I’d been taught in class
and I didn’t know the word in his language.’Half-breed’
is what the Concise English-Chinese, Chinese-English Dictionary in my school bag
said that meant.
‘Mongrel’
is what my curious fingers found
searching for a human kin
to a term I’d linked only to dogs.

Twelve years, two heartbreaks, and a few countries later I am
brown, with a tinge of yellow
and can never quite colour in the right shade of my skin,
skin dusted with hair that is
brown and black on my head,
with a tongue that claims two civilisations,
and a heart that needs to own none.
Roots tangle questions of source, yes, but I know, at least,
exactly what I am.

No 混血儿, no half-breed, no mongrel.
I am concentrated, not diluted
whole, not divided
and strong, due to a lack of recessive, inbred genes.
though, when provoked, I bite.

notes:
¹ 混: hun – mixed, confused
血 xue – blood
儿 er – child

Valerie Nunis is a Singaporean poet exploring issues of identity, religion, and history. She graduated from Cambridge University in 2009, and is now completing a Masters in Writing, Nature, and Place with the University of Exeter. She spends much time travelling between Cornwall, London, and Cambridge, but misses home.

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Elegy to the Ingratitudes

She roosts at home, braless, sagging,
picking at nails yellowed with tumeric
and caws at me to learn our native tongue.

Her language, rather,
one that has no word for thank you.
A language living in the nose,
one that crinkles up in disgust
at the Chinese boys I sometimes bring home
to help fix her faulty stove.

This apathatic tongue she mumbles,
keeping it alive at gambling dens of dried ladies;
their hair flames red with henna,
their gums burn with the spiced stories
of mother-in-law unions and
how fat your son is becoming.

Purses pour out like the River Ganga
and the talk carries on through afternoon snacks.
Mid-munch my grandmother realises
rummy requires 13 to declare.
Death by wadai!, she tells me.
Eyes that are never on the fans of cards
look abashedly homeward.
She’ll make her excuses,
usually involving prayers, and quit.

“See? This why you should learn.
It is good,
To explain me, explain yourself,”
she breaks off into English.

Like juggling floured dough, I throw one-liners,
to appear to be trying, but I can’t really juggle.
My chapatis are never evenly flat, rather,
crispy raw and baked in halves.

I bite my lip, recycle some grief,
and blow hot air about visits and cooking lessons
as she stabs at my eyes with kohl
like she did when I was six.
Her lips are still bitter,
her laugh is thin.

Was it like this for my mother,
the daughter-in-law struggling to love
the loved ones
of her loved ones?
There are still late night cups of masala tea left
on the counter top,
betraying her lip stain and mine
before my mother too flew away.

It is time to leave.

Count her inhalers,
kiss her goodbye.
The marks of the respirator on her face
disappear as she watches TV.

Later outside, I fumble out a pack,
and fill
my lungs with smoke-smelling cloves,
only to blow out rings of her oxygen,
and wonder, shamelessly,
if I already know her thankless language.

Part i.

“Tough,”
is a breathy cough
that catches on the throat
choking the whiskey sour
that was kept warm in his pocket.

There is little sympathy that spills
from his eyes,
more pills from his fists
for the pigeons in the park.

While the adhans call people in for mosque,
his Sabbath mornings are spent
at the cemeteries,
lurking paganly.
Both prophets
were pessimistic about his future.

There is a quiet purple stalk bending over a grave.
Hearing him pass
she turns upwards,
and he nods slightly,
chewing
on the greening edges of her hope.

“Maybe I should take a wife,”
he considers,
loose singlet shifting
in the whisper of leftover prayer.

A list of possibilities form
but all that runs through
his cagey heart is:
“Tidak mau, tidak mau, tidak mau.”

Every bird is a migrant bird,
and the old man counts his years
in new walking sticks,
and hangovers.

1. adhans - Muslim call to prayer
2. tidak mau – bahasa melayu for do not want

Part ii

Ash is another name for the grey powder
they use in temples to anoint the
foreheads of the devout;
after hour long sessions baying
sacred songs in Sanskrit
their knees numbing their movement,
they stumble to the door
to fade their hands and necks a tint more pale.

After her pilgramage to West India,
my mother came back different,
her luggage layered with ash,
having found people, and cried in their arms,
having found God, and bringing back his silver slippers.

I was in a play
that she wanted to join,
but that directed her instead to lose her temper at life,
webbing out in all directions, like sprays of
madly purpled bougainvilleas flinging themselves in rain.
Having had a taste of family,
her wan body could not take the self-piteous storms of regret
boiling fiery in her gut,
gutted by parents negligible,
a distracted husband, and the nag of long reluctant sadness.
She was in her own play
when they dressed her then crying, in loose hospital gowns
and told her she was not losing her mind.
“Feed me pills,” is not the pathological cry for longing.

Three months, I prayed every night for her return
until our insurance finally expired her stay.
In one of her manic episodes back at home,
she would find the word for grey powder everywhere,
in companies like Joash and Ashford, palindroming S, H, A.
She saw God in the toilet, and would break radios,
she read books on healing, to reconcile her body
to the mess of civilization, slowly tractoring over her panic
so she could pick it like a crop
in a return to the simple and organic.
She became better, divorced, went astral travelling again,
Only to bloom several dimensions away, winged and starry-eyed.
Maybe my mother never came back from West India,
her luggage layered with hurt
leaving a trail of children like ash, smoky like a burning bush.

Note: Joash and Ashford were training companies in Singapore that have since folded.

Raksha Mahtani is currently a Singaporean doing a MA at Melbourne University  (aren’t they all!) whose secret joys include the blues, theatre and kahlua byproducts. Having been involved in theatre since she was 11, she has written and directed theatre productions  She was most recently seen in 2008’s Short & Sweet in “Are You Wanting Greater Coverage?” which she wrote and acted in. She writes part-time for lifestyle magazines, and is working towards an anthology of poetry for the displaced and partially diabetic Indian soul who successfully completed an 18 month stint under the Mentor Access Project through the Singapore National Arts Council. These are her first published poems.

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George Orwell’s two seminal works of fiction, Animal Farm and 1984, were written in a tumultuous time. Animal Farm, published in 1945, was written as a Stalinist era dystopian allegory which made Orwell famous in the post-war world.  1984, published in 1949, another dystopian work of fiction, documented totalitarianism and its methods of controlling people—perpetual war, government surveillance and mind control.

Today, these two works of Orwell are more relevant than they ever were. If you take the Chomskyian view, not much has changed—only the Stalinist regime has changed to late capitalism, where the rule of the pigs has transmogrified into the rule of the corporate oligarchs—the war on terror is perpetual, technology is enabling the government to track their citizens with ever greater ease and corporate media plays as the mind controlling arm of the rulers. Democratic socialism (that Orwell subscribed to) is dead.

At such a time, when W!ld Rice chose to stage Animal Farm (adapted by Ian Wooldridge) to kick off its 10th anniversary celebrations, the expectations ran high. Would it echo the siege of our times? Would it mirror the globalised utopia that we live in today—trapped in our consumerism and relative powerlessness?

The good news is that the production lives up to the expectations. The adaptation has been well localized and it leaves the audience in no doubt that the play speaks to them about their own everyday reality (work hard, pay the rent-seekers, and work harder—a slippery slope of never making enough, never having enough). To establish this connection, there are hints galore and you don’t have to be too discerning to spot them.

The writer (Orwell and Wooldridge) and director (Ivan Heng) make us take ample note of the fact that tyranny is the fate of human beings. No matter how many times they overthrow a tyrant, there will always be a new tyrant who will rise from their ranks. Revolutions spring in our breasts the hope for a new future and every time, after the war has been won, blood has been shed, sacrifices have been made, this optimism is crushed by a new tyrant, rising like a phoenix in a new avatar, necessitating another revolution. There is no escape from this human fate—the cycle of revolution and tyranny.

There is also a comment on the role of organized religion (which is ironically so Marxist): Moses the Raven keeps referring to the Sugarcandy Mountain. I wish this oblique reference to a life of perpetual happiness in the heaven could have been made more direct and contemporary. Like in the scene where Squealer distributes the apples among the sheep (audience) and calls them organic produce. That is contemporization and it is wholesome.

The plot, as it were, is faithful to the book and the characters are selfsame—Old Major, Napoleon, Snowball, Squealer and so on. The actors have played their part so convincingly that you forget they are playing animals and that they are talking about things that are familiar to your bone. Pam Oei as Squealer gets the most laughs but then at times the play falls in the danger of skidding into the realm of comedy (as in a skit—in satire, we must remember, the desire for social change remains underlined).  Lim Yu-Beng as the sinister Napoleon is impressive. Gani Abdul Karim as Boxer is believable but it is Benjamin (sorry, missed the actor’s name) who plays the donkey takes the cake for me.

The static set of the Manor Farm is a bit simple, even boring. However, the music by the man in white Jenson Koh nicely complements it. In a particular scene, I like the way where he walks on to the stage and creates a storm with his drum sticks. Bravo! I also like the ‘Who let the dogs out’ part—it gives the play a cool contemporary feel, sutures it to our present times (why did I think of Abu Gharaib when that song played on?).

As David Hare has said recently, in Stalinist Russia, the most powerful protest you could make was to stage Hamlet. In our globalised land, it could well be George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Full marks to the cast and crew of Animal Farm for this powerful and timely production. It’s a must see for anyone who has a taste for reality.

When: 21 APRIL – 08 MAY 2010

Where: DRAMA CENTRE THEATRE, SINGAPORE

Details: Wild Rice Productions

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The words romantic and Australian male, are, I suspect seldom uttered in the same sentence. But poet Mike Ladd’s highly affectionate and often tender collection ‘Transit’ published by Five Island Press is an exception that should help to overturn many of the myths surrounding Antipodean men.

Ladd’s nostalgic collection of 61 poems takes you on a shamelessly romantic journey through time and place, articulating the human condition as experienced by one man. It moves effortlessly through the day from early morning to late at night, stopping off in finely drawn moments of transition that will leave you smiling in recognition, pleasure, or longing – sometimes all three.

‘Love Song With Swallows’ comes at the beginning of the book, commencing this journey at dawn:

‘A morning with a throb to it

a new Ducati

and the sea not far away’

and then taking you breathlessly through streets filled with birds, trees and anticipation, until you reach the climactic:

‘and if you hurry

she’ll just be waking up.’

In contrast, the next poem in the sequence, ‘Tattoo’ is a much more muscular piece that takes the romance of longing and turns it on its head. Here Ladd paints a succinct picture of ‘white trash’ looser love on the road:

‘He’s all indigo ink

drilled in strong punching arms

and though she knows he’s Trouble

she takes his offer of a drink.’

Yet it still has the spark of optimism that raises the two protagonists above despair:

‘and the radio wails

“I look so fine, but I feel so low”

only here, just for now,

it’s the other way round.

And you know that if this was a movie, it would be starring Micky O’Rourke and maybe Susan Sarandon.

The passing of time, how it changes and affects us, and the quirkiness of memories are constant threads in Ladd’s work, whether he’s writing about the young girl next door who first tested his manhood and whom he meets again in a corporate setting in ‘Intimations’, or the puzzlement of seeing family members spring from infancy to teenage years in what seems like an instant in the poignant ‘That Christmas’, where he plaintively asks:

‘Did I sleep through something?

It was a big lunch, years ago,

and afterwards I lay down,

their voices washing over me

from the other room.’

In ‘Of the South’ in a few sparsely drawn lines, the writer expresses that he is becoming aware of aging, drawing comparisons with the frugality of the land and resigned loneliness of

‘friends who think of each other

but haven’t met for years;

a visit would be extravagant.’

Finally acknowledging that he too is growing old and becoming as spare and stubborn as the land he is part of. This fact is recognised once again in the quietly amusing ‘Drinking Sake With Sam Hamill’, where the writer reinforces the message in the opening stanza:

‘Two silver-haired poets -

te only customers left.

Empty stone bottes

gather beside us.

and closes by lamenting:

‘Soon all the waves of the Pacific

will lie between us.

Tell me again the poem of Li Po,

the one about rivers and friends.’

Ladd is an accomplished writer. This is not his first collection, and hopefully it will not be his last. He has the rare ability to imbue his poetry with poignancy and romance without becoming overly sentimental. Each poem is a succinctly drawn picture that, despite its sparseness, is rich with emotion and powerful perception. Every now and again there is a flash or raw sex and sexuality (’In the Balinese heat/I licked your shoulder blade,/our bodies sliding…’ from ‘Wildtracks’) that stops you in your tracks and makes you aware that this is a man who is candid about his needs and has no trouble expressing them.

And the colours that blaze from between the words in an abundance of heat, dust, fauna and flora underline the Australian-ness of both the landscapes Ladd is travelling through, and the experiences he is undergoing, imbuing both with a greater sense of romance and unrestrained charm than you (I) had thought possible. Mike Ladd is a real literary find, and I very much look forward to knowing, hearing, and reading more of his work.

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