We found ourselves in the middle of Hwa Chong Institution's Bukit Timah campus last night, inside a Drama Centre filled with the cream of Singapore's adolescent intelligentsia, watching a play put up by the school's drama group, that would perhaps make our country's doyen of theatre, Ivan Heng, proud.
I must admit that I didn't know what to expect when Alex called to ask if I was interested to support her sister who was involved in the production. My childish notion of teenage theatre harks back to the old days when the idea of a staged presentation was a couple of awkward, arty outcasts doing an equally amateurish interpretation of anything cliched-Shakespearean.
But I confess now, that I was suitably impressed with last night's show by the kids. Even if I have never heard of How The Other Half Loves, much less the Playwright, Sir Alan Ayckbourne. Here's a brief sypnopsis I lifted off from somewhere in Cyberspace.
How The Other Half Loves concerns three couples: Frank and Fiona Foster; Bob and Teresa Phillips; William and Mary Featherstone. Frank employs both Bob and William and is considering promoting the latter. Bob is having an affair with Frank’s wife Fiona and is in constant conflict with his own wife, Teresa. She feels Bob is neglecting her while she raises their baby and is suspicious of his actions and phantom phone-calls made to the house. When he returns late, she confronts him about his actions and he lies that he has been comforting work associate William, who believes his wife Mary is having an affair.
Frank and Fiona’s relationship is in stark contrast to the torrid emotions of Bob and Teresa’s. They share a polite, distant and evasive relationship and when Frank asks Fiona where she has also been, she says she has been comforting Mary - who she barely knows - who apparently believes William is having an affair. Of course, William and Mary are innocent parties and neither of the adulterers realise they have both implicated the Featherstones in their alibis. Both parties swear their partners to secrecy - particularly as both couples are entertaining the Featherstones on successive nights.It was not an easy plot to juggle. Adult themes with lots of sexual innuendo and a single set representing overlapping living rooms, with parallel action in the different households acted simultaneously. But the teenage cast handled it with much aplomb. My only grouse was that not everyone could carry off the heavy British accent properly. Kudos for the effort though. Because having the play in
Singlish would have been even more disturbing.
And of course we felt like a couple of old farts inside the drama centre. I had a Nanyang girl, who could not have been older than 15, next to me, giggling throughout at any hint of naughty banter.
We came out of the play thinking to ourselves, indeed, intellectually, we've been surpassed by the younger generation because, like hell we could have come up with something like that back in the good old days! LOL.
Labels: Theatre