Unfinished Symphony
So many reliable and talented design professionals did such bad work for this play.
Anyone who remembered Ken Kwek's flaccid and borderline-incoherent Apocalypse Live! from 2008 would have gone into The Composer with low hopes - and would have been disappointed anyway. The play turned out to be a tawdry, fake melodrama of the type that could have been hacked out at any point during the past 150 years, and probably has been several times. It tells the story of Wendell Ang (Leslie Tan), an allegedly brilliant composer whose infidelities drive his wife to his death and (utterly implausibly, for both forensic and emotional reasons) himself to death row for her murder. All this thanks to the eleventh-hour reveal of a teenage conquest who decides to turn up on his doorstep shortly after giving birth to his child and hands over said child to his wife.
So no, we're not talking about a believable world here (though Kwek, with his prosaic dialogue and his yuppie/hipster milieu of clubs and corporations seems to believe in it). Nor are we talking about some great moral fable, a la Faust, though the prison scenes, full of cigarette smoke and dauntless self-blame do accurately capture a twelve-year-old lit student's conception of Goethean Sturm und Drang.
What we are talking about is an addled collage of theatrical styles that, unlike Apocalypse never even comes close to aesthetic coherence. Consider, for example, the character of Madeleine (Tan Kheng Hua). For much of her stage time, she is supposedly a ghost, haunting her unfaithful composer husband's (Leslie Tan) conscience. But her lines are so conversationally light, so alien to ideas of guilt and repentance that the suggestion that the composer would want to kill himself from the regret she embodies becomes ludicrous. Indeed, Madeleine seems much the same dead as alive, and I half-expected a Truly, Madly, Deeply set-up where she nonchalantly guides him to make the most of his new life as a widowed father.
Yet despite its incongruities of style, the play was basically written - and directed - by numbers. How convenient to have a characterless confidante (Sol Foo) who will point out that Wendell is on the wrong path without doing anything to stop him. How convenient that Madeleine's infertility is contrasted by the one-shot fecundity of the teenager. How convenient that the teenager decides to make no contact until the baby is born, and then does so by turning up unannounced... no... not convenient... horribly, horribly forced.
But, remembering the clueless peregrinations of Apocalypse, all this came as no surprise. What was surprising about The Composer was that so many reliable and talented design professionals did such bad work for it. Take set designer Wong Chee Wai, for example. He earned a special mention from fellow Inkpotter Ng Yi-Sheng in our Picks of 2008 thanks to a run of designs for W!ld Rice's Singapore Theatre Festival that often proved stronger than the plays themselves. Wong did not repeat the trick here. Imagine a 1980s motel lobby - all grey, matte surfaces and ersatz minimalist angularity. Now give that motel delusions of grandeur but a limited budget and you'll be able to picture its cramped, geometric attempt at a Busby Berkeley staircase. Next, give the motel special dispensation to flout building regulations so that the riser height of each step in its staircase is considerably higher than the 21cm generally considered to be comfortably navigable for human beings. You should then have no problem visualising the otherwise elegant, stiletto-heeled service staff (one of them a former Miss Malaysia Universe, for crying out loud) descending the stairs with glazed looks of concentration and lurching motions at the bottom of each stride. I can understand why Wong wanted some height in his set - it enabled the directors to array the composer's women around him in an estrogenic nimbus of judgment - but he seemed to feel the need to stretch the set's verticality to accommodate a portal in its centre that was only used a couple of times and was surely dispensable. And this overextension led to some uncomfortably deconstructed tableaux as well as the aforementioned lurching.
Or take lighting designer Mac Chan, a respected veteran of the local scene, who had decided that it was more important to aim pretty triangles of light at the set's horizontal surfaces than it was to, say, illuminate the actors' faces. I actually gave Chan credit back in 2005 for a similar floor-painting trick he tried with Toy Factory's Porcelain; but back then a) the stained-glass palette of filters he used nudged Chay Yew's script a little closer to the metaphysical mood it was striving for; and b) he lit people's faces. In The Composer however, a) Chan's drab, geometrically lighted floors reminded me of an early 3D platformer from the 16-bit era of video games, where a lack of processing power resulted in flat-shaded, polygonal platforms whose top surface was often brighter so you knew you could jump on it; and b) during one particularly tightly lit duologue I entertained myself by seeing how high I could count before one of the actors' heads veered into shadow. I maxed out around 20.
Or take sound designer Philip Tan, whose scratchy, nightmarish soundscape for Cake Theatre's The Comedy of the Tragic Goats still plays on loop in my brain during my most self-destructively obsessive moments. Here though, in a play whose title would lead one to expect a memorable score, I cannot remember a single note he wrote.
There were, however, a couple of redeeming performances. Tan Kheng Hua as Madeleine, the wife, performed with liquid grace and emotion, pouring life and colour on to the dingy stage. She may not have been given as good a role as in her previous theatrical outing, Desmond Sim's Wife #11, but she was determined not to let it show. She made even the most forced lines sound relatively natural, and she essayed the two most lurid moments in an evening of tone-deaf melodrama - a miscarriage and a suicide, all red light and agony - with a commitment that surely made them more bearable even though she never had a chance of saving them. If I'm being picky, though, perhaps the scale of Tan's performance somewhat over-filled the venue: I kept thinking she was going to start singing On My Own from Les Misérables.
Theatre newcomer Andrea Fonseka also did good work as a mistreated mistress - her wide-eyed vulnerability proved a semi-transparent container for the reservations she was beginning to form about her lover's cruelty. And Tammy L Wong, though slightly too arch in places, made lyrical use of a brief movement sequence, and almost persuaded me that the play was on the brink of finding a theatrical form that would transubstantiate its clunky clichés into something true and timeless.
Indeed, none of the women was bad (though poor Chio Su Ping in the boilerplate role of the pastor was very hard to watch, through no fault of her own). No, the only poor performance came, sadly, from the actor who needed to be strongest: Leslie Tan as the composer himself. Tan acts like an adding machine - one of those old-school ones with stiff keys and ticker tape coming out the side. His delivery was utterly predictable, monotonous and prefabricated. Granted, there was a faintly louche quality to his low-slung gait and the deep-set gaze he fixed on his women, but it wasn't anything you'd confuse with lust or danger... indeed, Tan did not appear to be particularly familiar with the concept of emotion. Thankfully, he is, by all accounts, extremely good at his day job as the cellist of the T'ang Quartet.
I can imagine receiving comments on this review (I generally have to imagine comments because, distressingly, hardly anyone replies) saying I have been too harsh. They would probably have a point. Although The Composer was confused, derivative, and embarrassing in places, it had forward motion, it wasn't boring, and most of the actors were at least okay. But I love theatre, and I hate to see examples of it that don't seem interested in reaching beyond what Channel 5 has to offer - especially when tickets are upwards of $30.