spell#7's back with yet another one of their MP3 theatre experiences, this time featuring texts written by NUS students. Each visitor listens to two tours, one after the other, guiding them through the lavish art deco grounds of the NUS Museum's Baba House. My first tour was Lim Xue En's From Joss Sticks to Bibles, which I found a tad too simple. It's told through the voice of an elderly Taoist Peranakan widow mourning her dead Christian husband, and certainly, there's emotional heft to the tale of love and ageing and cultural separation and fading traditions. Still, it feels like a mere dramatisation of sociological issues we've heard about a hundred times before.
Rather more interesting was Jenson Chen's Aldersgate, which uses the voice of a young Baba in 1928, newly returned from his law studies in Oxford. The character's played with a deliciously plummy accent by Edward Choy, and we're torn between being annoyed at his world of privilege and realising how similar he is to ourselves: this Western Oriental youngster who doesn't remember his family traditions and is amazed at how fast his homeland is changing.
Your enjoyment of the show will be influenced in part by the luck of the draw - other young playwrights you'll encounter include Faith Ng, Eleanor Neo, Kirenjit Kaur Gill, Tan Li-Jen, Aswani Aswath, Jaryl George Solomon and Hazel Ho. On the other hand, if you've never been to the Baba House before, I'd recommend the show unconditionally - it's a marvelous space, and it would be glorious to encounter it for the first time through fiction.