What My Senses Tell Me
It does an admirable job in presenting the Singaporean community's voices with unembellished honesty, creating a piece that is thought-provoking, heartfelt, and hilarious.
No Singaporean can deny that the recent 2011 General Election was a watershed event in our political history. Cooling Off Day is thus a play that needed to be created, and I am glad that Alfian Sa'at has taken it upon himself to ask the pertinent questions concerning the election period and to share these answers on stage. The result is an unabashedly political piece constructed from real-life Singaporean testimonies – a collection of voices ranging from laugh-out-loud hilarious to heartbreakingly astute.
The ensemble cast of six take turns portraying the different interviewees, amongst whom are some characters the audience is bound to recognize: ex-ISA detainee Teo Soh Lung, SDP candidate Vincent Wijeysingha, and blogger Xia Xue, to name a few. The subjects interviewed are varied in age, background, and profession, a testament to the playwright's efforts in gathering a wide and inclusive range of opinions. Highlights of the night include pearls of wisdom from taxi-driver Branson and a warning against rebellion from China-born masseuse Ming, both played by Peter Sau with impeccable comic timing. Particularly memorable as well are the parts played by Najib Soiman, in which one character rants about the absurdity of Malay MPs having to appear before a panel to be "certified Malay", while another shares his experience as an ex-PAP truck driver.
The strength of the ensemble feels under-utilized at points, even though co-directors Ivan Heng and Jo Kukathas do succeed in creating some effective and poignant stage tableaux. The scene in which the cast depicts various crowd members present at an SPP rally is particularly moving, especially the moment where it culminates in Neo Swee Lin's character declaring her heartfelt support and respect for an offstage Chiam See Tong as she shakes his hand. It is a moment to be reminded of the emotion that inevitably accompanies the concepts of home and belonging; a moment to be reminded that politics cannot be divorced from human connection. Visually, the mostly-bare stage set-up is also enhanced by the selection of photographic projections – some depicting scenes during the election period, while other shots are more symbolic in nature.
There is, however, fat that can be trimmed from this two-hour production. At points the vignettes begin to feel repetitious, in part due to the largely similar manner in which they are presented: A light change. A new character. A light change. A new scene. Act I ends on a definite high, with the ingenious staging of local blogger Mr. Brown's The Stall Next Door podcast. The audience loves every minute of this, with Rodney Oliveiro giving a highly commendable delivery of the famous "You will live to repent" line. However, by the time Act II rolls around, we could have done without the questionable decision to have a mini-recap segment, in which each character repeats a key line from their interview transcripts. (It doesn't help that this is presented like an awkward Viewpoints theatre exercise where each cast member waits their turn to speak.) The play ends with the cast gathered upstage-centre, between rows of plastic chairs arranged to depict the set-up in Parliament. Then an inexplicable phenomenon happens with the lights – they dim on the cast, then do a fancy sweep across the rows of chairs before a black-out. This served no other purpose than to further delay an already-overdue ending.
Nevertheless, Cooling Off Day is worth the watch, if just to re-live the excitement of this year's GE. Alfian and the rest of the team have done an admirable job in presenting the Singaporean community's voices with unembellished honesty, creating a piece that is thought-provoking, heartfelt, and hilarious. From the highly unsubtle practice of gerrymandering to the 1987 arrests of alleged Marxist conspirators, no issue is too taboo to be discussed. More importantly, Cooling Off Day drives home the message that our voices, individually and collectively, do count, and thus should not only be taken into account every five years.
It is a pleasant surprise to find Alfian Sa'at departing from his usual style of playwriting and attempting a piece of verbatim theatre. The format is not without its problems, however. Verbatim theatre is an excellent format with which to take a snapshot of the state of a nation – based as it is on real words, real events, real people, and real life. But the difficulty for any playwright lies in deciding whether to treat the intended piece of verbatim work as a piece of journalism or a work of drama – and the two can lead to very different results. The sad fact is that unless the material is particularly compelling or unexpected, the piece of verbatim work can come across as tedious and draggy.
Cooling Off Day gives off such vibes. The play rehashes arguments that had been beaten to death during the election period itself (Opposition for the sake of opposition? The aspirations of youth versus the caution of the old?), features voices from those who have had more than their say during the election period (opposition politician Vincent Wijeysingha, Teo Soh Lung, even mrbrown's The Stall Next Door sketch was re-enacted in its entirety on stage), and plays on age-old stereotypes for the sake of a few laughs. Apart from a few truly unheard and usually silent voices (that of the male-to-female transvestite, the masseuse from China, the nurse whose family has found itself slipping from middle to lower class), there is little on offer that is new. The play holds up a mirror to show us Singaporean society during GE 2011, but there is little to be gained from staring at a precise mirror image of oneself after a while; and unless one is inclined towards narcissism, the act of staring at one's reflection gets tiresome as well.
Perhaps tediousness was the point of the play. I found myself asking, "What is the point of this play?" several times during its rather long 150 minute runtime, but perhaps the same could have been asked of GE 2011 itself. The final image deployed in Cooling Off Day is the laying out of rows of white and red chairs (to the remixed tune of Yam Ah Mee) representing the final result of the election. The image is a stark reminder that after all that talk and all the excitement of the election, the 5 red opposition chairs only make up a fraction of a corner in Parliament. The rest is a sea of 91 white PAP seats. In retrospect, many of the arguments, grievances and complaints that surfaced in GE 2011 were not new at all – and for all the hype that was generated, the reality is that so little was finally achieved. A watershed election – how real is that claim? Perhaps Alfian means to imply that there are other things more real than our sudden hunger for opposition in Parliament: the divide between "Easties" and "Westies" and the strong communal identity of the former; or the desire to take a stance on specific issues such as the death penalty or gay rights. These are real; these are politics – the rest is as baseless as the inexplicable desire to use one's Growth Package funds to help pay for the election deposits of an SDP team in Tanjong Pagar without knowing their names. And yes, we know how that fiasco played itself out.
Karin Lai, 11 Aug 2011 (3.0 out of 5)