Survivor Singapore (M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2007)

Survivor Singapore takes the form of an enquiry into the aftermath of several students' attempts to initiate projects which creatively reach outside the proverbial box and embody the rhetoric about the New Economy and all that jazz. Kind of like SMU's Creative Thinking module, in fact, but only more creative.

Through a series of flashbacks we find out what went wrong with their various projects, and the process by which the school administration comes to terms with getting what it wished for, albeit in a way more true to the letter of its rhetoric than its spirit. As the saying goes: Be careful what you wish for, you may get it.

After watching the play, I get a bit of a sense why it was presented at a Fringe Festival.

In general it was a confused, vaguely related mash of cheap shots (local references [many in Malay, some in Tamil but oddly almost none in Chinese, probably because the playwright is Indian] and puerile jokes [for example, "Your dick is hard", "[Instead of Survivor or the Amazing Race I watch] America's Next Top Model", Indians rioting being a bad idea since there're too many of them on Crimewatch and turban jokes), angst about students' self-actualization and their struggles against the system and seditious outbursts, punctuated with mime set to spurts of throbbing music*. Many threads were not well developed or tied together, but merely hinted at or referenced. The tone was also awkward, with an uneven mix of didactic finger waving and surreal posing and posturing.

Interestingly enough, this also roughly describes another play I went to some months back - Campaign to Confer the Public Service Star on JBJ. Perhaps all this is symptomatic of much modern theatre, which explains why I am not fond of it.

All this might be intentional, for as one of the people involved in the post-show dialogue session explained, they wanted people to sit up a year later and suddenly realise a new layer of meaning in what they had viewed. Indeed, the construction of meaning for oneself instead of having it given to one is a tenet of post-modernist philosophies (insofar as they can be defined). Perhaps this delayed post-hoc realisation might occur for a few people, but what is more likely is that a year later it'll have faded from the minds of most of the audience. Not least because most were there as part of a school excursion.

The acting was good, with Kumar's appearance being a welcome surprise. Unfortunately, the bulk of his delivery was composed of the aforementioned cheap shots (eg Turban jokes).


* - During the post-play dialogue session, in respose to a question of mine about whether the mix of cheap shots and posing was meant to appeal to both arty farty types and the hoi polloi, the playwright said he wanted to write a bold play with a certain artistic quality, yet accessible to the public, so yes I suppose it was deliberate.


Interestingly, one of the play members said that the project about attempting to incite race riots was to question if we took racial harmony for granted. My interpretation of it was rather their mocking of the siege mentality engendered in Singaporeans by showing that no, we will not degenerate into chaos and ethnic cleansing the moment someone says something politically incorrect about race. The bit about the kids realising they were all speaking in the same language despite their being racialised by 4 decades of social engineering was also to me an indictment of how race consciousness is artificially accentuated. Unfortunately, the otherwise racially balanced group of students did not include an Other to point out the ludicrousness of racial corporatism.

All through the dialogue session, there was only reference to school and the problems and issues kids faced in being told to be creative et al., but I felt the play was obviously an allegory for Singapore - it *is* called Survivor Singapore, after all, and the problems the kids grapple with in obeying instructions to be creative and then getting into trouble for stepping in sacred cowdung are a direct parallel with Singaporeans doing the same.

This is the danger, perhaps, of the personal being political, since any personal act, no matter how innocuous, can be construed as a seditious attack upon pre-existing structures.