A peculiar, but enjoyable, day, starting with a trip to the theatre...
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I went to see a play today. It was called 'Cat, Lost & Found' and was staged at The Arts House theatre, which is located just behind Parliament House and is a beautiful example of colonial architecture.
It was the first act of a peculiar day. The play was staged by the youth wing of the Creative Edge production company, which features among its talents a British artistic director (and qualified botanist, apparently) called Brian Seward.
The play was advertised thus:
"How far will you go to be together with the one you love? Originally staged by the Finger Players, 'Cat, Lost & Found' explores themes of love, loss and what happens when nothing is quite as it seems. Featuring a quirky cast of characters including a salesman, his dead mother, a Malay movie hero and 500 ghosts, 'Cat, Lost & Found' tells an unconventional love story between a cat and his usher.
"Directed by Jonathan Lum, 'Cat, Lost & Found' is the showcase culmination of 12 months of intensive training in physical theatre, puppetry, mask and live acting by Creative Edge - Theatre Training Ensemble, I Theatre’s youth training wing."
And this I found intriguing. It seemed to me a prospect of mixing the dramatic with the quirky (which I like) without tipping over into the surreal (which I don't like). So I decided to give it a go.
While people were taking their seats, there was a preamble to the play, which featured a few of these ghosts - with empty expressions on their faces - walking about among the audience, occasionally sitting down in random places, staying there still for a few moments, and then walking about again.
The play began with the usher of the description ushering a cinema-goer to his seat and then, wasting no time at all, beginning to look for her lost cat, Angel, right there while the film begins to play. The film was a rather gruesome Malay piece acted out with people dressed like Southeast-Asian caricatures of Punch and Judy, but with the added moralistic touch that the hero of the piece did not periodically beat his wife. This Malay film couple had a cat, too...and, in keeping with the style of the film, the cat was also rather gruesome, although it was not lost.
Anyway, Angel soon appeared, and we discovered that this was no ordinary usher-cat relationship. The moggy tried to court the usher in a very un-feline way, by speaking to her and attempting to persuade her to marry him. I wasn't sure if this was because he liked her, or because he was merely trying to prove to her that he wasn't gay (a prospect hinted at when she placed a pink collar around his neck). The usher ultimately rejected Angel on the perfectly reasonable grounds that he was a cat, proclaiming that if he had been a man, she would have accepted! This led me to wonder if she had ever heard the fairy tale of the Frog Prince. Had she done so, she might have considered planting a big wet one on her feline admirer, just to see what would happen! But perhaps it would have left a mousy taste in the mouths of the $28-per-ticket audience if the resolution of the problem had come quite as swiftly as that.
Back to our cinema-goer, who had until this point exhibited saintly levels of patience in just sitting there and trying to watch this macabre Malay film while the inter-species marriage cacophony unfurled quite rudely behind him. For reasons never alluded to in the play, we are supposed to believe that he is a salesman. Thinking that he might as well get in on the act (possibly weighing up his chances favourably on the basis that she almost said yes to a cat), the salesman, too, decided to propose to the usher. But he reckoned without the interference of Angel, who, apart from displaying the ability to speak and reason, also had a murderous jealous streak. Angel developed an insatiable urge to kill the salesman, and possess his body so that he might become a man and marry the usher. And thus they began to brawl. The fight took them all the way out to the street, where Angel was struck and killed by a passing SBS Transit bus being driven by an Indian in a red turban (this fact is deemed sufficiently important to be mentioned more than once). You would think that Angel's fall would strike something of a terminal blow to the usher's quest to be reunited with her lost cat, but this play has plenty more to offer in the way of bizarre.
Ravaged by guilt for bringing about Angel's untimely demise, the salesman went to visit his mother to ask her advice. I'm not quite sure where she was, but maybe she fancied herself a bit of a film buff, because her house looked remarkably like the cinema they started in. When her son arrived, the Salesman Mother emerged like a Chinese Dracula from under a bench, where I guess she had been sleeping. I can only guess as much based on my astute observation that she was dressed in pyjamas, but I can't be sure...because she stayed in her pyjamas for the entire play, regardless of where she was or what she was doing.
That's when the gruesome husband in the macabre Malay film emerged from within the cinema screen and set about slicing up 3000 Singaporeans (and one chicken) over the course of ten days, in a quest to avenge the death of his brother. He spoke entirely in Malay, and the audience was provided with English subtitles. Like Bill Murray in 'Lost In Translation', I was certain that he was saying a lot more than the translation suggested, because he was going on with his pronouncements for a while. Still, who's to know? (Apart from the Malays, of course.)
And that's when things got weird. I won't spoil the ending in case they do a world tour. Needless to say, the fates of the gruesome Malay cat, the unencumbered (and unhinged) spirit of Angel, the constantly sleepy Salesman Mother, the 500 ghosts, the macabre Malay actor, his macabre wife, the usher and the salesman were all interwined. The story culminated at an anthropomorphic pedestrian crossing, played by someone with enough skill as a character actor to do a passable impression of a pedestrian crossing (yes,the beeping noises, too!).
In the end, I'm glad I went to see it. If you can overlook the occasional difficulty in following the story - which comes naturally as a consequence of a production with a constrained budget - then there is great fun to be had, as well as some good old-fashioned satire. The puppetry was done well, they began to explore important themes, and they did a good job of creating a suitable atmosphere with the ghosts.
After the play, we went for dinner at Clarke Quay Central, a major shopping centre near Chinatown. It was there that we came across a vegan kitchen in the food court and opted for various assorted burgers. The peculiarity continued here, though, because with our meals we were each presented a volume of vinegar to drink. We received these in glasses too big to take as shots but too small to last. We were instructed to drink these before the meal, which made me wonder if they were trying to mask the taste of the food! We weren't the only sceptical ones. I noted people's eyes bulging out of their sockets as different people at other tables were served their vinegar drinks. But we played along. I found mine to be quite nice. It was just flavoured slightly with apple. I gather that there was also a peach vinegar to be had...perhaps in the unlikely event that it's the apple flavouring that turns out not to be your thing.
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By
The Imperial Orange,
06th March 2016
06th March 2016
