Ariane

Why do Our Migrant Stories Need a Deus Ex Machina?: A Review of Patch & Punnet’s The Adventures of Abhijeet

This is an amateur student review of the show on 23^rd August 2019. There may be some spoilers.

Ten minutes before the start of the show, the doors open and we are ushered into the theatre space through a bottleneck of people struggling to remove their shoes at the door. We cross over from the brightly-lit, parquet-floored corridor of the old colonial building of The Arts House and into the cool, dark, sprung-floor of the black box Play Den. My first impression of the show is, in fact, mildly uncomfortable: we take our seats on the fake-grass rug on the stage floor, settling onto the green plastic blades that poke through the thin fabric of our jeans and prickle our legs. But soon enough, the lights dim, a hush falls over the audience, and the show begins. Within the first five minutes, the audience seems to have been won over by the charismatic main character Abhijeet (played by Jit Dastidar) as he cajoles his young daughter with silly jokes and puns, and all the material and physical discomforts of the small space are washed away by his comforting lullaby, sung beautifully and lovingly. Little did I know this would be the last time I would smile genuinely for the rest of the show.

The Adventures of Abhijeet, conceptualized and performed by the youth theatre collective Patch & Punnet, is a colourful Wizard of Oz-esque tale of a Bangladeshi father (Jeet, short for Abhijeet), who is desperate to raise money to cure his dying daughter. He consumes a magic pill from a mysterious rhyming man, sweeping him away to the strange and faraway “Singaland” to become a construction worker. There, he is greeted by an eclectic group of locals who literally sing praises about the new world he has found himself in. From this short opening sequence, we get the sense of a rosy, hopeful and optimistic new nation, where dreams come true and everyone upholds and believes in a state-given promise of peace and prosperity – one so cheerfully positive that it almost becomes eerie and foreboding. One wonders what inspired the creation of this fictional country. Throughout the rest of the play, Jeet navigates through strange quarters of the island inhabited by religious cults, vicious herbivores, even a monarchical half-dragon-half-chicken. He tries, and fails, to find his way through bureaucratic labyrinths and unknown terrain with his newfound friends in an attempt to retrieve materials needed for a magical cure, which later turns out to be all for naught.

Right from the start we are treated to a minimal set touched up by the occasional colourful-cardboard set pieces, and brightened up by the elaborate and fantastical costumes of the actors. The small cast played an impressive array of characters, switching fluidly in and out of a slew of costumes, vocal qualities, accents and physicalities. This sets up an expectation of the show to be a rather cutesy pantomime, yet the moment the first song is sung, we see that this is a show trying to do so much more. Adventures attempts to elude genre conventions, but this poorly executed approach comes across as messy and indecisive. It strives to be a tongue-in-cheek comedy, but many of the jokes are poorly made and rely too heavily on the audience’s presumed knowledge of pop and meme culture to recognize what feels like an infinite number of references – and, from there, form their expectations and interpretations of the show’s humour. For example, we follow the journey of our heroic trio – the main character Jeet, a true optimist and a loving father and friend; Gloria, a badass, empowered, purple witch’s apprentice (Day Cutiongo); and Ling Ling, a gutsy and hilarious out-of-work cucumber picker, who boasts a cucumber painfully stuck to her hand (Lynn Chia). They feel like a reference to the odd band of misfits from The Wizard of Oz. Krish Natarajan’s riddling character appears to be a cross between the Wizard and the Mad Hatter, throwing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into the mix. These whimsical characters quickly go from being cutesy, casual digs at their counterparts in traditional literary canon, to annoying and confusing because they’re part of a whole blizzard (or tornado, if you will) of references thrown into the air, demanding to be caught by an exhausted audience.

What I find even more problematic is the play’s political angle. As a social commentary and satire, it comes across as self-conscious and on-the-fence. Some jokes, such as the songs of promise and hope sung to the tune of popular local and National Day songs, are obvious and pointed critique of Singapore. Others are buried in so many layers of metaphor that their desired meaning is lost in translation, and the joke is no longer even funny as mere slapstick. It’s almost as if the company were trying to be severely critical about various issues within Singaporean society, but backtracked halfway out of fear of being seen as derisive and polemical. Referring back to the initial introduction to Singaland being a country of hopes and dreams and not at all inspired by real life, when the show is so clearly mocking Singapore, such insistent disclaimers come off as a lack of conviction, not humour.

I understood Adventures to be a satire on xenophobia and the way we Singaporeans treat migrant workers, but in the play, the Singaland citizens come across as snide and mocking instead. Was this meant as a reflection of how we, as a whole, treat migrant workers? Or just a reflection of the more racist population of our country that most of us can agree are wrong and should be silenced? Jeet speaks in near-perfect English at the start of the play and at some points later on, yet upon becoming a construction worker, he turns to broken and ungrammatical English, as if mocking the level of education of foreigners in Singapore. If this was done to get around the fact that the actors and audience do not speak Bengali, which would be Jeet’s native language, the device is not used again in the play and hence it just seems like Jeet is speaking English in multiple registers.

Gloria is a clear surrogate for Filipino domestic workers in Singapore, but this caricaturish portrayal did not make me sympathise with the community she stands for; rather it made me dislike her character at times, and wonder if I’d feel the same way about real life Filipino workers. Gloria is smart and tough, but also loud and shrill. She has booming outbursts with unclear triggers that only serve to make her even more unlikeable. If this was done as an attempt to force the audience to confront their pre-conceived judgements of domestic workers as loud and annoying, and then reflect on our own racism, it did not work. I did not come out of the show feeling repudiated for our ridiculous and unfounded racism. I came out of the show feeling a sense of injustice and indignance that these annoying characters were condescending portrayals of migrant workers. To me, this was not provocative and confronting?, it was just bad satire.

Even if we were to ignore thematic issues, Adventures doesn’t have a coherent internal logic. Once in Singaland, Jeet forgets his initial concerns to save his daughter and embarks on an outlandish quest for magical items to cure his injured leg and Gloria’s purple-ness. He remembers his daughter once, while intoxicated, and what kind of message does that send, what does that say about him as a father? After the intermission, the story concludes almost instantly when Jeet, having had no adverse reaction to any of the challenges he’s faced up to this point, blows up all of a sudden at the last obstacle faced in their “quest”. We don’t get to see a slow build-up of annoyance and exasperation, but rather a burst of emotion and defeat that is uncharacteristic of the Jeet that we have come to know so well. After this climax, the play ends as just quickly as the second act was begun.

The plight of Jeet’s daughter is suddenly brought back to the fore and is resolved, just like that, with the return of Salif Hardie’s Wild West Sherlock Holmes/Shylock Homies character (a loaded reference that still eludes me). Hardie’s character is a Singaland investigator-type with a cheesy Southern drawl who takes pride in befriending the disenfranchised, yet disappears into the backdrop of Singaland’s bureaucratic restrictions, leaving Jeet to fend for himself. He comes back at the last minute like a glorified deus ex machina and solves all their problems offstage (not forgetting a silly catchphrase to round it off, as if this were a bad Veronica Mars reboot). This hasty ending begs the question: what is the group trying to say? That the issues of migrant workers are so frivolous that they can be solved in a jiffy? And if Homies could, in fact, provide an easy and effective solution to our heroes’ problems, then why allow our three protagonists to go through with the quest for nothing but struggle and suffering? None of these struggles amounted to anything – their quest essentially failed and they had to be saved by the “white-man” representative of the state. This does not bring out the resilience and tenacity of migrant workers in their plight.

The moral of the story, if any, seems to be that the compassion of the state will eventually take pity on and swoop in to save our migrant labourers, but only after they’ve suffered and failed enough times and are ready to give up. For a play that tries to thrust migrant workers into the spotlight and make them the protagonists of their own story, it’s ironic that the main characters are completely reliant on the help of the powers that be in order to succeed. But does this even happen in real life? Or do we allow these workers to continue trying their best in a system set up for their failure, and only help a select few for publicity’s sake?

As youths and contemporary theatre practitioners of today, we need to do so much better. In a conversation with a friend after the show, he said that it seemed like the kind of play where “you have to just turn off your brain, not think about it, and just enjoy it”. We mulled over that thought for a bit, but it just didn’t seem right. If one were to suppress any urge to think about and interpret the show’s themes, it could be seen as an entertaining and decently-made pantomime. But for a show so clearly trying to comment on our socio-political landscape and how it bears down on our migrant workers, can we really do that? To attempt to critique Adventures by separating style from content would be doing a disservice to both the show itself, and to the voiceless subjects that the play tries to represent. It was an ambitious show built on good intentions. Sadly, the company tried to squeeze too much content and messages into too little time and space.

As a show performed by privileged youths, to a room full of privileged youths (and the young at heart), do the migrant workers themselves get any say in how this story played out? Would they be satisfied with this representation of their lives and struggles, or are we saying that they should just be content to have been the protagonists for once, and be happy with that, no matter how the story plays out? What could have been an empowering story of an overlooked minority in Singapore left me feeling nothing if not angry, angry that I had been complicit in laughing about my own Filipino colleagues, or the workers who gather at the open field near where I live every Sunday on their day off, angry that we are only capable of viewing them from a distance through our rose-tinted glasses of privilege.