Rose

I was eager to watch the recently revised version of The Adventures of Abhijeet that first premiered at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival in January this year. Patch and Punnet had made a decision to use feedback received from their first showcase to rework the performance for the better.

The instant I entered the black box theatre at The Arts House I was excited to see that pillows, mattresses and astroturf had been laid out across the stage floor for audience members to sit on. The relaxed seating layout created an intimate setup for the performance. There was a lively and chill pre-show atmosphere as audience members chitchatted while waiting for people to fill the space and for the performance to begin.

In the spirit of this informality, Astley Xie (co-founder of Patch and Punnet) announces (from the corner of the black box) that the show is about to begin! The Adventures of Abhijeet begins with Abhijeet (played by Jit Dastidar) receiving a magic pill from a gaudily dressed wizard (played by Krish Natarajan) that will transport him from his home in Bangladesh to ‘Singaland’ in a quest to earn money for his sickly daughter. The wizard’s tacky purple blazer, polka dotted shirt and gold pants hint at the absurdity of what’s to come in this mysterious new land.

Abhijeet soon finds himself in a ridiculously extravagant ‘Singaland’ where loud, booming music is played, and Singalanders sing a loud patriotic tune in welcoming him, a stark contrast to the more muted scene in Bangladesh. The overenthusiastic welcome proceeds with a threatening conversation with Abhijeet’s boss (played by Salif Hardie) dressed in a furry blue vest, a crown on his head and who has a penchant for excessively barking vulgarities at Abhijeet. It is here where Abhijeet is overworked as a construction worker to earn money to send back to his sickly daughter in Bangladesh. Abhijeet comes off as a very likeable character – his enthusiastic responses to his haughty boss and eagerness to work hard for his daughter immediately makes the audience want to root for him.

Under his overbearing boss’s order to “work like a beaver” and to not get injured at all costs, Abhijeet ends up drained and inevitably lands up in a work accident that injures his leg badly. This event forms the catalyst for a series of adventures, where Abhijeet seeks help from various Singalanders to treat his injured leg. A wild goose chase across Singaland’s baffling bureaucratic system ensues as Abhijeet is redirected from one ‘place of help’ to the next. He meets two new friends along the way: Gloria (played by Day Cutiongco), a witch apprentice (domestic worker) from the Philippines and Ling Ling (played by Lynn Chia), a cucumber plantation worker (sex worker) from China. At this point, it is clear that The Adventures of Abhijeet is reliant on metaphors and allegory, leaving the audience to decipher what each new reference alludes to. All three of them are victims of their workplace exploitation and are trying to find help from various dead ends across Singaland. All three actors attempted their respective character’s accents which (intentionally or unintentially) came off as comical at moments.

It becomes increasingly frustrating to watch as these three vulnerable foreign workers struggle to receive help from Singalanders, simply because the country’s citizens refuse to depart from their black-and-white protocols and procedures. An especially heart-wrenching and provoking scene takes place at the ‘Pink Hub’, where a desperate Abhijeet attempts to seek help from Pink Hub workers – to which they respond mechanically and coldly, ordering him to fill out forms and redirecting him to other counters. A helpless Abhijeet tries his best to follow all their instructions, only to be obstructed by a language barrier – an obstacle that could have been easily overcome by assistance in translation – so close yet so far. As a Singaporean that has never had to navigate this sort of nightmarish bureaucratic problem, the scene was especially eye opening and made me sympathise with him more. Abhijeet’s seemingly endless journey to get help reminds me of an article by TWC2 titled Survey of doctors reveals barriers to Healthcare for migrant workers. Here, TWC2 details the problems foreign workers face when trying to receive healthcare. A survey conducted in 2016 – 2017 revealed problems such as them being declined medical leave despite eligibility and financial issues; two issues very similar to what Abhijeet faced.

When the trio arrived at their fifth stop (which what really felt like their hundredth), I felt a restless cloud descend upon the audience. It was a scene where Abhijeet and Gloria were trying to fight their way through a herd of animal Singalanders to a watering hole. By this point, and after previous scenes stuffed to the brim with metaphors and motifs, I was exhausted trying to unscramble every single double meaning behind every imagine and line. Perhaps the point was to frustrate the audience, so that we might feel the way Abhijeet did when he could not read and fill out an important form? Nonetheless, I found certain scenes unbearably slow-moving and others abruptly fast-paced, particularly towards the end of the play, so much so that I had little time to really grasp what had happened.

Patch and Punnet have stated in their Instagram updates that they devised the play intending for the audience to root for their foreign worker protagonists. Abhijeet, Gloria and Ling Ling are definitely likeable and funny, and they do gain our support. However, I did find myself wondering whether the jokes and their imitation of foreign accents were appropriate at times. Ling Ling, for example, had a stereotypical Chinese accent and comes across as simple and naive. It made me wonder what the foreign workers in our midst would feel if they watched this play. Would they laugh at these jokes along with this predominantly Singaporean upper-middle-class audience?

Overall, The Adventures of Abhijeet valiantly tries its best to shed light on the plight and struggles of migrant workers. Undeniably, there is good fun when the show has spot-on observations, where allegory and reality match (e.g. The Pink Hub), and there is a need for more companies to tackle difficult problems surrounding marginalised communities of people in Singapore. For this, I applaud Patch and Punnet. However, I still left the black box feeling ambivalent about the work. Yes, I felt an empathetic pain when watching Abhijeet and his friends struggle, but was it successful in pulling off all their satirical jokes? I am not so sure. Was this a continuous question of what are we laughing at? Is it permissible to be laughing when many of the abstract allegories trace back to serious problems in Singapore?