Sabrina

The Adventures of Abhijeet – A Review

Have you ever tried explaining poverty to a five-year-old, and then realised that they don’t understand anything outside the Disney Channel?

To get around this, maybe you use Tiana from Princess and the Frog as an example in a Wizard of Oz adventure-and-obstacle setting, with Ursula’s greed representing the capitalist economy system, and hope that they sort of get it.

And if they don’t, well, hopefully it’ll make them laugh at least.

I’m sure my baby cousins — “Pink gem! Find the pink gem!” — would have found The Adventures of Abhijeet very exciting. And solely as an adventure story, it is. We’ve got Kings and pink people and a purple person, and an underdog protagonist who brings his rag-tag group of friends on a treasure hunt adventure to find random objects like — “Pink gem! Find the pink gem!” — pink gems.

If you didn’t know otherwise, The Adventures of Abhijeet may seem like a cute little quest led by Abhijeet and Gloria, joined later by Ling Ling, where they try to fix the problems caused by a loud and scary King, also try to take revenge on a Witch, run from Black and White knights, eat weird mushrooms, and somehow meet Sherlock Holmes and a hybrid chicken-dragon, all to get a —

O-kay. It’s not all about pink gems.

When I first walked into the room, I was glad to see that Patch and Punnet have begun to create a niche style of their own. Like their previous production, last year’s Stupid Cupid, The Adventures of Abhijeet stayed true to their relaxed approach to audience seating, with everyone on the floor, surrounded by pillows, and in close proximity with one another. Kind of like a kindergarten class during Story Time.

Seats aside, their now-establishing style comes through in all aspects of the production: from their trademark comic opening, the use of theme songs from popular children’s shows as narration, hyper-theatrical characters, purposefully lo-fi props that look like they came straight out of a primary school production, and an overall psychedelic dynamism that feels like a cartoon come to life.

If they didn’t know what to expect, it may initially throw first-timers off to watch such a child-like show talking about real-life issues, like using Abhijeet’s adventures to raise awareness about migrant workers in Singapore and their plight.

In The Adventures of Abhijeet, we tag alongside Abhijeet on his journey to heal his leg after an accident at work, in order for him to continue working and to earn enough money to save his sick daughter back home. Unfortunately, healing his leg isn’t as easy as it sounds. Not in Singaland.

The play brings in characters like Gloria (the purple (read: very bruised) Filipino domestic helper) and Ling Ling (the Chinese sex worker who’s stuck to a cucumber) as composites who embody the different kinds of migrant workers we employ in Singapore, while giving us a glimpse into the struggles that these different workers face – such as domestic helper abuse and abuse towards sex workers.

At one point, we get faced with a very harsh reality when Abhijeet struggles endlessly with Singaland’s extremely complicated bureaucratic system, by portraying the entire situation as absurd, and darkly humorous. We watch the helplessness of his situation, as he tries to get a bunch of papers in order to acquire another long list of indecipherable acronyms –his FPPs, SFNs and ABCEFGs –, only to be held back again as he struggles to find a translator, and then again, as he goes through ten other things just to get a chance to speak to someone.

The bureaucratic struggle that migrant workers face exists, is a real problem, and in Abhijeet, is represented in a way that makes it easy to understand — it’s presented as a fun Tom-and-Jerry chase, making the audience laugh first before oh… shit, they’re reminded of how much worse it actually is in reality.

It can be crazy, messy, hilarious and smart all at the same time. But the line between being absolutely brilliant and just… too much… is very thin.

While the play cleverly narrates itself with music, using popular melodies from Powerpuff Girls, and changing the lyrics of National Day songs like ‘We Are Singapore’, the actual progression of the play doesn’t quite hit the same note.

Abhijeet’s actual adventure —after the second obstacle or before the third item on their quest, or maybe at some point where they get caught for smoking weed— just gets very, very confusing. It actually feels like you’re high on weed as you watch it. And true to how that works, you somehow end up laughing a lot in Abhijeet, maybe even at everything, even though in hindsight, you may realise – as I did – that many of the jokes were actually quite cheap and weren’t genuinely funny at all.

The haphazard nature of the play can also feel really overwhelming at some points. It’s quite distracting to scramble to put the pieces together and remember all the strange names the show introduces every 5 minutes, while also trying to stay on track with what’s happening.

And because the entire show basically talks about migrant workers and their problems and plight without actually talking about it, the links between what’s in the play and what it represents in reality gets blurred very easily. You lose track of what-means-what in real life, and the holes in your understanding that continue to grow makes the experience feel like you’re watching the play while playing an extremely fast round of charades at the same time.

Having watched their previous production Stupid Cupid, I know that perhaps with a less politically charged plot, this method and style can really hit the mark. In Abhijeet, unfortunately, the layers that revolve around the issues that revolve around the marginal community of migrant workers, the migrant worker conversation, and the ambitious attempt to talk about everything at once in a way that’s funny, wacky and unique, make the play come off as oversimplified at times, and over-ambiguous in others.

After a long and stretched out treasure hunt (spoiler alert: they don’t get a pink gem —or as I came to find out later, a pink IC— in the end… can you guess why?), a lot of laughter and a lot more confusion, the play comes to an end, and I’m left with a grand mix of emotions careening between initial excitement, actual funny, cheap-funny, confusion and disorientation. Perhaps too-idealistically, I was hoping that the ending would somehow answer all my questions or at least wrap up the adventure in a way that made sense.

But of course, that wasn’t what happened. (And really, this was what fell shortest because we’ve been following Abhijeet for ages, and I mean ages.) Instead, we got a stack of giant problems, getting quite literally magically solved in no more than two minutes right at the very end. It felt like watching someone frantically wrap up a presentation after talking about one point for too long and — !! “THIRTY SECONDS LEFT”— so um, yes, to conclude, um, everything works out in the end. Thank you.

The “ending” was also jumbled up even further with the addition of a “Post-Credits Scene”. The idea of the scene was quite impressive to me and I remember thinking, ‘wow this is new’. I’m sure it was aimed at creating a sort of cliff-hanger that leaves you wanting more, or makes you question what you’d thought. However, because the second half of the play was already so confusing in itself, the post-credits scene, just ended up making me feel even more confused.

Having said all of this, however, I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy myself.

Patch and Punnet’s take on the issues that the migrant worker community in Singapore face with Abhijeet was ambitious and fresh. On a superficial level, the play engages with the difficult challenges our migrant worker community faces, in a way that’s easy to accept and enjoy. It’s not “overly-woke”, such that it wouldn’t scare off anyone who’s just in it for the laughs, doesn’t want to rock the boat, and would rather not come to terms with the truths about their privilege and the people that bear the worse end of that stick. It feels like a fun play I’d bring my family to watch for some Zootopia, “here’s the moral of the story” level of awareness. But just like anything family-friendly, we remain comfortable, waddling around in the shallow end of the pool, rather than feeling challenged to go over to the deep end. Abhijeet doesn’t raise anything that we don’t already know, and it also doesn’t bring up any deeper conversations on the things we do know, choosing to skim over many small issues rather than unpack a really big one.

Just like their characters and music choices, Abhijeet presents itself like any other family cartoon — it catches your attention, you dance to the theme song, the characters get themselves into difficult situations that are also kind of stupid, and you laugh at the low-level jokes based on popular culture references and stereotypes.

But it doesn’t really make you want to change the world or anything, y’know?

List of (some of the) Characters (mentioned):
Abhijeet – Jit Dastidar
Gloria – Day Cutiongco
Ling Ling – Lynn Chia
Scary King/Sherlock Holmes – Salif Hardie
Evil Witch – Nisa Syarafana
Black and White knight – Zulfiqar Izzudin
Hybrid Chicken-Dragon – Deonn Yang