S’pore Fringe Fest 2015: Untitled Women passing through
The Necessary Stage's untitled women at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival. Photo: Caleb Ming / SURROUND.
SINGAPORE — It just doesn’t seem right to end the coverage of a fringe festival with a conventional play like Mosaic, so the last hurrah for this edition will be a work featuring a woman who plays a cow and another woman who plays a fairy.
I’m talking about The Necessary Stage’s untitled women. Directed by Alvin Tan, it’s a double-bill restaging of playwright Haresh Sharma’s untitled cow number one and untitled women number one from the early 2000s, at the height of their post-modern experiments.
The former is a poetic musing on death, following the story of a woman (or a cow, if you want to take the text literally) who’s in mourning for her recently deceased husband (or bull). The post-death ritual alludes to the Tibetan ritual of sky burial, where bodies are left on top of mountains and picked clean by vultures. But the wife-cow refuses to abandon him.
Here, a musician and a physical actor enact grief. Sharda Harrison’s leg is tied to a chair, unable to or unwilling to leave. She mourns as she dances, and there is an arresting vision of her writhing on the chair under the spotlight. Bani Haykal, meanwhile, goes around, looping sounds on instruments all over the set of inclined planes, from a guitar to a chair-turned-guitar. He hums like Thom Yorke. It is mostly him — the spoken word poet — who also utters the lines of the wife. Later on, they briefly swap roles, with Harrison having a go at looping typewriter sounds and Bani performing — it is his turn to be tied to the chair and he scats, all facial tics or Tourette’s-like.
The insertion of a monologue by Harrison about an abandoned child is initially confusing, but the piece eventually steers back to the wife-cow-in-mourning scenario, as she undresses herself and, seemingly giving up on life, lies down, symbolic white blood (or, fine, milk) dripping from her body.
Meanwhile, untitled women number one finds two women — Edith Podesta and Ethel Yap — presumably trapped in an unidentified place, perhaps a prison cell or a hospital room, or limbo or it's simply happening in someone’s mind.
Whatever it is, it’s an important space. Literally, middle ground. “From here, it’s a different world. Sooner or later, we move away from the middle,” says Podesta.
Both women take turns despairing at their situation. There’s cabin fever. Sexually deprived, Yap asks Podesta if she wants to have sex, recalling her own encounter with a black man. Podesta, meanwhile, takes on various roles as if playing the part of entertainer — a winged fairy, a blondie — to distract her roommate.
And then you realise they’re not held there against their will. And when Yap eventually leaves, someone else comes in, also played by Yap. The cycle repeats.
That Podesta at one point enters with a stethoscope suggests some doctor-patient relationship going on. But why does she sleep there as well? Is it part of her roleplay? You’ll likely get bogged down by questions regarding the logic (or, ahem, Illogic) of the narrative, but it doesn’t quite matter as much since you already have the general sense of things. In fact, the vagueness is rather intriguing.
That said, it then also becomes yet another addition (or since it was done years ago, perhaps one of the first) to the whole “canon” of limbo literature we’ve seen onstage.
So of the two untitleds, I actually preferred the first. But Tan fairly does a seamless merge of the two, with recurring images and themes (a baby/doll/child, bones, snake, death…) as well as their respective characters crossing paths. Both, after all, are about transitioning from one state to another.
untitled women runs until tomorrow, 3pm and 8pm, at Drama Centre Black Box. Tickets from SISTIC. For more details, visit http://www.singaporefringe.com
