Descendants filters Kuo Pao Kun’s classic work through a Gen Z emo lens

Descendants 

zone 境
Black Box, 42 Waterloo 
Sept 25, 8pm 

Deliberately analogue visuals created by a live artist manipulating paper and pen. Performers rolling energetically around on the floor in choreographed moves. Sound effects that reach for noise and ambience. 

Yes, this is experimental theatre and it gave this reviewer – who grew up with similarly raw efforts at The Substation – moments of deja vu.

Except, of course, the visuals are channelled through a newfangled projector instead of the old-school overhead projector; the Black Box space is a tad more polished than The Substation’s ghetto grit; and ticket prices have jumped. 

Whether viewers take to this work depends on their threshold of tolerance for the obscure logic of contemporary art making, as this piece is informed not just by playwright Kuo Pao Kun’s enigmatically oblique and poetic prose poem, but also by tropes beloved of performance art makers. 

What rescues this reworking of Descendants Of The Eunuch Admiral (1995) from the quagmire of navel-gazing self-indulgence is the obvious earnestness of its makers.

Dancer Chew Shaw En is an appealing natural presence, balancing composure and clarity as one of the titular descendants of Cheng Ho, the eunuch admiral who serves in Kuo’s dense script as mirror, mask and metaphor.

Veteran actor Neo Hai Bin, who has delivered impressive performances in Chinese-language theatre, feels oddly tentative in this mainly English-language production. He swallows some words, and his delivery of Macbeth’s famed “Is this a dagger I see before me” soliloquy – borrowed cleverly as an accent for Cheng Ho’s father who performs his son’s castration – lacks the Gothic horror and moral terror that it needs. 

There are some delightful moments in the show. These include the opening visuals of a horse materialising on a field and a flipbook of a galloping horse manipulated deliberately slowly, in a nod to those familiar with Kuo’s story, which includes an anecdote about Cheng Ho’s real surname Ma (“horse” in Mandarin). 

Some of the staging is clever.

A speech Chew delivers about a fear of dreaming sets her in a slow circumambulation of the space, walking backwards with her arm linked with, and leaning against, Neo, who is facing forward and repeating her lines in an unsettling whisper.

As the speech builds to her conviction that she is a descendant of Cheng Ho, their bodies lean closer until the duo turn to face the audience, their faces planted cheek to cheek in a physical presentation of her conclusion. 

The famous series of descriptions about the various processes of castration is staged using belts with little clusters of jingling bells that accent the visual with sounds. 

Director Ang Kia Yee has also added her own text to Kuo’s original script. While her lines update the 1995 script with contemporary references to the National Library and Maju Forest, the Gen Z emo sentiment feels trite alongside Kuo’s richly emotive minimalism. 

This is a young theatremaker’s effort to engage with a seminal text, and the rawness is evident in the patchiness of the narrative as it moves from Kuo’s script to Ang’s own writing, from one mise en scene to another.

What is encouraging is the healthy audience attendance, and rapt attention, for a work that obviously still needs polishing. 

In keeping with Kuo’s own liberal encouragement of youthful experimentation, this reviewer’s conclusion is that Descendants, while far from perfect, carries in it some of the freewheeling spirit of The Substation. 

Book It/Descendants

Where: Black Box, 42 Waterloo Street
When: Sept 25 and 26, 8pm; Sept 27, 3pm
Admission: $35
Info: str.sg/rtgVK