Force Majeure’s band of unfulfilled artist siblings aptly opens Pangdemonium’s finale season

Force Majeure

Pangdemonium
Victoria Theatre
March 7, 3pm

Force Majeure opens with the return of a prodigious artist – from Europe to his South-east Asian home – as Western art havens crumble and his ascendant native land starts pouring money into the arts.

After being grilled at his homecoming exhibition, the patriarch John’s season of migration to the south ends abruptly in death, and it is his artist children who live in that aftermath.

John’s (Ebi Shankara) youngest daughter Irene (Rebecca Ashley Dass) despairs that her art practice is languishing and yearns to return to Europe for a fresh start. Act after act, however, she sinks even deeper into her sweltering existence within a decadent Straits Eclectic home where her father’s triptych of his three daughters looms imperiously over the motionless lives of the household.

In Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s bleak 1901 drama Three Sisters, the three titular sisters are coping with the ennui of provincial life during the waning years of Czarist Russia. London-based, Singapore-born playwright Stephanie Street cleverly transposes this into a story of privileged artist siblings withered by life in a cultural backwater amid profound global changes.

Moscow is the paradise for Chekhov’s sisters to which Europe – where “art is at the heart” – is Street’s equivalent.

It is apt and with bittersweet irony that Pangdemonium, which unexpectedly announced the conclusion of its 16-year run by the end of 2026, is starting off its finale season with a self-reflexive work interrogating the existential conditions of art-making. In Street’s script, the arts play no major role in public life and are increasingly determined by technocrats and capricious funders.

As to which South-east Asian country the action takes place in is left ambiguous. It is only through the dialogue that audiences intuit it is a country that is finding its footing in the arts and even building an arts centre comparable with Singapore’s Esplanade – a shadow version of Renaissance City Plan Singapore, perhaps, in the early 2000s.

Eucien Chia’s brilliant set of three towering shophouse structures – a pastiche of variously styled carved wood panels and ceramic tiles set against hand-painted tropical foliage – further confirms this shadow Singapore.

Chia’s maximalist set not only represents the decadence of the siblings’ lives, but also externalises their fear of emptiness.

There is tight ensemble work between the matriarchal Leah (Selma Alkaff) sidelining her acting career for teaching, the reclusive Mary (Inch Chua) embroiled in an affair and Irene. Then, there is the aloof wastrel Andrew (Benjamin Kheng) giving up his music career after he marries the artless Nat (Sharda Harrison).

Force Majeure does not just indict the cultural vacuum the four siblings find themselves stranded in, but it is also in some sense about “nepo babies” who have squandered their privilege. The narrow-mindedness of the characters’ concerns seem completely incompatible with the drastically changing world around them – with floods, artificial intelligence and poverty raging in the distance.

Director Tracie Pang extends the maximalism by having some actors double-hat, which could be a way to keep the sprawling cast of characters tight. Benjamin Chow plays both the uptight playwright-wannabe journalist Theo as well as Mary’s self-promoting university lecturer husband, for example, and Harrison switches from the brash Nat to play the newly minted arts centre director Vic.

Pang also exposes the backstage of the play on stage – with characters changing in view, actors improvising on various instruments, and percussionist Marc Monteiro propelling scenes forward. The decision to foreground the backstage work of art-making is interesting, although it can be distracting, especially for a talky drama in which much of the offstage action is explicated through dialogue and implication.

Contemporary audiences might harbour the same question that audiences have always had towards the proto-absurdist play: Why don’t the well-heeled sisters just leave and move to their paradise?

But that is as much the point. They are trapped by their own inaction and submit to their own unbreakable idea of a force majeure (“superior strength”) beyond their own making and undoing.

The play starts slow but, after intermission, the consequences of the siblings’ inaction pay off dramatically and Street’s writing hurtles them towards a resonant emotional ending.

The three paintings – which gradually deteriorate and become moth-eaten – also lend themselves to much interpretative freedom, depending on the audience’s appetite for pessimism. Suspended in water, the trio could either be drowning gracefully or struggling to break the surface for air, but they are never motionless.

Seen that way, Force Majeure is a desolate play but not unbearably so.

Book It/Force Majeure

Where: Victoria Theatre, 9 Empress Place
When: Till March 15, 8pm (Tuesdays to Fridays), 3 and 8pm (Saturdays and Sundays)
Admission: From $38 (SG Culture Pass eligible)
Info: str.sg/aeafm