In Last Rites, five Asian stage legends deliver a masterclass in living artistically

Last Rites

Emergency Stairs
SOTA Studio Theatre
May 22, 8pm

When five master performers with more than 250 years of combined stage experience are convened to confront the impending end of their artistic lives, very little else is needed before the room begins to vibrate.

Last Rites knows this and so gives the quintet no more than a cube each to sit on and a notebook to fiddle with – the rest is their presence.

And boy, does this work vibrate like five intensively lived bodies packed into an atomic nucleus. Emergency Stairs artistic director Liu Xiaoyi – who triple-hats as director, playwright and set designer – has assembled an unlikely ultimate dinner guest list of Asian performance doyens which is, first and foremost, a feat of scheduling.

Arranged in descending seniority, they are Singaporean actor Yong Ser Pin, 78, whose acting life is inextricable with the father figure of Kuo Pao Kun; South Korean actor Jung Dong-hwan, 78, who has a penchant for difficult plays like a seven-hour Dostoevsky adaptation; Japanese Noh actor Kanji Shimizu, 73, a designated living national treasure; Indonesian dancer Didik Nini Thowok, 72, a maestro of cross-gender performances; and South Korean mime artist Nam Geung Ho, 65, whose street performance led to an arrest.

There is no flashy conceit. Liu just dresses them in plain black attire and socks, then lets them talk. And what a luxury it is to overhear this conversation that feels so intimate as if it were conducted over an austere dinner.

Their monologues run across Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Bahasa Indonesia and a smattering of English, as well as across divergent performance styles, but the common language that keeps the conversation flowing is the shared language of the disciplined body.

Didik, in small flicks of the wrist and improvised percussion through the mouth, conjures a kaleidoscope of dance styles from Balinese to bharatanatyam. His heightened physicality is not unlike Shimizu’s, whose actions turn ritualistic when he dons the stoic Noh mask.

Both perform across genders and have given contemporary expression to their respective traditions – Shimizu discusses creating a new Noh work for victims of the Nagasaki bombings, for example – and meet in their masks frequently through the show.

Yong and Jung come together to perform two exquisite excerpts of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist classic Waiting For Godot in a bilingual Mandarin-Korean exchange.

Yong’s is a much more naturalist and everyday Estragon to Jung’s affected Vladimir, but the contrast works – especially when the two stand nose-to-nose in what this reviewer regards as the show’s most vulnerable moment. Can someone commission the bilingual Waiting For Godot starring this duo already?

Nam, like most of his peers, came to the stage almost serendipitously.

His thick Busan accent and inability to adapt to Standard Korean eventually pushed him to pick up the wordless art form of mime. With his boyish charm, one is almost convinced he has the body of a spritely young adult and an extended, playful shower scene – in lieu of a more direct account of his arrest – wins over the audience with its allegory of violence.

That, too, has resonance to Yong’s story of how Kuo behaved after his detention without trial – with an almost heartbreaking levity.

These five performances weave in and out of one another and are not so much masterclasses in performing as they are masterclasses in the art of being a performer. Their lives have amounted to the ultimate work of art and everything is on naked display to the audience without the usual accoutrements of theatre’s illusions.

Sound artist Darren Ng and lighting designer Faith Liu Yong Huay’s work subtly contribute to the atmosphere of serenity that insulates the entire performance.

This is as good as verbatim theatre gets, and kudos to Liu for bringing the right level of restraint to the performance – there is no ego at all for the director or any of the performers.

This Singapore International Festival of Arts commission announces what genuine inter-Asian artistic dialogue can look like, and deserves to tour across Asia and beyond.

Emerging from Last Rites felt like coming out at the end of a tunnel of a grief that this reviewer did not know he was walking through – a grief for the brevity of life and for the difficulty of a life surrendered to art.

But with grief comes consolation, too, at the light that leaks through at the end of the tunnel – which is the fact that these masters have forged something essential out of art anyway.

Everything else, as Yong puts it, is a bonus.

Book It/Last Rites

Where: SOTA Studio Theatre, 1 Zubir Said Drive
When: May 23, 2 and 8pm
Admission: $38, eligible for SG Culture Pass
Info: https://sifa.sg/plan-your-visit/all-programmes/programme-details/festival-stage/last-rites