Theatre review: Alvin Chiam’s Last Luncheon is a terrifying look at the hopelessness of male solitude

Last Luncheon

Huayi – Chinese Festival of Arts
Le Jeu Studio
Esplanade Theatre Studio
Feb 15, 8pm

This patience-testing, casually audacious offering by Singapore theatre practitioner Alvin Chiam is not for those who crave storytelling and entertainment, and definitely not suitable post-heavy meal.

In fact, at certain points, it appears deliberately anti-entertainment. It is at least 10 minutes before the first words are uttered, not by Chiam, but a voice recording on that omnipresent voice recorder his character is obsessed with.

Before that, an aged Chiam, clad in just a white singlet and boxer shorts, subjects a bemused audience to his morning routine. Back curved like a Tyrannosaurus, he performs barely perceptible squats and a shuffling run back and forth in his flat, with attendant huffs and puffs.

Finished, he folds his napkin, takes out his pills, lays them in a row and proceeds to gulp each down to varying degrees of satisfaction. He takes out a radio-cum-tape recorder-cum-cassette player, humming Hokkien pop songs, now and then allowing himself to crack an out-of-place smile.

Male loneliness is a bit of a theme at this year’s Huayi – Chinese Festival of Arts, with Taiwanese screenwriter Wu Nien-jen’s Human Condition VIII also fixating on that tragic, ignored figure of the grim, friendless, cooped-up old man.

Chiam, in penning this 90-minute monologue, is inspired by existentialist Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), a similarly one-man script with an old man listening obsessively to audio tapes, lamenting that his best years are behind him.

For Chiam’s character, too, there is precious little to celebrate. The snatches of his old life are hinted at only via the voice recordings his former self had recorded, betraying his once-youthful innocence, but containing mostly bad news.

Chiam has elected to deliver these in a colloquial Hokkien, finding it more intimate than Mandarin and more believable in a Singapore setting.

Audiences are granted just enough context to guess at the harshness of time on his character, a gesture at Covid-19 also reminding audiences that self-isolation in this form must have been commonplace for a not insignificant number of seniors during lockdown.

Yet, despite the depressingly sparse set of white table and chairs and empty cabinet, Chiam’s character allows himself some nominal moments of levity, particularly in music, and perhaps food. He appears to cook in real time off-stage – the steam visible to audiences and the fragrance wafting up to the seats.

It is only later that the significance of the luncheon meat he eats is revealed – and this is a significant enough revelation to suddenly lend the old man pathos.

One wonders if this information could have been provided to the audience sooner, but the overall effect is to force a reckoning with the mundanity and recursive grief of Chiam’s solitary life. It is an intense character study and a minimalist presentation of the suppressed emotions roiling beneath a grieving man’s routine.

There is one moment where Chiam puts on a suit and seems to de-age himself, his character striding back on stage to, in the same way, say grace and silently partake in a dignified meal.

He reverts to his old self as soon as the suit comes off, but in this moment, all there is is terror. Could it be that a man alone is fundamentally the same through the decades? Or is a man nothing more than his will to live and what he wears?

Either way, this reviewer was glad to be let out of the theatre, with everyone given a stick of ice cream that Chiam had eaten on stage. He may have intended it as hope, but it felt like cold consolation.

Book It/Last Luncheon

Where: Esplanade Theatre Studio, 1 Esplanade Drive
When: Feb 16, 3pm
Admission: From $32
Info: str.sg/EuKC