Theatre review: An Actress Prepares is a love letter to live theatre

THEATRE

Wild Rice

Thursday (Nov 5), Wild Rice @ Funan

There are at most 50 people in the audience at Wild Rice's Funan theatre, but actress Siti Khalijah Zainal pulls laughter from them so readily, she makes it feel like a full house.

She bounds onto the stage not as if she is about to put on a production, but as if she is coming home.

An Actress Prepares is, in many ways, the perfect play for Wild Rice to reopen its theatre with after months of coronavirus-induced closure. It is a monologue - no need for social distancing if there is only one person onstage. The set is simple, a dressing room table with some props.

But more than that, it is a love letter to live theatre. It is the story of how acting changed one person's life, and how this, in turn, has placed her in a position to change the lives of others.

An Actress Prepares, written by Alfian Sa'at, was first devised for the Singapore Writers Festival in 2016 and later reworked for the Singapore Theatre Festival in 2018.

It has now been updated for the Covid-19 era. Siti opens with an anecdote about her failed attempt during the circuit breaker to start an alternate career as a warehouse worker.

The job required no work experience, but after they read her resume, two different staff called her to try and talk her out of it, the implication being that actors are incapable of manual labour.

An Actress Prepares riffs on the book An Actor Prepares by Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski. Siti refers often to this acting manual, beginning with her distinction between method and technique - one is tricking your mind and body into assuming a role, the other is tricking the audience.

Siti, a two-time Life Theatre Award Best Actress winner, puts on her make-up while telling her life story. She delves into her childhood - she was teased about her weight and was one of two Malay girls in Chinese dance class - and how she came to be an actress, despite the odds.

An Institute of Technical Education student, she was initially rejected for a scholarship that would have helped her pursue acting because her school was not one of those covered. She managed to appeal with the help of theatre company The Necessary Stage.

She makes it clear, however, that she is the exception, not the rule. The system would have made it all too easy for someone like her, even with her talent, to relinquish a future in the arts.

In a sequence that swings quite abruptly from hilarious to harrowing, she imagines an alternate life as an unfulfilled office lady and mother of three, listlessly watching Suria, searching in vain for someone else to make her laugh.

She also touches on inequality in the theatre, questioning if it is just middle-class people telling working-class stories for a middle-class audience.

Many of the characters she has played would not in real life have been able to afford a seat in the theatre, she observes.

She performs extracts from classic works like Kuo Pao Kun's banned play The Struggle and Wong Souk Yee and Tay Hong Seng's Esperanza, a play about a Filipina helper accused of stealing from her employer.

If Esperanza, which was first staged in 1986, feels like an uncannily prescient choice given the recent High Court acquittal of Indonesian domestic worker Parti Liyani of theft, Siti does not comment on it. She simply speaks the words, brings the character to life and leaves the audience to judge.

Siti knows she is not the only star in the firmament and she takes care to situate her own story in a canon of others.

She pays tribute to trailblazers like Aidli "Alin" Mosbit - who directs her in this piece - and in one of the play's most moving moments, dons a stunning, spangled blue gown and sings in commemoration of the late legends of Singapore theatre - Krishen Jit, Christina Sergeant, Emma Yong and more.

After months of interminable Zoom and squinting at screens, one is likely to view any sort of live theatre through a rose-tinted lens.

Yet there is something to be said for how finely calibrated An Actress Prepares is for this moment, when the world has come so very close to losing the entire industry of performing arts.

"Nothing's wasted," says Siti. She is referring to method acting, the amount of immersive research required to prepare for a role, but one senses she is also talking of what she and her industry have been through in this pandemic.

This time has not been wasted, she is saying. It is preparing them for what they are going to create next.

WHERE: The Ngee Ann Kongsi Theatre, Wild Rice @ Funan, Level 4, 107 North Bridge Road

WHEN: Till Nov 22, Tuesdays to Fridays, 7.30pm; Saturdays, 2.30 and 7.30pm; Sundays, 2 and 6pm

ADMISSION: $35 to $55 via Sistic (call 6348 5555 or go to Sistic's website)

INFO: Some mature content, for ages 12 and above. Patrons can only enter with the TraceTogether app or token enabled. For more information, go to Wild Rice's website.