Theatre review: No Particular Order tantalises with vignettes of social breakdown

No Particular Order

The Studios: Trip 
Esplanade Theatre Studio
Last Saturday, 8pm

A bureaucrat requests an acoustic weapon to kill nuisance birds en masse. A forbidding drunkard infiltrates an activist party. A fashion house scoffs at the idea of a post-war floral print revival. 

These off-kilter vignettes of social breakdown make up the unsettling world of playwright Joel Tan’s No Particular Order. In it, an unstated political event in an unnamed land has unleashed an unspeakable wave of terror. 

The show’s 18 loosely related episodes are suggestive in their ambiguity regarding location. Director Sim Yan Ying writes in the programme that her reference points are as diverse as Myanmar, Ukraine, Hong Kong, Syria and Singapore. 

Sim animates the script’s 43 characters – played by just four actors – through slick costume changes. War zone morphs to art gallery morphs to supermarket in her use of Hella Chan’s multipurpose, four-piece industrial set. 

Sim, who directs the show as part of the

Esplanade’s Trip programme

for early-career directors, has picked an ambitious script that is narratively challenging. It tantalises and taunts with non-sequiturs and deliberate lapses in information.

But the experimental storytelling – seemingly in no particular order – can be parsed into two acts with a marked mood shift.

In the first act, characters reckon with the presence of war in their daily lives. A woman (Arielle Jasmine Van Zuijlen) questions why her principled husband (Shrey Bhargava) has abandoned writing his novel since a new regime took power. 

But the vignettes felt repetitive after a while, as they reflected silence, or at most quiet defiance, towards the terror. 

This is where the script’s ambiguity works against itself, as the audience starts chafing at the lack of specificity around everyone’s fear.

Forgo any attempt to piece events together and treat each scene as a distinct and surreal nightmare, and the play works better. That the work is full of inexplicable shadows mirrors the insidious way fear works in more subtle forms of despotism.

The second act – an ostensibly post-war world – offers some hair-raising and thought-provoking scenes. 

There is a welcome shift in the play’s tenor as soon as a large vertical screen is unveiled in the background. Light projections morph the screen into settings that are decidedly more expansive – art, sky, edifice. 

A contemporary artist who displays his war-themed artworks in a foreign gallery is roundly admonished by a fellow countryman (Pavan J. Singh), who asks whether the artist is profiting off his suffering. 

Separately, a stern education director (Karen Tan) censors a certain “unpatriotic” poet-theatremaker from the national syllabus, warning that “peace is fragile”. 

These meta-theatrical and satirical episodes draw laughter from the audience. They expose how, even in an apparently new world, art continues to be complicit with profit and authority.

Beyond sombreness and satire, one wishes for greater emotional range and a larger slice of absurdity, given the potent scenarios. 

The 43 characters sound more like different versions of the four actors rather than distinctive personalities with their own stories. Greater modulation and contrast in each character’s physicality and voices might have created more memorable characters in the absence of narrative development. 

This is a cerebral play, one that requires a lot of post-show discussion and problem-solving with your theatre companions.

But for those who are willing to be patient with the play’s sly obliquities, No Particular Order serves up some serious questions: How do people instinctively behave in a state of emergency? Do wartime habits end with peace? 

And perhaps the most startling of all questions: In times of political order or no particular order, who or what is it that people choose to obey?

No Particular Order is sold out.