Psychob***h

Wild Rice
The Ngee Ann Kongsi Theatre
Last Saturday, 7.30pm

Greta Gerwig’s hit film Barbie (2023) has been the fount of many memes, but one monologue has found expected resonance, its text posted and reposted again on multiple platforms.

Delivered impassionately by actress America Ferrera, the speech fleshes out the contradictory and impossible expectations placed on women by society. Its clarity has been cathartic for many girls and women, and informative for the men watching the film with them.

Psychob***h, lawyer-writer Amanda Chong’s one-woman play, is a welcome addition to this lineage.

This very funny brief history of traumatic events from the point of view of protagonist Anya Samuel (Sindhura Kalidas), a high-achieving Singapore journalist, is redolent of that other one-woman play, Fleabag (2013) by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, which also makes its point through irresistible wit and self-deprecating laughter.

As the play begins, Anya arrives more than an hour early to her fiance’s office, preparing for a presentation.

Threatened with a break-up, she has to prove that her crying in public four times in the last two years does not mean she has a pattern of being too “emotional”.

Ever the type-A swashbuckler, she has made animated PowerPoint slides charting the correlation between these episodes and her menstrual cycle.

But she soon wonders why she has to be on the defensive, and whether her fiance does not also have psychoses of his own.

Chong’s script is a well-crafted one-two punch that follows up crowd-pleasing jokes with quieter, emotional scenes of Anya’s family.

The first half of the 90-minute show flies by.

Some of the funniest moments are of Anya’s “crypto bro” boyfriend’s inability to talk about feelings without corporate doublespeak. He refers to their different sensibilities as an “axiomatic divergence” and speaks of the need for Anya’s outbursts to “trend downwards”.

The second half slows a little, and perhaps lingers a beat too long. But Kalidas, directed by Pam Oei, is eminently watchable, filling the stage with dynamism despite the spare set.

She handles the different characters with practised verve, adopting different stances, tenor and diction, most hilariously of a property agent.

The occasional Singlish and the contemporary online vocabulary (“bro, I clap for you”) are delightful, and there is a nice touch in Anya removing layer after layer of clothes as she becomes more vulnerable and truer to her feelings.

Over the course of the show, Anya unlearns bad habits and builds up self-worth.

It is a touching portrait of an unmarried 33-year-old woman knee-deep in a journey that often seems painfully obvious to an outsider, while requiring Sisyphean effort from the one going through it.  

Book It/Psychob***h

Where: Wild Rice @ Funan, Level 4, 107 North Bridge Road
When: Till Aug 19; Tuesdays to Fridays, 7.30pm; Saturdays, 3 and 7.30pm; Sundays, 3pm
Admission: From $20
Info: str.sg/iwua