Potong
Teater Ekamatra

Esplanade Theatre Studio
Thursday, 8pm

If circumcision is what makes a man, then Adam (Irsyad Dawood) prefers to keep his boyhood intact.

But Siti (Farah Ong) wants her only son to return from Perth to Singapore and undergo this religious rite so she can be assured Adam is his own man.

To be or not to be circumcised, this act of potong – or cutting – richly conveys the cultural, religious and familial expectations weighing on the young protagonist.

Johnny Jon Jon’s script, first staged in 2018 by Teater Ekamatra at the Malay Heritage Centre, cuts to the heart of what it means to come of age as a bicultural child and the son of a single mother worried that she will not see her child grow up.

Potong gets a worthy restaging by director Mohd Fared Jainal, who takes a small cast of five characters – including two mother-child pairs – and weaves a finely wrought tapestry of intergenerational pain and healing.

It is a story with no frills which creeps up on the audience when one least expects it.

Central to the story is a family history of Alzheimer’s disease. Adam returns from Perth to find his “uncle” – a gender-fluid, transgender woman named Saleha (Jada) – caring for her ill mother, and soon realises his own mother is starting to lose her memory too.

Both mothers are played by Ong, who reprises the two roles from the 2018 staging. It is a casting choice that subtly draws out the parallels between Adam and Siti as well as Saleha and Nenek.

Although Adam’s dickering with his inappropriately punny circumcision specialist, Dr Dini (Aisyah Aziz), provides light-hearted moments of reckoning, it is Jada who turns in the night’s most complex performance as Saleha.

Saleha is at the heart of the show. She sees no contradiction between observing Muslim prayers and her own gender identity. She passes off as her sister, Siti, when their mother forgets her rebellious “son” – and finds bittersweet solace in this indirect form of acceptance.

Saleha plays uncle to his nephew, but presents as a woman outside. Her gender fluidity might be part of how she sees herself, or it might arise from a need to strike a compromise. Jada’s performance makes Saleha’s contradictions compelling.

Wong Chee Wai’s gorgeous set projects a dreamy, abstract world that represents the state of amnesia afflicting Potong’s characters, who have all forgotten something to be where they are today.

Metallic drapes sprawl overhead, soaking in the neon light that drenches the faux Scandinavian interior design of the apartments. It is a choice that brings a splash of surrealism to the story, but sacrifices the opportunity to draw a sharper distinction between the Australia and Singapore settings.

The show is not without its flaws and could have invested more time in building some of its other characters more subtly.

Adam’s backstory as a Perth-born Singaporean feels a tad unconvincing. Beyond his Australian accent and slang, his physicality or costume do little to bring out his cultural in-betweenness.

Siti’s sudden decline also feels more shocking than plausible. This might be the case only because audiences see her primarily as a mother to Adam and a sister to Saleha, and never who she is without her family.

The projection of obscure quotes on screens as scene transitions also adds little to the performance and might have been dropped or at least dealt with more creatively.

Still, one emerges from the theatre teary-eyed in this intimate production by Teater Ekamatra. Jon Jon’s script speaks to a range of outsider experiences and sensitively probes at the complex mix of race, religion and gender.

Potong, in rendering a life’s continuous coming-of-age in all its multifarious beauty and pain, is a story worth retelling.

Book It/Potong

Where: Esplanade Theatre Studio, 1 Esplanade Drive
When: May 19, 8pm (sold out); May 20, 3 and 8pm; May 21, 3pm
Admission: $38 (standard) and $30 (concession)
Info: https://str.sg/iJgF