Theatre review: Three Years In The Life And Death Of Land tackles land-scarce psyche

Three Years In The Life And Death Of Land

The Necessary Stage

Esplanade Presents: The Studios
Singtel Waterfront Theatre
Saturday, 8pm

Almost three decades later, this script addressing the fraught relationship Singaporeans have with this patch of land continues to ring true.

Haresh Sharma’s Three Years In The Life And Death Of Land was

first staged in 1994

during a decade of resounding economic growth. One of its main characters, property developer Lionel Lim, beams at the opening of his new building project.

Fast forward to 2023 and Lionel – original cast member Julius Foo reprises his role – is still beaming. He might call his project a “vertical garden” now, versed in the language of sustainable architecture in the playwright’s updated script, but he is still building.

When his son Eric (Tan Guo Lian Sutton) returns from his studies in the United States, the younger architect chafes at how his father is fixated on the future and can so thoughtlessly raze his childhood park and memories.

Eric’s childhood sweetheart, Shalini Mulchand (Sharul Channa), is equally exasperated by her migrant mother (Daisy Irani), who wants to keep her daughter close at hand even as Shalini longs to move away.

The stories of the Lims and the Mulchands, however, are merely two threads in a much more intricate tapestry of lives shaped by the scarcity of land.

There are also mosquitoes (Joshua Lim), a black cat (Ghafir Akbar) and the ghost of a spurned lover (Siti Khalijah Zainal).

These episodes dramatising the fate of the non-human characters form the most interesting parts of the play. The ideas developed here are in line with current thinking about how humans do not monopolise the land, which is teeming with other presences – spirits or animals.

For example, while generations of mosquitoes have accepted their lot of having a lifespan of approximately five days, one finds himself in an existential crisis – paralleling quite comedically the intergenerational differences in our human protagonists.

The trio of actors playing non-humans might very well be the stars of the show, adding a layer of humour and absurdity to a story which is more straightforward in laying out human concerns about land.

In the attempt to make every creature a protagonist in the show, however, depth is sacrificed. The intergenerational conflict of the Lims and the Mulchands begins but never deepens, and there is not much to go on when trying to parse the relationship between the two mostly isolated families.

All these disparate lives are brought together by Wong Chee Wai’s monumental set which makes visible the disconcerting sense of alienation that the characters feel about their land.

In its flat whites and sharp, hostile angles, the residences appear clean, cold and rational. Stacked in three layers that hardly cross into each other, it is a visual arrangement which captures the isolating and standardised architecture of Housing Board flats in land-scarce Singapore.

This play shows that it is not so much that Singapore has not moved forward from the 1990s, but that the competing visions of scarce land might be a perpetual state of mind for Singapore residents, and therefore Singapore theatre.

One hopes that

The Studios’ overarching theme of Land for the next three years

will continue to spotlight works of Singapore theatre that have approached the issue from different vantage points and take their audiences to more unexpected places.

Book It/Three Years In The Life And Death Of Land

Where: Singtel Waterfront Theatre, 8 Raffles Avenue
When: Till Aug 13, various timings
Admission: From $45
Info:

str.sg/iiDb