Theatre

WHERE ARE YOU?

Wild Rice

Wild Rice @ Funan, last Friday (Feb 5)

What happens when someone dies? Is there an afterlife? How do you mourn the dead?

These questions and more take centre stage in Where Are You?, a sensitive, assured production by Wild Rice that explores the experience of grieving.

Seven actors channel characters who contemplate rigor mortis and reincarnation, revisit memories of the dead and reenact Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic and Islamic rituals.

The set is sparse but provoking - as the dead depart, they climb through a large hole at the back of the set and disappear into an illuminated corridor parallel to the stage.

Where Are You?, devised from scratch over the past four months by director Sim Yan Ying and the current Singapore cast, has had several incarnations. In 2019, it was performed by a different group at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Last year, it was shown as a digital production.

The work's lengthy gestation seems to have served it well.

Much of it feels "just so" - the unobtrusive sound and lighting, the actors' light-footed physicality and their costumes, which have a touch of earthiness about them.

Scenes have been carefully thought through and the imagery is suggestive but never coercive: a ghost light; a serpentine scarf that turns into a winding sheet; smartphone zombies shuffling through the MRT underground.

Despite its subject matter, Where Are You? is often leavened with humour - such as when a Malay couple arrive in a void deck for their wedding only to find it is being used for a Chinese funeral.

If one is occasionally left feeling a bit cold (not just owing to the freezing temperatures in the theatre) it might be because Sim and the cast are trying to be emotionally honest.

Far from sentimental, Where Are You? takes a clear-eyed look at grief that is still being excavated, examined and processed. Deepest feelings, after all, often show in the form of restraint.

The production plays to the respective strengths of its actors: Zora Smith's rendition of the old song We'll Be Together Again, sung with a pleasing vibrato; and the adept footwork of Aiswarya Nair, who is trained in classical Indian dance.

The work's merits are all the more commendable when you consider the relative inexperience of much of the creative team.

Sim is one of four young theatre-makers selected for Wild Rice's Directing Residency Programme, a laudable investment in the next generation of artists amid the pressures of Covid-19.

The show's final scene, featuring a shift from ritual to science, draws on part of a fictional eulogy in NPR's podcast Planning Ahead Can Make A Difference In The End: "According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly."

The idea that our energy will still be around after we die is a comforting one. What remains, however, is a larger question, central to the work but never quite answered: Where do we go from here?

The production does not quite break its way into a new understanding, although this might be too much to ask. For the most part, Where Are You? is a trial, an attempt, a call into the void. And the rest, as they say, is silence.