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Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Live in Verse
There is no mistaking that Toy Factory has pulled out all the stops in producing this sumptuous visual and theatrical feast of a play, very apropos considering that the play centres on the activities in the run-up to a patriarch's sixtieth birthday. In fact, we see no actual feast (nor male protagonist) because all of it is suggested through verse, costume and stage design. The stage is minimally supplied by director-playwright-set designer Goh Boon Teck's two tall elegant showcases of fine white porcelain if only to provide a neutral backdrop so as to foreground Dorothy Png's opulently complex lighting schemes, other equally spectacular multimedia projections and Anthony Tan's Russian Doll-like ornate costumes.
Yet this feast is but superficial gloss compared to the emotional maelstrom that is whipped up by this birthday celebration. Five women (three sisters, one sister-in-law and one unmarried young cousin) congregate in the household for the occasion but ended up forming The Crab Flower Club, a poetry group, amongst themselves, collaboratively composing poetic lines by moonlight - words they will leave for a dreamed-of posterity. Taking inspiration from Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Chamber, Goh's play delineates the cloistered lives of upper class ladies during the Qing dynasty but actually uses the opportunity to restore to view seven poems from Cao's literary masterpiece. If poetry is used as an escape mechanism from the fetters of elite and strictly codified lifestyles for the women, Goh's intent is clearly more in the delivering of lyricism to the public's ears - though this seems slightly lost in the less than subtle translation into English.
The Crab Flower Club excels at being a disciplined study of contrasts, movements and metaphors. The ladies first appear onstage with their distinctive traits overpowered by the polyphony of their choral speaking, but each gains in individuality as they gradually shed their layers of costumes, which also carry inscriptions of their personalities - Cousin Liao Liao's penchant for astrology is reflected on the surface of her skirt by a print of a starfield and Wu Chang's drive for lyrical composition is shown by the calligraphy on her hems. Sisterly rivalries and enmity, especially between the first-born Wu Chang and her sister-in-law, Han Bing, ease into empathy and comradeship, fostered by the ameliorative effects of verse. The rather over-the-top comic bitching sessions and fanciful ambitions are counterweighted by the sisters' personal tragedies and shattered dreams. Even the curious addition of Hong Sek Chern in a performance of live ink painting at the back of the stage does not seem so out of place if one accepts the somewhat stretched metaphor and brackets her art within the cultural and aesthetic milieu of the play: Hong could easily be read as the master painter invited in to dedicate a work of art to the patriarch or as accompaniment to the sisters' verse writing (although at the end the painting was revealed to be that of the structures of women's private chambers of the time).
As much as I was entertained by the conviviality of the play's spirit, I can't help but feel that the production cuts too close to melodrama, not unlike the variety found in television period dramas. All the five actresses were suitably piquant and forceful, yet it might all have been a little too shrill with all the venom, spite and sarcasm so deliberately enunciated as if they were afraid the audience might fail to get the punchline. So life is not what it seems for the upper classes - there were miscarriages, deformities, beatings and sexual violations in their separate cases - and the women are presented as anchored by their pain and fidelity to the code of virtuous honour, doing and saying what might seem cruel but is undoubtedly necessary. But such twists are already the stuff of televisual and cinematic representations of the China of that era. What I most object to, though, are the conventional moralising of the rise and fall of empire that takes root in the play (i.e. "the glory of the nation" spent by "fatuous royals" and "ignorant commoners" serving as a reminder of the current financial calamity), as well as the overly symbolic rendering of life/death cycles with Liao Liao's expectant state after a night of drunken fooling coinciding with the ruin of the household after the death of its patriarch during his attempt to quash a sectarian uprising. I wished for moments of nuance and vulnerability, and also attention to historical and literary detail, because the actresses' stiff stoicism or overplayed histrionics made it difficult to come to more ambivalent conclusions about what it means to write women through poetry.
Source: http://www.inkpotreviews.com/2009reviews/0603,crab,ad.xml
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