Missing

4-7 July 2019, The Arts House, Page to Stage

“Missing possesses an intricately crafted, quintessentially Singaporean script…Under Rajagopal’s sensitive direction, Neo Swee Lin delivers one of her best performances in recent years that has brought both her characters to life in all their complexities, their faults and their virtues.”

–bakchormeeboy.com

About the production

Hui’s family have fallen into hard times and have had to move from tree-lined Bukit Timah to grubby Balestier, where the streets are narrow and there are too many lighting shops. The only consolation for the 13-year old Hui is her budding friendship with the family driver, Siva. Hui’s mother, Mei, reeling from the anguish of a failing marriage also seeks solace in Siva. But one day, he goes missing.

How and why did he disappear? We meet Hui and Mei years later, who tell their versions of the story.  

 About the Production / Creative Process

 Missing was first presented by Spare Room Productions (Tan Kheng Hua and Lim Yu-Beng) in July 2019 for The Arts House’s The Page on Stage programme. The series invites creatives from a range of disciplines to adapt Singaporean short stories for the stage.

 In this production, filmmaker, K Rajagopal reworks a short story of the same title by Ng Swee San. Ng’s delicately crafted coming-of-age story is about a young girl’s relationship with the family chauffeur. Under Rajagopal’s direction and with writer, Kaylene Tan’s text, creative liberties were taken – with the consent of Ng – and they imagined what the girl, Hui would be like as a grown up; fleshed out the character of the mother, Mei who is a peripheral character in the story and switched the ethnicity of the driver from Chinese to Indian. With these changes, the new Missing became an exploration of the taboos of inter-racial relationships, class and social expectations. The simple narrative revealed the complex relationship between mother and daughter, and the stories we tell and the ones we choose forget.

 From the onset, the creative team was interested in the interplay between different forms: stage and screen, short-story and play. In this production, the creative process brought up questions of adaptation: what happens when a text and characters traverse genre boundaries, and how is artistic control negotiated.

 Rajagopal brought a filmic dimension to the production by creating an evocative backdrop to the scenes and Kaylene drew from the conventions of screenwriting and editing in the creation of the text, using cutaways, flashbacks and jumpcuts to shift between times and spaces. The interaction of forms explores the nature of performance, as Neo Swee Lin with skill and sensitivity, demonstrates how characters are inhabited, and framed by their medium.

Production Credits:

Director: K Rajagopal

Writer: Kaylene Tan

Performer: Neo Swee Lin

Review by bakchormeeboy