Pulau

I so resent my disability to sustain a decent conversation with people in general. It makes me feel excessively dumb (in all senses of the word!) How do I describe to you how I feel about your play, for instance?

And because I didn't come across AT ALL intelligible with my halting mandarin and my awful AWFUL tongue-tiedness where the brain just flails around like a chicken wildly struggling in deep waters, and Char is not online for me to whine at, I shall attempt to articulate bits of foggy thoughts about Pulau here. Just to make me happy.

After mulling over the play in the shower (I think better in the shower, for some odd reason) I guess the main thing that comes to me with regards to Pulau is that sense of... incompleteness. It wasn't just the girl who was incomplete-- the girl who has lost something that she cannot remember (how often have we felt this way, if only in our dreams?) The story itself gives off, repeatedly, a--how do I put it? an "almost-but-not-quite" feeling. A desire, or a memory, or a clue to what this whole play about is slowly unravelled, unravelled... and then taken away. Whether with a rejection, or an awakening from the past with a sudden jerk, or a narrative that is suddenly interrupted and then overlapped by the next narrative...

And the sense of loss, too, that pervades the piece... So that you don't know, any more than the character does, what she really is seeking...

I'm trying to figure out why I'm having difficulties articulating my thoughts about the issues explored in the play (beyond the fact that I suck at verbal communication), so I'm turning the play over in my head and talking it out here. Writing allows me to attempt to catch fleeting images and stitch them into coherent picture, somehow, and you don't see me flounder and stammer for words-- I can hesitate and let my fingers hover over the keyboard and flip the thoughts over and over in my own time, without pressure. And you still get to see pretty paragraphs, worded comprehensively in the way I would like them to sound.

But I digress. Back to figuring out why the ambiguity I feel.. (and now the literary part kicks in) I'm thinking, even as the play makes allusions to Singapore, to politics, to entrapment upon an island, you can't just compress it into a single theme or issue and say, "This play is about being trapped under the rigid Singaporean rule" Because it isn't, I think. (Note the multiple disclaimers: It's always "I think", not "It is", because nobody can impose a single reading on any piece of work--it limits the richness of the text. And my views might be completely different from the writer's, for all I know) It's subversive, definitely, in little ways, and it provokes you to contemplation... to wonder at some point, for instance, why there are certain things "you" (the ruling party?) can impose on its people... of ridiculous little ironies that govern us even in our deaths... yet there is this vagueness that I can't... quite... explain... The significance of this sense of loss that you cannot identify... but what have we lost? Always, always it comes back to this thing that you have lost, that you're desperately seeking, that keeps you tied to a single place, trapped, so that the only movement, within the play, is the shift from one memory to another, all linked by this sense of incompleteness and loss...

And I love the fact that everything is done within a space no bigger than a square metre, a tiny "island" of sand that they never stepped out of =) The performers were brilliant =) Goodness, the emotional intensity! The lighting was well done, too, in setting the mood, and the sound gives the island a very 3D feel...

There. Now that I've got it out somewhat, I feel so so much better. *smiles* If I can at least work a sensible fraction of these into the conversation just now I wouldn't feel so utterly unintelligent, and I wouldn't have left the poor playwright feeling puzzled and bemused and awkward by my own fragmented incomplete sentences, and Charlene wouldn't have to do all the chatter and attempt desperately to involve me in the conversation as well. I am half tempted to email and say "Your play is brilliant, it's just that I need time to digest it because it's so heavily layered! Gimme a little more time and I can tell you how I feel about it" (now, that's not so hard to say, is it, Charm? Beyond the ummm, maybe, eh... yah...?)

Sigh. Think of all the darn times you can learn from thought-provoking discussions with these brilliant people, that all but disappear because you can't talk!

I am so thoroughly exasperated by my astounding communication skills sometimes.