A review of The Transplant, performed by The Finger Players and Rudra at the Singtel Waterfront Theatre, Singapore, 24 February 2024

This blog post has no connection to my employer, BBC News

It seems to me there are two kinds of sex in this world – the hilarious sort in which people follow their desires around and the other variety that’s, well, nobody else’s business. So just how funny is the first kind to judge by The Transplant? Measured in devibels – which are like decibels, only harder to digitalise – the combined laughter of one she-demon and three imps on Saturday night seemed to be a good indicator.

And, and, and I had not been expecting much comedy although the excited bloke sitting across the aisle from me on his own in the back seats was grinning like a monkey at the end of a particularly good tea party, before the lights had even dimmed. The innocent explanation was that the chap probably did not get out much, a bit like myself of late, although I did not display brightly striped socks nor was I perched on the edge of my seat like a myna bird nor was I studying the stage like a stalker. One car short of a Singapore MRT train maybe? One card short of a deck possibly? Well, he was welcome to his visions as long as he kept them to himself and anyway, what is the ship of fools without the village fool too? As long as he did not distract me from events on stage. And so crept the train of my thought into a tunnel as the lights went down and an unhappy home was conjured up before us.

The middle-class husband, wife, stay-at-home only son and ailing, bedridden grandmother look familiar. Unhappy homes are nothing new but the three demons of greed and hate and ignorance are normally inner – not actual demons perching on the sofa, licking the soup bowl and laughing in glorious iniquity as they do in this deeply clever play. If they incarnate the wife’s obsessions then the nubile new home help helpfully brought home by the husband at the start of the play may be his sexual fantasy made real, but what if the light-footed creature from the street has diabolical plans of her own? If only the husband had read the 18th Century Chinese classic Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, the play’s inspiration, he might have had some inkling that it would all end badly. Or equally it might not have made a blind bit of difference to him in the throes of his lust, of course.

In some ways this is a very simple morality play about the dangers of letting yourself be ruled by your passions, a cathartic parable with universal appeal, but three things make it a night of memorable theatre for me:

• First, the acting. The intensity with which the wife writhes in helpless despair in her room as her husband slips away, anything but unnoticed, to the younger woman’s room, put me in mind of Klaus-Maria Brandauer pacing his room in the 1985 film Colonel Redl.
• Second, the puppetry. Both the life-sized puppets which (who?) interact as humans with the actors and the actors who interact with other humans like life-sized marionettes.
• Third, the live heavy metal music which follows the action of the play quite operatically, played by legendary local “Vedic metal” band Rudra.

When it was all over and the full house had finished applauding, the audience was invited to stay behind for a Q&A with two of the performers plus Rudra’s frontman Kathir Aryaputra, and the director and writer, Oliver Chong. It was a chance for me to realise how much I had missed in the production, such as the symbolism of the family’s shoes. I also gained an insight into how artists spark off each other – Aryaputra described how the music had been conceived in the space of one zen hour when Chong came to meet him at a neighbourhood cafe.

Chong was happy to take questions but seemed more interested in hearing how the audience had interpreted his work than in explaining it to them. Indeed the writer and director seemed to take a positive delight in the questions, his face beaming beatifically like that of a proud father showing off his baby to the world, dangling his feet in their stripey socks and shoes on his second chair of the night, down at the business end of the theatre.