Singapore’s golden jubilee seems to be bringing out the best in the local artistic community. After 7 Letters, the Singaporean filmmaking community’s emotional love letter to the little red dot, it’s the turn of the theater community to shine with a new play, Hotel, commissioned as part of the Singapore International Festival of the Arts and bringing together some of its best playwriting, directing, and acting talent.With Hotel, co-written by Alfian Sa’at and Marcia Vanderstraaten, theater company Wild Rice takes the audience on a rollercoaster ride through the past 100 years, with fire-cracking dialogues that balance humor with dramatic moments where actors’ skills shine.Co-directed by Ivan Heng and Glen Goei, it is a tour de force for the superb cast, who must master multiple characters and extended dialogues in multiple languages and dialects. The cast are put through many emotional gambits, and each member is given a time to shine.The play is actually a succession of 11 vignettes, one for each decade, with all the action taking place in the same room in a luxury hotel; the room’s ever changing occupants acting as the perfect metaphor for our short stay on earth and the transient nature of an immigrant island like Singapore. Each scene has its own set of characters and could be seen independently as a self-contained short-play (though some storylines continue through the years to show later implications of some actions).Hotel illustrates how history seems destined to be repeated. The first vignette is set again the aftermath of the 1915 Sepoy Mutiny, on the day the mutineer Indian soldiers will be executed, and provides an opportunity to consider racism, religion, and the death penalty while the second jumps in to look at maid abuse in 1925. The parallels to recent riots and continuing concern for domestic worker’s welfare provide a serious underlining to the play from the get-go, though it is balanced with plenty of comic relief and never becomes ponderous.The strength of the first part of the five-hour play is its pacing and the mix of serious subjects with comic elements whether dealing with spiritualism and superstition or the nascent local moviemaking scene of the 1950s, when Indian directors came in to create escapist fantasies, these scenes offering plenty of laughs and contrasting with one that concerns wartime comfort women, but also love across the divide of war and the consequences when the war ends.The second part of the play starts in 1975 with a scene that provides the most laughs as a Vietnam War veteran high on drugs and alcohol ends up in the room with two transsexuals — an opportunity to reflect on how ahead of its time the island was in terms of transsexual operations in the region yet contrasting the conservative stance today on many LGBT issues. But after this hilarious drug-fueled fantasy scene – that includes giant penises and a stern version of Lee Kuan Yew preaching against aping the west– the playwrights turn increasingly serious and melancholic as the 21st century nears.Multiculturalism is considered in a scene about a Chinese bride marrying an Indian groom, while the issue of prejudice against Muslims in a post 9/11 environment is considered in another. An overarching theme is that for all its talk of multiculturalism and embrace of diversity, differences and misunderstanding of each other’s cultures remain; as one character puts it at the end, the only diversity the country has truly achieved is that of its food.One would have hoped the final scene could conclude on a more upbeat note, rather than a melancholic one, but it’ll leave theater goers with plenty to think on and overall the play is such an enjoyable rollercoaster it is bound to become one of Wild Rice’s classics to be brought back, hopefully very soon!
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