Marking the 10th anniversary of its original performance, artists Claire Wong and Noorlinah Mohamed will present their durational piece “Recalling Mother” at Singapore’s Checkpoint Theatre.Originally performed in an intimate art gallery space, the show has since 2009 called Checkpoint its home and has been performed at the theater three times: in 2009, 2015, and now this 10th anniversary version. It is a vehicle through which the artists tell stories of living with and apart from their mothers.Rather than each performance feeling like a rehash of old material, “Recalling Mother” gains a new layer of poignancy every time it’s performed. The work was devised as a piece about the funny and sad cultural rifts between the two English speaking cosmopolitan women and their respective Cantonese and Malay-speaking mothers, and its impact gets greater with age.Similar to Michael Apted’s “Up” series of documentaries where he revisits a group of people every seven years, “Recalling Mother”’s intensity increases if you have experienced a previous version, allowing you to see the triumphs and tragedies that occur through the passage of time.In “Recalling Mother,” audiences get to see this in the shifting relationships Wong and Mohamed have with their female parent. Whereas the earliest performance gained a lot of its material from their mothers caring for (or trying to care for) them, both as children as adults, in its two later performances who has to care for who has shifted. As the two moms grow older, they are less able to be caretakers and become people who themselves need to be cared for, and this heartbreaking process that happens to most of us is recounted powerfully in the piece. Rather than just a tragedy about the ravages of time, “Recalling Mother” is also a joyful celebration of these two artists’ mothers specifically, mothers in general, and women even more generally. Mohamed and Wong’s mothers are clearly portrayed as smart, sharp, three-dimensional characters. They are women with flaws — Wong’s mother is impetuous, Mohamed’s stubborn — but are all the more compelling for them. These are women that you hope will still be around in another 10 years for more stories from “Recalling Mother”“Recalling Mother” will run March 24-27 at Esplanade Theatre Studio. Tickets are priced at $35.
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