Date viewed: 10 July 2022
Venue: Victoria Theatre
Duration: 70 min
Table of Contents
Synopsis
This monologue follows Kwa from girlhood and early romance to life as a political wife, mother, top conveyancing lawyer and main breadwinner of the Lee Family. It explores how it might have felt to be, as Lee Kuan Yew himself said, smarter than he but forever limited by gender to a secondary role.
After their secret marriage in Stratford-upon-Avon, Kwa Geok Choo and her husband were offered a law career in Britain with the promise of a comfortable private life for themselves and their children. Instead they chose to return to overthrow the British. The life they returned to couldn’t have been easy, with death threats against her husband and his new political party, rioters on the streets and a child gone missing…
Objective of Production
This is a tribute to the remarkable woman whose actions and influence are responsible for directing the waves, currents and tides that shape our lives in Singapore. It is a family love letter to all Singaporeans, in the hope that memories of Kwa Geok Choo, alongside those of our mothers, grandmothers and others who’ve passed on, will forever form the wellspring of our identity.
Impressions
Firstly, it’s not easy to stage a production about Madam Kwa. Everyone has their expectations of a production like this, so it is a question of how to find that pure sincerity to back it up and stage it with a genuine story and the right delivery.
There was no one angle the producers could take because everybody saw her differently. Starting with her family, her classmates, the people around her time… her children, her colleagues… everyone seems to have a different version of her. Instead, they were actually trying to elucidate that there was no one perspective. She was different things to different people, even to herself. So we are showing the different facets… but most of all from her side (first person perspective), how it must have been for herself in that moment in time, changing so many things.
And one can tell the extensive amount of research done, which allowed the play to be directed with a sense of conviction and certainty as Kwa shared her life and her truth.
In an interview, the playwright Ovidia Yu commented: " You read whole horrible thick books and then you find one paragraph about her! So it was a lot of digging for very little stuff. Most of it was from Lee Wei Ling’s newspaper columns and from Lee Kwan Yee’s writings and memoirs. We strung all that together along with information from people whose parents knew the Lees."
It's a lot of tedious and hard work.
What I liked about it
The story plays out as a soliloquy (monologue/talking to oneself), and it’s the different hers talking.
I can understand why is was presented as such; most of feedback they got came from people who reacted to her in different ways. So all this data was strung into an imaginative amalgamation of her reactions to various significant people in her life. It allowed us (the audience) to get a composite picture as we see her responding to the different people and opining about incidents in her life through the potent use of speech and body language.
Takeaways
The actor playing Kwa, Rui Shan, absolutely did her justice in this more-than-one-dimensional portrayal of Kwa. My main takeaway from this play was, really seeing the other side of Madam Kwa. When Rui Shan impressively brought out, the girlish, youthful, liking-pretty-things side of her, and yet that complete commitment and dedication once she decided to do something -- like magic. She didn’t lose your girlishness, her self and her playfulness even when she was focused on 'the Goal'. This is what effective story-telling does; it brings out the complexities and contradictions of the protagonist in a confluent and elegant manner -- all while touching the hearts of the audience.
References
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