As an art form that caters to non-mainstream audiences, the theatre prizes its “live” aspect above all else, and was badly impacted during the pandemic. As for puppetry, considered even more non-mainstream than the non-mainstream theatre, what sort of predicament does it find itself in?
It turns out that the predicament is this – the shortage of manpower and talent, made even more urgent during the pandemic. The Finger Players Co-Artistic Director Myra Loke lamented in an interview with Lian He Zao Bao: “Actually, the puppets are alright. It is us - the humans who are not. We are witnessing the passing of puppet masters, or puppet makers and puppeteers needing to choose another industry to sustain their living.”
Despite that, The Finger Players are still optimistic in the face of this predicament. In addition to the launch of Puppet Origin Stories repository and the Puppet Origin Stories@126 production (Toggle here to view the review), the Co-Artistic Directors Ellison and and Myra Loke, who stepped into this role in 2019, started The Maker’s Lab in 2020, an initiative to groom makers and designers of puppets and objects. From 2020 to 2022, The Finger Players has seen through three cycles of The Maker’s Lab. Each cycle aims to provide spaces and resources to groom one Maker, and since then three Makers have completed the programme.
Holding on to the belief that puppets should be the starting point of every creation, The Finger Players put together three groups of creatives to create three pieces – each group consisting a Director, Playwright and Actors, all theatre heavyweights in their own right. The triplebill comprising My Father the AI Machine, Parting, and The Bench was created and presented at the NLB Drama Centre Black Box Theatre, titled The Puppets are Alright. The Puppets are Alright is the swan song production of Co-Artistic Director Ellison Tan and Myra Loke, before Oliver Chong takes over the reins. Whether the original title in English or the Chinese translation, it is an optimistic take of their hopes for the future of puppetry.
The Finger Players has set up an exhibition at the foyer, allowing the audiences to witness the Maker’s journey and reflections through their time at The Maker’s Lab. The artefacts include the prototypes and mechanisms of the puppets featured in The Puppets are Alright, offering the audiences a glimpse into the quirky design insight of each puppet, letting us have a chance at being close to them, touching them, truly allowing the puppets to go back into the spotlight (Reviewer Teo Pei Si titles her review as such). In The Puppets are Alright, puppets take the spotlight.
I couldn't help but wonder: why puppets, and not humans as main characters? Can puppets really perform effects that humans can’t, and give meaning to performance in a way that human actors can’t? Conversely, if puppets can be replaced by humans without affecting the performance, does a puppetry performance then lose its meaning?
Cautionary Tale: My Father the AI Machine
My Father the AI Machine is directed by Liew Jiayi and written by Chong Tze Chien, and touches on the hot button topic that is artificial intelligence, to explore humanity's abnormal reluctance to keep the dead close to them. In My Father the AI Machine, a piece set in the near future, the Singapore government has developed a black technology - brain waves of the dying are stored and then implanted into Artificial Intelligence. Mother (Doreen Toh) stores her deceased husband's brain waves in artificial intelligence to allow him to continue “living”, and spends the rest of her life dedicated to upgrading this AI father; the son (Neo Haibin) cannot accept that this robot is his father. With age, conflicts with his mother became more and more acute.
Using puppets to interpret artificial intelligence is a true match made in heaven. The puppet featured in My Father the AI Machine was designed and created by Sim Xin Feng, the maker from cycle one of The Maker’s Lab. This puppet incorporates animatronic technology; the performer can use the joystick to control the puppet’s eye movements, and not only does the eyes move, they also emit light, and there is a mechanism inbuilt in the chest cavity that spits out paper. The rawness and lo-fi quality of this puppet is also in line with the context of My Father the AI Machine - due to the family’s financial predicament, Mother can only afford a robot with moving eyes.
An excellent sci-fi work is often a foreshadow of what is to come. The anti-dystopic My Father the AI Machine is a sharp take on the social problems that may be caused by the disparity between the rich and the poor. In spite of technology’s rapid change, it cannot eradicate the greed in human beings. Businesses will capitalize on the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Only the richest can afford lifelike artificial intelligence, with the everyday man only being able to scrap a few coins for a “Frankenstein” equivalent. Mother takes on multiple part time jobs, but still fail to take on a loan for a mouthpiece for the AI Machine Father, and can only afford to install a mechanism to spit out notes from his chest. In fact, this technology may not have retained the brain waves of the dying person at all, but that the powerful learning ability of artificial intelligence allows them to take on the pretence of likening to the dead. What’s most frightening is that the government may be using this technology to manipulate and supervise its citizens, thereby enforcing them to stay within the line, under the guise of helping their loved ones “live beyond death”.
The subversion at the end of My Father the AI Machine is the cherry on top of the cake, elevating the concept of the story. The son who has always opposed artificial intelligence, actually implanted his mother's brainwaves into the AI Machine father after his mother passed away, because of how much he loved her. The son chose this same morbid method of retaining his mother, in order to let his loved ones have a life after death. It is ironic but completely understandable. And because he couldn't afford the expenses, he could only let his mother adopt the shell of the AI Machine Father (All he could afford was a wig, which he put on for her). We can almost imagine the son devoting the rest of his life to upgrading his AI Mother, falling into the same vicious cycle.
When the lights come down at the end of the show, AI Father’s (or should it now be AI Mother?) glowing eyes seem to be suspended in the dark, and we get a sense of “Big Brother Watching You”. This impactful image sears itself in our memories.
Modern Strange Tale: Parting
Parting is written and directed by Oliver Chong, inspired by his first creation I'm Just a Piano Teacher. It follows a man’s journey (played by Alvin Chiam) as he deals with the end of a relationship. Parting is a non-narrative, stream-of-consciousness piece - you can interpret Parting from a realistic perspective, regard it as urban horror, a story of ghostly revenge; or from a symbolic perspective, that Parting is an physical embodiment of a murderous love-hate relationship.
The three puppeteers (Jo Kwek, Angelina Chandra, and Rachel Nip) in Parting take on a ghostly image and physicality, and are visually impactful from the get go. They are not just puppeteers, they are also the metaphors of this show, and they give Parting another layer of meaning. They take turns appearing in a jump scare manner, accompanied by the sound of doors opening and closing, and move onstage in a macabre manner, like three mischievous ghouls, or perhaps the man’s deepest fears.
The fragmented(appears as limbs, torso and head) and underwear-clad female puppet first appearance reminds one of meat being hung on hooks at the butchers, only now they are hung in various segments of the wardrobe. This reminds me of the poet Xia Yu's "Sweet Revenge", where we see an imagery of a lover being marinaded. The man tries to pack the body parts into different suitcases, and the three ghouls begin to play tricks on the man, manipulating the body parts. There are clasps attached to these body parts, which allows them to be assembled into a “human”, or to be taken apart. Three ghouls manipulate the female puppet to interact with the man, revealing a relationship full of violence and blood.
Is the resemblance of a female puppet to the sex doll, a metaphor of the man’s objectification of her? Or is the fragmented female puppet the ghost of a dismembered woman, or the fragmented image and memory after a breakup?
In any case, this female puppet designed by The Maker's Lab's second puppet maker Loo Anni, fully expresses the meaning of Parting, as its design allows it to be disassembled and assembled, perfectly reproducing a modern day version of Strange Tales from Liaozhai.
"Patricide" complex: The Bench
The Bench is written by Ellison Tan Yuyang and directed by Myra Loke, and it tells the story of a father and his son, through their life experiences and dialogue, at various stages of their life. The single parent father (played by Thirunalan Sasitharan) raised his son Paul (played by Ian Tan) single-handedly, and through the art of storytelling, constructs a rich imaginative world for Paul, in a bid to teach him the various principles of life. However, as he grew up, Paul discovered that the stories from his father were actually adapted from literary classics, lacking originality and reality, and believed his father to have deceived him. Paul having grown up, longs to leave this world that his father has built for him, and at the same time hopes that his father can live for himself.
The Bench draws from many classics (the most obvious being Homer's "Iliad"), and demonstrates the literary foundation of playwright Ellison Tan - these allusions afford the story a poetic layer, in a way that’s not contrived nor didactic. For example, in a scene where the Father adapted the story of the Iliad into an adventure undertaken by “Spelling" to arouse Paul's interest in learning new words, and to teach Paul to view failure positively. I especially like this scene for its warmth and liveliness. And I wonder if it only serves to contrast their later conflict even further?
The Bench is an exploration of a motif often found in Western literature – “Patricide” -
especially the end of a father and son’s reliance on each other, their route to independence. The dialogue between the two take place on a bench in the center of the stage. The bench is suited with sensors, and each sensor pad would activate a note when touched. When the two are talking, they will touch the sensor pads, and we would hear musical notes being played in dissonance or harmony, reflecting the change in their relationship. It is a pity that the effect of this was not fully realized, and so the metaphor of the bench was unable to be fulfilled. Moreover, The Bench is limited by this form of dialogue. The dramatic conflict between father and son are all carried out through dialogue, and lacks dramatic action and tension.
The most important image of The Bench is actually the bubble - the creative team chose the bubble as a metaphor to allude to the world that Father has built for Paul, beautiful but fragile. The Paul puppet, designed by The Maker’s Lab’s Cycle three Maker Marilyn Ang, can spit bubbles from its mouth. If the bubbles from child Paul is a metaphor for childhood innocence, does the bursting of those bubbles imply the disillusionment of innocence? At the end of The Bench, a mechanism along the edge of the stage is raised, and we expect to see a gigantic bubble sheet enveloping the entire stage. However in the performance that I watched, several bubbles had burst mid-way, and the intended effect was not successfully produced, and I’m led to wonder if this effect is actually better suited to reflect the fragility and impracticality of the imaginary world that Father had built for Paul?
If the symbolisms of the bubbles in The Bench could be more unified and clear, would it elevate the themes of the show？ And if we were to eliminate the bubble-spitting mechanism of Paul, and the necessity of having a character play multiple ages, can Paul be portrayed by a human actor and not a puppet?
Although the three pieces share the same set, there seems to be no connection between the three, and as such did not manage to complement one another. Even the radio, a prop that appears in all three pieces, only serves as a prop to transition across pieces. Having placed the puppets back in the spotlight, would it have been more impactful to create a more concrete, overarching theme to thread the three pieces together, so that the audience can thoroughly reflect and experience the irreplaceable charm of puppetry?
The puppets will be alright. The various "emergency" measures by The Finger Players in the past three years have steered Singapore puppetry in a positive and optimistic direction, allowing the audience to believe that indeed, puppets will no longer be in a predicament.
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