The Review

The much anticipated review by Matthew Lyon of Flying Inkpot.



Capricorn Rising
Most physical theatre prides itself on its precision: consider the elastic grace of Ramesh Meyyappan, for example, or the clockwork choreography of many Finger Players productions. Cake Theatre's The Comedy of the Tragic Goats, however, seemed to have discarded precision in its urgent rush to get across what it wanted to say. The show resembled a hyper-caffeinated lit student hammering club-fisted at his keyboard, battering an essay deadline into submission. Its two actors looked like they were powered by far too many batteries. But this was a very good thing indeed - Goats' relentless attack gave it a unique aesthetic that drilled through the eyes and bubbled into veins and glands. It reeked of testosterone, piss and sweat; you could taste its blood on your tongue. And it didn't care that it was messy and bleeding: the play possessed the ecstatic abandon of a wounded animal - roaring and defiantly alive... and quite unlike any other theatre I have ever seen.

And it's not like precision had never had any part in the proceedings. The play was tight, well-timed and consistent (I saw it twice), and there must have been rehearsals, early on, when neither of its actors (Najib Soiman and Rizman Putra) sustained bruises; when neither was soaking wet by the end; when the props survived until next time. Certainly each moment of Mohd Fared Jainal's direction was carefully considered and expressively articulated... And while Natalie Hennedige's script (which was given out with the programme) was a mere sculptural doodle, it was one drawn with clean lines, consisting of an unadorned litany of actions for the characters to perform.

But while the play's skeleton possessed economy and grace, in performance these qualities were disguised under layers of convulsing meat. Consider an early confrontation scene in which Rizman plays one of the protagonists, Boo, a construction worker, and Najib plays his sadistic site supervisor. Najib leans back, setting his shoulders low and emphasizing his belly in an arrogant, Neanderthal slouch. His gaze is slow and glassy-eyed, but his fingers twitch from an instinct for cruelty built into their nerves. As Rizman leans over a work desk to assemble his materials, Najib lazily hefts a long metal pole and positions the pole against his crotch, creating a giant phallus. He eyes Rizman's backside with an autonomic detachment - and then he proceeds to mock-sodomise Rizman, all the while maintaining a disinterested demeanour, save for the slightest curling of his lip. Meanwhile, Rizman attempts to go about his business with the wary glances and shrunken posture of a kicked dog. He draws in his arms; his feet carefully, automatically measure their steps; his eyes refuse to look directly at his oppressor in the hope that meekness will assuage him - but nor does he look away entirely, keeping Najib always in his peripheral vision. And then in the moment when Boo finally snaps, Rizman's physicality detonates. His muscles violently swell; his pupils dilate yet attain a razor-sharp focus; his face contorts with galvanic, wind-tunnel ferocity. The performances in this production came not from the brain but from the red chemistry of the flesh. Although there was no spoken text in Goats, it seems wrong to call it mime, with all the Frenchified, theoretical baggage that word carries. This was physical theatre plain and simple.

Yet there was a depth to the piece – the kind of depth folktales have: echoing and unilluminated. It told the story of two prisoners: Boo the construction worker and Munsee the student-activist. The play chronicles the events that led to their imprisonment, the games they play to occupy themselves, the obsessions their captivity incites, and the torture they receive at the hands of a sinister clown Gestapo. The story was simple enough, but between the script and the direction, enough of a symbolic vocabulary was created to lend it an infrasonic resonance - an indefinable but persistent sense that there were larger issues at stake than the fate of these two men. For example, the jail Boo and Munsee find themselves in serves as a makeshift workshop (rendered in stained steel and wire mesh in Fared's versatile and fitting set design), and the pair use the materials they find to create effigies of their obsessions. Munsee builds an army of blocky clay soldiers, their right arms raised in salute to him, their Supreme Leader. Boo draws on a blackboard sketches of the utopia he dreams of constructing - an earthly paradise that uncannily resembles the Integrated Resort. Both men caress the blackboards with chalk, describing abstract but voluptuous female forms, before their lust overtakes them and they stab the chalk at the board, obsessively colour and recolour the genitals, and finally throw themselves against the flat surface in two-dimensional coitus. Politics, satire and sex - it may not be quite clear what Goats is trying to say, but it's certainly saying something big.

Audience members familiar with Hennedige's past work may be better able to parse Goats' symbolism. Hennedige has a deep distrust of podium-pontificators and architects of paradise - of men with grand plans and booming voices. For example, in Cheek, her take on the Antigone myth, Lim Kay Siu played Creon as a petty generalissimo issuing self-satisfied diktats to a zombified demos; while in Temple, Najib played a deluded latter-day Moses driving his flock to build a land of milk and honey in a neighbourhood sports hall. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral and Queen Ping also contain their own iterations of men (and in the latter case, a woman) with the mad glint of epiphany in their eyes - with a mania to command, to exhort, to see the face of God. How, then, does one stand against these obsessives and megalomaniacs? Organically. In Temple, Li Xie was a butterfly beating her wings against the glass case that confined her. Queen Ping saw Noorlinah Mohamed drowning in a tide of love and lust that carried her away from her dysfunctional family - and she inhaled deeply the lung-burning water. In Cheek, Jean Ng, playing Antigone, stood rooted as a tree, swaying but unmoved by Creon's bluster. Resist, and be who you are. Even when your resistance will have no effect; even when being yourself will kill you.

Except that it's not quite so simple in Goats. It seems that either Munsee or Boo is the son of the Goat Head, an assassinated military leader who planned to build Utopia. Each, then, must struggle against an impulse that threatens to overwhelm him - Munsee to rule, Boo to build - even as they struggle against the powers that have imprisoned them.

Najib and Rizman were brilliant at portraying these struggles. They burned with rage and desire and humiliation. They broke and rebuilt themselves. They succumbed to petty jealousies and one-upmanship... yet, ultimately, they achieved the kind of gnosis Aeschylus had in mind when he wrote that man must suffer to be wise. And all this without words and, more impressively, without the dancerly precision with which mime implies that it is a system of codified meanings as schematic as language. What Najib and Rizman did here was make meanings out of meat.

Complementing and intensifying the impact of these performances, Philip Tan's sound design was a deliberately low-fi affair - a scratchy, repetitive, narrow soundscape that gave the impression it was made with nails, vynil and red-eyed, insomniac nights.

As a theatre lover, it's a rare joy to see a production like this: avant-garde but mythic, chaotic but controlled. Every element held up - especially Fared's direction, which managed to be endlessly inventive as well as being easy to follow (although he might have paid a little more attention to Munsee's death, which wasn't very clear). But compared to the ten-layer, cherry-topped gateaux Cake usually serves up, Goats is a slightly thin slice. What I'd love to see more of is the fusion of scale and focus Cake achieved in Nothing (which I like even more than Amos did): a play big enough to blow you away and secure enough to know where you'll land. Until the next masterpiece comes along, though, Goats is an extremely welcome diversion.