Quills

Hehheh such hedonism yesterday...delightful, delightful. Having finished prelims two days later than most other people, now I have a lot of catching up to do =P

Well, nothing much to report for Hist S. It went much more smoothly than Lit S, I must say. Rather had fun yesterday doing the paper, did one question on history as science, and the globalisation question for Section C. I think 1.5h per essay is really reasonable, considering how we have to think on the spot. In fact, compared to the normal History A, I think the S Paper is in fact easier. At least you're given some breathing room.

Well, after that went out with the 13A people to Cine to have lunch at Phin's. Hehheh, Zhi An has the quirkiest eating habits =P Anyway, we were going to watch The Brothers Grimm, and to burn away the excess time after lunch we sauntered down to Kino, because there are only so many places that you can go in Orchard. And of course, since it's only one of the two really good bookstores on our delightful little island, also ran into practically the whole world there...let's see...HC Humans' Rui Min, Clarisse, and others who I don't know personally, then Weijie and Lilian, all in the space of walking from the Finance section to the Econs section. And then, on the way back to Cine, bumped into more Guitar people. In fact, bumped into 1B people too in the course of that afternoon. Yep, the whole world was celebrating the end of the Prelims, and everyone was in town.

Hmm The Brothers Grimm was all right as a movie, but didn't strike me as particularly brilliant, though. Maybe it's because it merged together practically every fairy tale in the book, with the exception of Snow White, perhaps. Some parts were really bizarre, like this mudball that comes to life and consumes this child before morphing into the gingerbread man and jumping into a conveniently located well of its own accord. And towards the end I think the farce was a bit over the top. But it was entertaining to spot the fragments of all the fairy tales in the movie, to see how all these fantasy elements can fit together so nicely into a (somewhat) coherent plot. And I swear, there was even a shout-out to R&J in there! An Italian biting his thumb at the evil witch queen. It was also rather amusing to see the blatant historical symbolism in there...taking place in the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, you see the arch-rationalist French Army bombarding this enchanted forest, and then the witch queen just blows a breath and the whole lot of them is swept away.

After that, no time to breathe, shuttled down to Clarke Quay to meet Ian, Thong and Vaish for dinner. She brought us to this rather quaint riverside restaurant called Cafe Iguana, and everything was Mexican-themed (afterwards it turned out that she brought us to the wrong restaurant, but ah well, it was rather nice, as far as mistakes go...). It strikes me that the Clarke Quay area has really been ruined by the sort of layering of modern architecture over the old shophouses. There's some really garish development there. Anyway, I think I can learn to like Mexican food...the chili and beans and fragrant rice with soft tortillas was really good! Hehheh, thank God for Mexicans, who invented such charming food. Oh, and for some reason, Vaish thought she recognised two of the staff there, and we met an RJ kid part-timing it there too.

Then it was scooting off for the cherry on top of the hedonistic cake, Quills at the DBS theatre. My gosh, it was the most brilliant play that I've watched in a long time, and also the most terrible play ever, arguably. The stage design was a veritable stroke of genius, designed diagonally so you can see more of the scene, and that design makes it harder for the deliberate diagonal stage positioning of the actors to look so choreographed. And the lights...the lights! Sublime. Liberal amounts of smoke, strategically placed spots to cast spooky silhouettes, and the pillars of the set, which under normal lighting look like they're melting, turned into visions of the Inferno. And then there was a point in time when suddenly, the whole set was pulsing with red, and you realise that the pillars also double as blood vessels, the channels of human passion and brutality. And twinkling little lights create starry backdrop, while candlelight on the floor marks out a cross, and against the positively hellish setting, these elegant touches were shockingly incongruous. They did not enooble Hell; Hell debased them.

And then the visual effects were further enhanced by the acting. The notorious Marquis de Sade in full white clothes, his writing in red wine, or even blood at one point. And as the play progresses, the Abbé tries to exorcise him of his depravity by stripping him of all civilised dress, which of course produces a very ironic effect considering what he is trying to do. Give the Marquis a scrap of civilised clothing, and he'll find a way to write his terrible tales on it. Strip him of every stitch, and he becomes his tales, the embodiment of the naked, primal, depraved human being.

Of course, the presence of a naked actor on stage has its visual impact (I still admire that actor deeply - what must it take to be able to keep your wits about you when hundreds of people are staring at your nudity?), but the play was more than an eyeful: it was a seamless melding of sensory inputs, an experience experienced at all levels of consciousness and perception. The sound carefully blended with the light to create a most exquisitely tense mood, the alluring lines drawing the audience unwillingly into the moral mire, until the point when they realise that they are actually willingly following the Marquis through the depths of the human soul.

There were some positively brilliant moments. First, at the end of the first act, was a story, whispered by the naked Marquis through the corridors of the asylum, another tale of terrible sexual appetites. And, as the actors on stage start to whisper in chorus, and the Marquis, caught up in the terrible beauty of the horrors, starts yelling the tale, so no one in the audience can avoid being buffeted by the full attack of the shouted words and the insiduousness of the whispers, there is a piercing scream, the stage blacks out - and a woman drops from the ceiling, hanged. That was the climax point of sheer terror, a flash of depravity in the halls that draws the audience in, and where the tale leaves room for the imagination, the audience experiences the unpleasantness of being able and willing to fill in the blanks. And though the dummy struck me as rather cheap after the interval, there is still the lingering discomfiture, because the Marquis was able to plough my own mind and reap a crop of its own horrible images.

Then there was this scene, in the second act, where the Abbé was pleading with the dead body of a girl for forgiveness, because he had not been able to restrain the Marquis from telling that tale, which drove an inmate mad enough to kill her and reenact the story on her gutted body. And then, in a rather surreal moment, the body wakes up, and begins an account of how she ascended into heaven and met Christ, who kissed her wounds and made them whole. And as she speaks in this reverent tone, smoke billows from the pillars, and out of it materialises, spookily and utterly silently, a figure in white with arms outstretched. As the smoke clears, you realise, sickeningly, that this Christlike figure is the Marquis in a full flowing robe suspended between two pillars. At this point, the girl's tale turns horrific, and she starts describing the sexual ministrations of the Almighty, and when she reaches the climax, the Marquis is bathed in red light, and bellows, "There is no God but me!". And then he disappears in another cloud of smoke, while the girl starts to seduce the Abbé, and in the end provikes him into penetrating her virginal body - at which time the scene returns to normal, and the Abbé realises he has been rutting with a cadaver.

It was utter poetry on stage. But the message it carried was utterly terrible. When the second act was playing itself out, there was this constant sickening sensation in the pit of my stomach, and yet I was at the edge of my seat watching because I could not but watch, and because a part of me actually does want to know. And there was not only the vision of the anti-Christ to contend with. The Abbé, in an effort to silence the depraved tales of the Marquis, first strips him and his room, then cuts off his tongue, and then chops off his fingers, toes and penis, and finally, when the Marquis is just a lump of flesh, flailing about helpless on the floor of his cell, "more meat than man," as the Abbé says, he finally cuts off his head to silence his thoughts. And as the boxes of disassembled body parts pile up, one can see the Abbé, in his devotion to delivering the Marquis from evil, unknowingly sacrificing his own goodness and descending to the Marquis's level of morbidity. It reminds me of that movie in which a murderer baits a cop to commit all seven deadly sins, the last of which is murder, because the cop has to kill him to stop him killing more people. It is this image, of goodness pouring itself into a void of deepest darkness to try to fill it, that is disturbing, because in the end, when all the goodness is spent, the darkness still proves as unfillable as ever. Lots of people noticed the parallels between this idea and Conrad's, but I think this play puts it across much more eloquently and chillingly. The idea is not new to me, this uncomfortable notion that human goodness is wasted in a world of unfathomable depravity, but it was the immediacy of the experience in the theatre, the impossibility of detaching yourself from the stage, that was so deeply unsettling.

The most disturbing idea is arguably what the Abbé says at the end. Driven mad by the Marquis's spectre lingering in his (and all of the audience's) mind, he ends up interred in his own asylum, and in the closing scene, paints the image of a lone man, standing on a sheer cliff at the end of the earth, with no angels to guide him and no devils to lead him astray. "Would that there were," he cries, "would that there were!" This, of course, is the idea that there is no utter morality or immorality, and without gods and devils, all goodness and evil must come from man himself. Without Satan, who can we blame for our own sins? And again, the idea is not new; Eliot and Hardy and Conrad all say it, that God and the Devil are equally just figments of our own reality-constructs, and nothing more than our own creation, and in the soul of man lies all the potentialities of abject evil and divine good. But it was the intimacy of the experience that was so unsettling. In that theatre, I came to the conclusion that if I were in the Abbé's shoes, I would be driven to come to the same conclusion too.

It is not God that I doubt; last night, while ruminating, I still felt that there is a God. It is my capacity to believe in Him that I must question.

After that play, I was really numbed, stunned, even drained. More or less deadened for most of the trip home. Partly, I guess, was because I'd been awake since 0530, but mostly I think because of the psychological exertions in Quills. I wonder what it is like, to be able to shrug off the impact of that play so easily. Maybe concentrate on the technical excellence rather than the message? But I thought that I needed to stew in all its implications for a while. It was not a pleasant play, but I must still give it laud for its technical and psychological mastery. It is plays like this that reaffirm my belief that the theatre is a superior form of art, the blend of all mediums of experience. The theatre is a potent psychological force indeed, and wielded in the hands of masters, brings the audience to face the limits of their own existence.

Well, so that was yesterday. A most brilliant day, I must say, even given the rather disturbing play at the end. in fact, perhaps it owes a lot to Quills to make it so doubly memorable. Hehheh, well, now that prelims have ended, and we have our time back, I plan to start reading a piece of fiction, and I plan to start playing the guitar again, and I plan to get bored and like it. This afternoon, going off to Kats's place for his birthday. Mmm...more hedonism to come, it seems =)

pondered by phoenican @ 24.9.05