Review: Hi, Can You Hear Me? by The Necessary Stage (or “heart.worm”)
Two days after watching the third last show of the run, I waited at a traffic light with this question running through my mind:
“Has the concept of the sanctity of life become so antiquated on this island nation we live on?
“Has it truly become more important for us to climb the corporate ladder of success, than to respect the sentience of life with which we coexist everyday?”
Unfortunately, I, for one, knew All Too Well what the answer was — at least to the majority of the people whom I interact with nowadays.
Having not written about anything in a while, you won’t see anything special in this piece of writing beyond an attempt at organising my thoughts in a somewhat-structured manner that simultaneously captures attention.
Hi, Can You Hear Me? hit me like a sack of bricks carried by the buffest foreman you could imagine on a construction site, for its message of accepting change, especially when we have no power to enact change over uncontrollable circumstances — amidst both the microcosms of our lives and the larger marco environs of the outside world — was All Too relevant to the current situation in life I was going through.
It was also at the same time bittersweet, yet heartwarming, charming, yet a stark wake-up-call — to pay attention to all the things we have been running away from.
From anything including the feelings we have never dared to admit to ourselves, to the brokenness and cruelty of the human condition which perpetuates violence of all sorts beyond the confines of our geographical abode — our struggles eventually always catch up with us.
Heaven
The lights come up on a stage on which a single countertop bar rests. Made of what ostensibly looks like polished and varnished wood, it presents a very HDB-esque style of a countertop, seemingly whitewashed, unassumingly simple in its design. But the skilful use of aptly multi-coloured and rainbow-hued rays of light by Multimedia Artist Brian Gothong Tan transforms a simple countertop bar on a stage into an ethereal bar that looms over each and every situation staged before the audience’s eyes — the aches, pains, joys, and grievances of every character that walks through Utama’s (Sharda Harrison) bar.
Early on in the play, we are made observers (voyeurs?) of Shimizu-san’s (Doppo Narita) daily life; he cooks up a ubiquitous Japanese meal of curry and rice, in between often forgetting which step of the process he has reached. These moments of forgetfulness are gently remedied by his Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) caretaker, Cloud.
With a play that references incredibly heavy-handed issues such as the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the earthquakes that led to the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, moments such as these in which we see the simple interactions of the story’s characters within their own daily lives gave me a sense of personal connection, and warmth, to the characters we see on stage — and indeed, to the stories they are telling, both of their own worlds, and of the larger conflicts within the outside world as well.
Intimacy is often misconstrued by the common person as closeness in terms of physical space, or outpourings of words and thoughts that we tell to no one else but those whom we love and cherish the most.
But true intimacy is forged in the mundane — where we go through life with someone who sees us in our houses, cooking, cleaning, washing up — activities and spaces that seem superficially ordinary, but which in fact often allows us to be seen at our most vulnerable. Giving audiences a window into Shimizu-san’s life — into how he lives out his life through the small day-to-day chores he does to provide himself with sustenance — made me feel like a part of the character’s lives, and indeed, made me care about their fate and how their individual struggles would be resolved.
But these insular, minuscule moments of each character’s lives are also juxtaposed against the backdrop of the ever-present and iconic presence of both the countertop bar and indeed, Utama herself.
The iconicity of both Utama herself and the countertop bar remaining center stage throughout the story (except in one of the last few scenes, where Utama finally is able to escape the bar) seems almost like a deific presence that watches over all the characters living out their tenderly intertwined lives.
Alvin and Yagnya’s masterful portrayal of the physical presence of both Utama and Utama’s bar that at once also hints at its metaphysical and watchful gaze over the world in which Hi, Can You Hear Me? is situated paints a deeply and hauntingly beautiful picture of an imagined reality in which the stories of the play are told. The surreal atmosphere and often heart-wrenching dialogue between the characters brought to mind similar moments in my own life — moments in which we know, despite the depth and strength of a connection with another person, it must end, for reasons only both parties know.
Moments in which we often struggle to remember — or say — what is most important to us.
Moments in which we struggle to break free from cyclical patterns of life that we are cursed (or blessed) to recognise, but lack the power to change.
Hell
At a certain point in the play, Utama describes the bar as neither “heaven nor hell”, or even Purgatory, but implies that it may be something else entirely, in the entire (un)conceivable existence of the afterlife and beyond.
As much as Utama depicts her bar as this otherworldly, detached realm, however, we as onlookers (or perhaps, as the show wears on, fellow participants in this world) bear witness to the entire spectrum of human emotions laid bare by all the characters. The crudest and harshest emotions of the human soul are the most visibly palpable — grief, loss, regret, pain — even longing.
With the indicative ringing of the entrance bell signifying the entrance of new characters and new stories, the confrontation between Utama and John (Rodney Oliveiro) in particular, brings to the fore the harsh aggression characterised by the intensity of emotion in a “play-fight” that is a caricature of what would be most individuals’ idea of a bar fight.
Most significantly, this is one of those rare times in which we see Utama emerge from behind the countertop bar— where she is trapped in, also at once symbolising her entrapment within the ethereal bar — to “fight” John. Sharda’s flowing moments and animalistic habitation of the tiger’s presence truly gives us a glimpse into the wildness of the tiger’s animal spirit; perhaps this being one of the only few times where Utama emerges from her personified role as the bartender from behind the counter points towards how freedom is truly only achieved by giving in and accepting who we truly are — which, in Utama’s case, is the true wildness of the spirit of the tiger.
The confrontation, fight, and John’s apology within moments of composing himself again after the fight with Utama is over provides a stark contrast against the heartwarming scenes where Shimizu is seen in his daily life earlier, illustrating once again both the complexity and contradictions of the enigma which is human emotion, for the things we feel (sometimes, most frustratingly, all at once) can be so polarising as to make us wonder in infuriating awe how our small physical stature is able to contain such heightened emotional energy.
Purgatory
Hi, Can You Hear Me? brought together four archetypes (stereotypes?) of humans commonly portrayed in popular culture — humans with personalities, and perhaps external facades, that we ourselves may have come across in the people we have met in our lives thus far:
Shimizu-san, the end-of-life Japanese salaryman who has strived in the Sisyphean task of both providing for his children’s materials needs but also attempting to tell them that he loves them.
Sindhu, the paradigm of a successful woman, who has seemingly “made it” despite both the barriers of her gender and her race in a patriarchal society, and even in her golden years, is still haunted by expectations (more so perhaps her own) to hold it all together and be seen as the typical “strong, independent woman”.
And John — who also, despite having what seems to be a stable marriage, and a child on the way — finds… comfort? reassurance? in an extra-martial relationship which he knows is ultimately ephemeral yet cannot let go of — for it provides the illusion of control and calm to his tumultuous inner world that triumphs the overarching awareness that this center cannot hold; eventually, it will give way to the anarchy already present in the outside world.
Although it seems as though Utama is the eye of the storm, a safe port of call where the characters may shelter (temporarily) from the chaos and conflict of their lives, her inner dissatisfaction, frustration, and ultimate resentment at the humans who have caused her demise eventually rear themselves in the form of a long-overdue tirade towards Guan Yin (Zelda Tatiana Ng) — revealing that much like her regular patrons, she too is consumed by the same intensity of rage and emotional upheaval that entraps her within her extraplanar bar.
Though having taken on the identify of a god (put upon her by humans), Guan Yin herself much like Utama is in fact also personified and humanised — revealed through the grief-filled interactions she has with Shimizu, through confiding of her feelings in Utama, and even in the final tender moment that she shares with Utama prior to Utama finally being able to leave the bar behind.
And thus — despite Utama and Guan Yin themselves seeming like exceptions to the buffet of archetypal humans presented in the forms of Sindhu, John, and Shimizu, we eventually realise that much like the other characters, Utama and Guan Yin face similar struggles within their inner world that, by certain definitions, would make them human too.
But the interpretation of these characters experiencing emotion and conflict as a “human experience” then begs the question — does the experience of all sentient life have to be seen as “human” for us to value it, and to be important? What if all of these issues were experienced — and indeed, struggled with — by all of life around us — the animals, the plant life, the smallest of micro-organisms, the plankton in the sea and the bacteria that suffuse the air around us, as inexplicable as that idea may be?
“At exactly 8.52pm, I felt like going back and having a Singapore sling.
“At exactly 9.04pm [because of Sindhu’s line], I felt like having a whiskey on the rocks.”
At two exact moments during the narrative of Hi, Can You Hear Me?, I found myself writing these statements down in my notes — for they were exactly how I felt upon seeing (and hearing) the mention of each drink during the play.
In particular, the Singapore Sling was mentioned during a video projection of a parody-documentary, where John narrated the story within a black-and-white video of how the last tiger killed in Singapore found its way into the Bar and Billard Room of Raffles Hotel and was subsequently shot. The said documentary has become a well-known icon through Singapore due to its affiliation with the Raffles Hotel. Multimedia projections such as this, intricately and intentionally curated by Brian also greatly enhanced the mystical and at times even supernatural air of the story, which added to the audience feeling as though we were bearing witness to this tale outside of time within the same times and spaces in which the characters (and the bar) resided.
The two lines of my notes summed up my sentiments of the show astutely; I think a show that could make me want to partake and be a part of the character’s stories — to want to intervene in their lives and journey with and support them in their struggles, is a show that has successfully made me care. And that, I think, makes all the difference in the world.
“We live with the choices we make.”
— Utama
Hi, Can You Hear Me? was a play staged by The Necessary Stage (TNS) which followed various characters whose normalcies had been fractured due to events and experiences beyond their control. It examined questions such as:
How and why do their paths cross?
When everything that was going smoothly gets disrupted, what is there left to cling to?
Originally written as part of TNS’s playwrights’ development programme, Playwrights’ Cove 2020, and later staged as part of TNS’s 2024 season, the show ran from 21–24 March, and 27–30 March 2024, at the Esplanade Theatre Studio.
For more information, refer to the programme booklet here.
