Eleanor Wong Triple Bill

April 27th, 2003 theatre

I can’t get enough of Eleanor Wong. Watching a good play gives me encouragement to continue writing. I can never write like her but it makes me determined to try. In her three plays I see my private fantasies played out on stage: drama and breakdown of a marriage of convenience and the freedom and onerous duty of choosing passion. And she showed me something I know I can never know, not now, not ever: the tenderness of a stagnated love. My idol!

In inkpot.com/theatre, the reviewers raved about Eleanor Wong’s two plays. (I am disappointed no one liked the political note of the last installment: we are Singapore; we are what we make of it. Perhaps it had been graceless and unsubtle.) Thinking about the plays, I realise what Magaret Atwood (was it her?) said about writers was true. The sucess of a writer is not what she can do but also what she can’t. EW knows a great deal about the human heart and she doesn’t know a thing about putting it into a political perspective: that flaw in the third touched me with its awkwardness.

National Anxiety

April 24th, 2003 Uncategorized

As the SARs body count increases, the touchingly human in Singaporeans emerges. Fear and sympathy to those in trouble made most pockets especially loose to charities. Even our Deputy PM has become something close to human: in Parliament today, he said that “if you need, we have the resources; just don’t waste it”. This national anxiety is good for our collective soul. I feel hopeful: there is a chance that our people will mature with grace and elegance.

Gulf War Redux

April 11th, 2003 Uncategorized

Despite its messiness, everyone loves a war. The drama of blood and death so close to us yet so far and sanitary makes excellent television. Writers love the excitement of conflict. Soldiers secretly enjoy the killing and the bullying. Economists know that a prolonged effort will drag down main economic indices while a short term effort will yank US economy by its breeches. Politicians are bursting from saying, I told you so. Only when victory is prolonged that we start to acquire a distaste for war.

That Saddam Hussein is missing perhaps means the coalition isn’t looking for the right man: have they thought of someone slim and mustachless?

Failed Marraiges: bad topic?

April 5th, 2003 Uncategorized

There is something unlovable about the topic of a failed marraige. I did not realise this until today, reading again what I wrote I found no hope nor humour in the piece

Leslie Chung’s suicide

April 3rd, 2003 Obituaries

That Leslie Cheung jumped to his death seemed an usual method for the person I imagined him to be. It seemed so level headed: to buy a drink, tidily perform one’s last discharge of duty – the death note – and then execute the deed as planned. Doesn’t one’s courage run away that moment overlooking the cars below?