I remember back in secondary school we often had a term for the kids who always seem to miss the point, we called them Blur Kings or Blur Queens. They would get everything besides the point, every remark except the punch lines. Often these BKs and BQs were academic over achievers as well. Much mirth and back breaking laughter were derived from the exploits of these BKs and BQs.

One gets a certain feeling of deja vu nowadays when reading some reviews in Life!’s theatre review columns. In particular, Clarissa Oon’s reviews tempts one to reminisce about happy times far gone.

Vacuity

On the surface level Oon gives a fair and often balanced review. There is however often an air of smugness and a tendency to clever remarks that masks a glaring vacuity in her writing.

Her judgment of what is considered good drama is truly questionable. For example in 1998 she nominated Kuo Pao Kun’s Sunset Rise as the best play of the year. In a review then she praised the production unreservedly. Kuo’s contribution to Singapore theatre cannot be denied. However even an ardent defender of Kuo’s work could see that Sunset Rise was his most sentimenal, mawkish, and badly written work.

This could be due to the fact that Kuo workshopped the play about old age from a group of relatively youthful performers who could hardly know the bitterness and loneliness of old age. This, of course, was entirely missed by Oon.
Ignorance
In reviewing theatre one should realise that theatre wasn’t created the day one decided to become the Theatre Critic of Singapore. There is a body of knowledge and practices that one should be familiar with. In other words one should not make the mistake of “if I’ve never seen it, its never existed before and therefore since I can’t fit it in my categories, it must be bad” mistake.

Oon’s standards of good theatre can be summed up as follows: it’s entertaining, its snappy and it says something. She displays a preference for one dimensional works, probably because it is neat. She shows an extreme low tolerance for messy complicated works where one is unsure of what the message exactly is. Works like these are “indulgent”. Up to today one can hardly be surely what exactly is the message of Pirandello’s plays or Beckett’s “Godot”. The complexity of art is a challenge to the maturity of a critic. I would venture to argue that Oon’s lack of tolerance for complexity stems perhaps from a lack of clarity. In other words perhaps she doesn’t know what she wants.

Seldom in her reviews does one see her referring to great works of drama and dramatic theory. In interviews she shows an appalling ignorance of such matters. She is always on the watch for sound bites and seeks to pigeon hole a work at the first opportunity. Her reviews show a lack of understanding of staging, writing, dramatic necessities. Her only gauge is her attention span. In this respect, it truly reeks of immature writing. I would recommend her and anyone who wishes to understand modern drama, to read Penguin’s “The Theory of the Modern Stage” edited by Eric Bentley, a true critic, for a good grounding in drama.

Too Much Respect For Institutionalized Figures
When one is lacking in knowledge of one’s subject, the safest answer is to look to institutionalized figures. The argument is that since so and so had been around so long, he/she surely cannot be wrong. This not only includes, in the case of Kuo, giving a good review of a bad production, but it also means giving space to these figures.

Oon frequently devotes large spaces to reviewing or critiquing the work of these figures. So called ‘huge’ negative pieces are actually giving credit where credit is not due. Just because the NAC spends a few million on a production doesn’t mean that it deserves that space. NAC is a bureaucracy and acts with its own brand of bureaucratic logic. If artists and critics allow their agendas to be dictated by a bureaucracy they can be said to be engaging in an act of self castration.

Oon dishes out her support according to theatre groups differentiated into ‘big’ and ‘small’ categories. In an article dated – “Wither Small Theatre Groups” she postulates the question of whether ‘small’ groups should be supported. Why doesn’t she ask whether ‘big’ groups should be supported? Apparently she takes size, monetary power, audience reach as a determinant in whether she supports a group at all. The article had an air of condescension in the sense of saying “look at what we are doing for you, when you don’t deserve support anyway.” The assumption, when one even asks such a question is that the scale of a performance determines its significance.

In absence of an original aesthetic judgment she substitutes size for quality. I think this is awful. We have to understand, we are not engaged in pornography, but art.

© Aporia Society MMI