by Angelica Chong 14A01B
1.5 Hours of Your Life You’re Never Getting Back: A Preview
It’s a Thursday night. Too late in the week to have any energy to finish (or should it be or perhaps start) your work, still 24 more hours to go before you can head out on a Friday night. Instead of laughing at cute cat videos at home by your lonesome, why not come to the PAC and laugh at your schoolmates, with your schoolmates, instead?
Where can I sign up?!!! you desperately ask, relieved to be free from adorable animals that you will never get to hold and cherish. And what is this preview for, anyway?
It’s for the so very adroitly named 1.5 Hours of Your Life You’re Never Getting Back: a one-of-a-kind (perhaps thankfully so!) performance, featuring our very own students directing and acting in two plays, one a slapstick satire and the other a literal ‘comedy of errors’, as well as performing a few of the most famous monologues in literature in between. Rest assured, you’ll get your money’s worth—and if not, you can always angrily approach any HP student for a refund/get a mob together, buy a couple of pitchforks, and go after the nearest hapless HPer for a refund. (I’m kidding. There will be no refunds as I’ve been told all proceeds will go straight to buying a flat-screen TV for LT6.) (That was also a joke.
King Lea— er, Kin Lee Er
King Lear? You pull back in horror as you read this. Wasn’t this supposed to be fun? Before you let any literature teachers catch you lamenting about the unfun-ness of Shakespeare, however, fret not—this isn’t just any ordinary play about a king and his avaricious daughters who drive him to madness and death; what the HPers have done with it is to use this premise and convert it into an ode to the vagaries of the local political scene. Call it blasphemy or genius or anything in between, but you’ll be undoubtedly entertained by the satirical twists in this new and improved, Singaporeanified version of the bard’s famous play. Since poking fun at our political leaders is every Singaporean’s favourite past-time, it’s pretty much got universal appeal. You definitely won’t have to pull up Sparknotes in the middle of this play to enjoy it.
Pride at Southanger Park
Everyone knows that feeling—when you’re watching a performance on stage, and suddenly someone messes up (forgetting their lines, breaking a prop, falling, farting, what have you) and you literally cannot bear to watch. Ah, the pains of second-hand embarrassment. Watching Pride at Southanger Park, though, you can leave those worries behind you. Rupert Bean’s Pride at Southanger Park is a piece of coarse acting, which takes aim at the blunders of amateur theatre by taking the very concept to its disastrous extreme. By bald-facedly parodying these bloopers and blunders, it’s hoped that theatre-goers will forget about the—at times—snobbish intellectualism of theatre, or the subtextual meaning behind every stage direction, and just enjoy themselves by having a good laugh. Of course, if you think about it, it’s easy for bad actors to act badly, or for good ones to make honest mistakes. For our budding home-grown actors, who cannot be labelled ‘stupendous’ but surely not ‘horrendous’, to act acting badly—well, that just might be a tad more tricky.
Oration through the Ages
If watching many people speaking on stage isn’t really your thing, maybe watching one person speaking on stage is. While listening to a lone figure rant and rave on stage for what seems to be an interminable period of time seems deathly boring, you might just enjoy this one. From Blanche DuBois to Shylock the Jew, the monologues being performed vary so much in theme, time period, and tone that they will be anything but monotonous. (However, if at the end of the day they still don’t rock your boat, you can always tune out the performers and make up your own words to amuse yourself. I’m sure no one will notice.)
Details
23rd January, Thursday, 7.00pm (doors open at 6.45pm) at the PAC (RI Y5-6 side)
Tickets go at $5, and you can get them from the canteen booth on the 22nd Jan (Wed), or order online at http://tinyurl.com/1point5hours. Alternatively, probably less attractively, approach any Year 6 HP student!
If you’re still on the fence, visit https://www.facebook.com/events/268811453274387/ for more details!
