This wonderful monodrama by Singaporean Stella Kon came my way courtesy of Wild Rice.

The play, first performed in Malaysia in 1984, and then in Singapore a year later with Margaret Chan in the lead role, has been described as a "a turning point in Singapore theatre". The narrator is Emily Gan, and in the course of the play, she lays out her entire life story. She is a Nyonya, from the Peranakan Chinese community, whose origins go back to marriages between early Chinese immigrants to Malaya and locally born women, and from the beginning, her story had a massive resonance in Singapore: "Chan ... still recalls with disbelief that 'whole audiences would burst into tears'. There was just something about Emily, her climb from rags to riches and descent to emotional rags, that resonated with the Singaporean consciousness."

As the blurb from Wild Rice makes clear, we are pulled in two directions by the character of Emily: "Is she a heroine or a villain? A woman ahead of her time, or a woman trapped by tradition?" Abandoned by her mother after the death of her father, Emily is married off at the age of 14 to someone twice her age. She's smart and tough, and learns not only to survive in this distinguished and highly traditional Peranakan household, but also to work her way up to the position of matriarch.



Emily is snobby, bossy, manipulative -- and supremely vulnerable. We start out ready to laugh at her, but then we begin to admire and pity her in equal measure.

There is a pivotal passage that lays out the crux of Emily's dilemma:

"Do you understand what made me what I am? Before my breasts were grown, I learned that a woman is nothing in this world that men have made, except in the role that men demand of her. Your life is so meaningless, you have no value, except as you are a wife and mother: then be the very devil of a wife and mother. Look after your husband and family, yes: do everything for them, wrap them, bind them in the web of your providing, till they can't lift a finger to help themselves: so that husband and son and sister-in-law must all depend on you, so that you can control them and keep them in the palm of your hand. So that the whole world knows your worth -- so that a screaming girl-child, long ago, may be reassured that her life has some significance, that no-one is going to throw her back into the gutter."

How to navigate this trap, which makes her simultaneously victim and oppressor?

As a woman, Emily finds she can exercise power only in a very narrow realm. Therefore she over-exercises it. She seeks to control everything -- until she learns, by the bitterest of lessons, that she can't. In playing the role of "the very devil of a wife and mother", she loses her oldest son (who commits suicide because Emily is pressuring him to go in a direction that goes against his inclinations), and loses her husband (who moves in with his mistress, Diana Lee of Amber Road, and even when he eventually returns home, continues to withhold his love from his wife).

And Emily passes on the subjugation, urging her daughter, Doris, to "stop reading... [and] come and help me in the kitchen; when you are married you must know how to cook and look after your family".

She learns, it's true. When Doris announces her intention to make a hasty marriage, Emily persuades, rather than bullies, her to think again.

But she never entirely fathoms why her strategies for success have brought her such disappointment: "Richard, I was a good mother to you! Kheong, I was a good wife! Why did you both hate me then? I didn't do anything wrong!"

What she does gradually discover, on the other hand, is that she has control over very little.

At the end, Emily is alone not only on stage but in life. Her children have moved out, so the big, grand house is empty now, its stately rooms closed, its fabric falling into disrepair. She has sold most of the land that insulated it; the garden, with its lawns and fruit trees and tennis courts, is gone, and in true Singaporean fashion, tall apartment blocks and busy roads are pressing up against the property.

She addresses her dead son, who in her mind is still the only possible source of strength: "Mother's feeling very tired... I want to go home, sleep. You're a good boy. You take care of Mother, ya? My big, strong son."

She dances alone, as the ghostly music echoes. There's a shivery quality about this ending. It reminds me of the Browning poem:

Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned:
"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.
"The soul, doubtless, is immortal—where a soul can be discerned...

"Dust and ashes!" So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.



So, an exquisitely poignant play, exemplifying the blend of comedy and tragedy that is so hard to do well, and so very effective when it IS done well.

And Ivan Heng's performance was fabulous. His extraordinarily expressive face and vocal nuance ensure that he conveys the play's gamut of emotion impeccably.

But wait -- he?? Yes, that's the curious thing. Emily, in this production, is played by a man.

And although, as I said, he does it very, very well, I had a few question-marks.

As Heng himself points out, there's a long tradition of female impersonation in Peranakan wayang, where the matriarchs are played by men. So to that extent, the gender switch is very appropriate. And to have Emily's lines -- the passage quoted above, for example: "I learnt that a woman is nothing in this world that men have made, except in the roles that men demand of her" -- spoken by a man taking on the role of a woman is "pregnant with drama... and the irony is not lost on the audience".

On the other hand, as Kenneth Chan points out, "The playfulness of drag took on a performative power that demands attention for its own sake, at the expense of the play's central thematic examination of patriarchal oppression." This is particularly the case in the "interactive" parts of the play, where Emily draws the audience into her world -- rebuking late-comers, asking them to give account of their preparations for Chinese New Year, allocating kitchen tasks, and so on. It's all very funny, and also culturally informative, but at these moments, as Chan notes, "The performative excess of theatrical female impersonation, not only in terms of its larger-than-life spectacle but also its gender parody and comedic excess, deterritorializes drag from its political connections in the play and gives it a kind of narcissistic flourish."

So I remain ambivalent about the combination of drag, audience participation, and Emily.

But several days after seeing it, Heng's performance remains in my mind, as large and bright and moving as ever. I guess that's testimony enough to its haunting power.