Mad Forest's first review

18 years ago on this day, a group of young men in Timişoara carried a Romanian flag with a hole cut in it and sang "Deşteaptă-te, române!" (Wake Up, Romanian). Today, young & W!LD gets its first review for Mad Forest as we remember the Romanians who lived, loved and lost in the name of freedom.

The Straits Times
Life! (page 12)
Tuesday 18 December 2007

Rare and arresting time in a Mad Forest

By Hong Xinyi

UPRISING: The revolution is seen from the perspective of various characters. -- PHOTO: WILD RICE

theatre

MAD FOREST

young & Wild

The Republic Cultural Centre, Lab

Last Thursday

THE acting was uneven, the pacing lagged in the seemingly interminable final act and the cast's attempt at Romanian accents was, perhaps expectedly, an acquired taste.

But in the final count, one is inclined to overlook all these things, because there is so much that is rare and arresting about this production of British playwright Caryl Churchill's 1990 piece.

The first act introduces two families living under the rule of Romania's communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989, on the brink of a mass uprising that would violently topple his brutal regime. The third act revolves around what happens to the families in the aftermath of the revolution.

The second act, titled December, is based on interviews conducted by Churchill in Romania. It breaks away from this narrative by enacting the revolution from the perspectives of myriad new characters.

What December does is re-create the visceral rhythms of a revolution like the movements of a symphony. The first stirrings of provocation build into the building murmurs of discontent. Then, everything seems to falter, before a wave of fearful fervour crests in a moment of purity - the end of a way of life as monumental figures are demolished.

Before the doubts and division set in among the population once again, there is this: The sense of a whole country waking up together, wounded and intensely alive like ravaged newborns.

Under the direction of Jonathan Lim, what the 13 performers accomplish in this section is nothing short of breathtaking. They move in a circle at first, with individuals stepping out to deliver their lines, the rest murmuring snatches of dialogue under their breaths. As gunshots and confusion set in, they scatter like a burst of fireworks, before coming together again in a moving tableau of song.

The entire thing mesmerises like a taut, fervent dance; the ensemble moves and breathes as one.

And for this spectacle alone, spending nearly three hours in this Mad Forest was completely worth it.

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More reviews:

Youth.sg
http://www.youth.sg/content/view/4036/51/

The Substation Magazine
http://www.substation.org/mag/review/once-upon-a-time-in-romania.html

The Flying Inkpot has also released a tentative first-impression review
http://www.inkpot.com/theatre/

Young & W!LD in ST Life!

The Straits Times
Life! (page 12)
Thursday 13 December 2007

Revolution at your fingertips

The Internet played an important role in this play about the Romanian Revolution

By Hong Xinyi, ARTS REPORTER

ACCENT ON ACCURACY: Besides learning to deliver their lines with Romanian accents, the cast of Mad Forest also role-played and did extensive research on the revolution. -- PHOTO: WILD RICE

EXPECT Romanian accents and revolutionary fervour in the young & Wild production of the 1990 play, Mad Forest.

Written by English playwright Caryl Churchill, it was inspired by, and staged shortly after, the Romanian Revolution of December 1989, in which the communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu was violently overthrown. This month marks the 18th anniversary of the revolution.

Director Jonathan Lim, 32, explaining his decision to ask the cast of 13 Singaporeans to deliver the lines with Romanian accents, says: 'I didn't want the actors or the audience to have a sense of familiarity at all.

'The accent makes the actors think differently when they perform and helps the audience to travel with us to a different place.'

He adds jokingly: 'You have to be careful with the Romanian accent. Lay it on more than just a tinge and you can start to sound like Count Dracula.'

Lim, the associate artistic director of theatre group Wild Rice, runs the young & Wild branch of the group, which was set up to train up-and-coming local performers like the 13 actors performing in Mad Forest.

Their first showcase was held earlier this year - a production of the considerably more lighthearted romantic comedy, On North Diversion Road.

This time, Lim wanted to stretch the actors more by selecting a play that 'still had an ensemble-based energy, but something heavier, with more depth and bite'.

As part of the preparation process, the cast played role-playing games as secret police agents and the people trying to escape persecution. They also did extensive research on the revolution, trawling the Internet for things like photographic documentation of the events as well as Romanian folk songs.

'There is so much material available now because of the Internet. We know more now about the revolution than the people who actually lived through it. The whole revolution is at your fingertips, so we really exploited the advantages of being in 2007 to the maximum,' says Lim.

This is also a significant play for him as he first saw a TheatreWorks black box production of it as a junior college student in 1991. It featured now-established local actors like Lim Yu-Beng and Gerald Chew.

'It was such a tiny space, such powerful actors, and this mercilessly powerful text,' he recalls. 'I had never seen Singapore theatre like that, it was very refreshing.

'It made me feel that there was more to Singapore theatre, that it could have this social bent.'

Directing his own version of this memorable play has been an enterprise of creating a tight-knit ensemble of performers who feed off one another's energy.

In his black box version, for instance, all 13 actors will be on stage throughout the play, even when they have no lines.

'No one will be alone,' he says. 'I don't remember the details of the 1991 production. It had a certain energy and I have tried to keep that.'

hxinyi@sph.com.sg

Mad Forest plays at The Republic Cultural Centre's Lab (Republic Polytechnic, 9 Woodlands Avenue 9) till Sunday, 8pm with 2.30pm weekend matinees. Tickets from Gatecrash (www.gatecrash.com.sg, tel: 6222-5595).

Mad Forest opens today!

After exhausting days of bumping in and setting up, we're all set to open! We're so proud of our front-of-house display, which took great effort and ingenuity to put together. The end result is worth it!

Take a few minutes before the play begins and during the interval to glance through the chronological pictures of the revolution. Many of them are incredibly powerful.

Looks familiar? The images from the front-of-house display are the very same ones we had on our research wall at our 27A Kerbau Road rehearsal space and have been part of our rehearsal world for the past three months.

More pics from the fight choreography that Yu Beng helped us with. Eleanor was clearly having the time of her life atop Qianchou.

Meanwhile, Terence gets slapped around.

Personal thrill: I've specially ordered these pendants as first-night gifts. I doubt any of them will be reading this entry before our call time at 9am tomorrow...I mean, today...so this will be a nice surprise :) Isn't it so apt?

fighting in the forest

Last week I invited actor Lim Yu Beng to come and help us work on the complex and potentially dangerous brawling scene at the end of Act3. Yu Beng was in the 1991 Theatreworks cast of Mad Forest - he played Radu (and his presence at rehearsals stressed Terence the current Radu considerably...) Its been 16 years and Yu Beng's memories of that show were hazy at first, but as we got into the scene, bits and pieces came back to him, and he recalled especially how explosively violent the brawl was back then.

The aim I had was to create a brawl that balanced the sudden explosion of long-harboured enmity with the ongoing development of character relationships - it needed to kick ass while at the same time continuing to unravel the individual character journeys.

By the end of the session, we'd developed a whole new brawl - very different from the one Yu Beng remembers, and very unusual in its dramatic precision.


It'll take your breath away! Come and see!

random - meet Valentin aka Chocolate Mouse

this is our mascot - an adorable little mouse that has begun popping by to watch our rehearsals, and sometimes gives furtive acting notes...

rehearsal snaps volume 2

More stretchey moments....

rehearsal snaps volume 1....

Rehearsals are getting more intense and more strenuous as we get closer to full runs, and to prepare the cast for the highly-physical show, Judy and Jon Lum take turns taking the ensemble through increasingly challenging warm-up sessions. Its fascinating to sit at my director's desk under a canopy of Mad Forest branches and hear the gasps and groans...

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And the crowd whirled on

What happens when individuals converge and become a mass? How infectious is a single person in a crowd? And what will you do when you become just one unit in a sea of madness?

Act 2 in full swing. There is strength as well as malady in numbers.

Personal grief or grief of the herd?

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Random snapshot: Jon's birthday Sunday before last. We're guessing he really, really likes this cake.

We're running!

Ah yes, after numerous rehearsals of individual scenes (there's about forty, each in bite sized portions), we're putting the show together again!

One of the largest challenges of Mad Forest, in my opinion, is reproducing something that was originally devised by an ensemble. The volume of subtext! nuanced and layered, because the words we're reading were formed in accompaniment to these actors' specific gestures, personalities, culture, and insight to the revolution. We've been probing and investigating almost every piece of the puzzle, and still we're discovering something new each time.

It has been thrilling, to enter a rehearsal thinking, "ok, we've already figured something out, let's see how we can make it better"; only to discover an hour later, that our choices can be turned around 180 degrees. Which gives the actor so much to play with...

And then we put act 1 together, and we're pleasantly surprised by the result. How the pieces seem to fit without worrying too much about how they should be put together, how the play develops from scene to scene, and how our characters, given their diverse scenarios, are fleshing out quite nicely. Not that we've considered the act solved, but at least we're feeling more secure with what we've discovered so far; that we're doing fine performing from moment to moment. And in the end, we hope to present a piece that does justice to those who have been repressed by a governmental regime, blind to its people's needs; and the sore after-effect when so much has been held back for too long.

Now on to act 3...

Back

Tonight, our director finally returns to us from smoggy London and we resume rehearsals proper.

Jon says he's all refreshed and ready to play. I'm not sure the cast is feeling quite the same sense of rejuvenation as I happen to know that many of us are more bogged down than usual with work and personal concerns.

Nonetheless, there is a palpable sense of impatience and eagerness to dive back into the Mad Forest, given the time we've had to process not only the accent but also the facts surrounding the historical events the play touches on, not to mention their impact on the daily lives of the Romanian people.

Of tremendous help in getting us acquainted with the history and language of Romania was Candice's Romanian friend, Albert Simsensohn, who was eight years old when Ceausescu was overthrown. Albert spent two evenings with us, during which he gave detailed notes on the Romanian alphabet, accent and pronunciation. Furthermore, he regaled us with an eclectic range of personal anecdotes and stories that vividly fleshed out the reality behind the facts and figures we had all been reading up on.

No amount of research could have painted for us, the way Albert did, such a clear picture of the day-to-day struggle to obtain basic necessities like bread, eggs and other things that Singaporeans take completely for granted. For instance, the majority of us, who rely at least partially on caffeine fixes at some point during our day, can barely imagine living in a pre-revolution Romania, where coffee and chocolate was so hard to come by that they were actually used as bribes. Meat was available pretty much only on the black market, and bread had to be queued for; parents would despatch their children to join the line early in the morning.

Albert also gave us a glimpse into how his own family coped with the communist regime, describing how his father hooked up Christmas lights to a car battery to provide illumination during the almost daily blackouts, and how he sat Albert down at age 6 to try and explain to him why he should never ever tell anyone that he had accidentally come upon his parents tuning into Radio Free Europe and had heard the commentator call Nicolae Ceausescu a fool. (It was then that I truly understood the dynamics of the confrontation between my character, Flavia, and her son, Radu, about the importance of toeing the party line, at least in public.)

Yet living under communist rule was not all bad. Boys and girls had access to free education, and women were regularly employed in occupations that are more conventionaly male-dominated in many other countries. Unemployment simply did not exist as all citizens were assigned jobs upon completing their education.

The more we find out, the more it becomes apparent how much there is to know and understand. It is a confusing, painstaking business...but one to be joyfully embraced as part of the process of immersing ourselves in the world of Mad Forest.

Six weeks to go before we open, and I'm sure many more discoveries lie in store, both about the socio-political context of our play and about about the characters we portray. I'm excited; I know that much!

Cast bonding, anyone?

Yes, Mr. Director, the cast definitely has bonded. :)

We ARE working hard, really! This was after the session had ended.

Romanian Singaporeans? Da!

On Saturday, we made people stare. All without making excessive noise, doing anything unusual nor taking off our clothes.

Six people with strong (not to mention iffy) Romanian accents chatted freely around a table in Kopitiam while tucking into supper. In no time, it was not hard to notice anyone within earshot turn and stare and wonder where the heck we were from.

Jasmine and Candice in particular attracted the unabashed curiosity of a man who was queuing behind them at a stall while they were talking (yes, still sounding Romanian). Even more interesting was his expression when Jasmine proceeded to order her food in Mandarin.

You see, we've created this rule to help us get used to the accent. Where two or more Y&W people are gathered, only the Romanian accent is to be heard (my, doesn't that sound biblical?). No Singlish, and certainly no Indian or Filipino, which is what we tend to degenerate to when we're not watching our tongues.

This has made chatting and gossiping a great deal more tiring, but a whole lot more amusing. But more importantly, it has had an interesting effect on some of us, as Candice mentioned: because we are forced to rethink the pronunciation of each and every word, we are starting to see English as an almost foreign language, often forcing us to slow down and work harder to speak it.

Accent demonstration is available upon request. Sniggering also welcome. Just not during our show. Hopefully you won't have to snigger by the time our show runs.

* Da means yes in Romanian.

Young & W!LD's first attempt on the Romanian accent

Yes the director is overseas. So you think you can slack? Of course not! Actors' research and homework must continue. Last night was the ensemble's first Romanian accent session with our dear Candice. It is challenging and I am really looking forward to the end product in December. Here's my humble attempt to 'showcase' what we learnt last night.

Salut (Hello) to visitors of our blog! Ce mai faci (How are you)? Young & W!LD will be performing Mad Forest at The Republic Cultural Centre, The LAB at Republic Poly from doisprezece to saispreszece decembrie (12-16 December). Tickets are available at www.gatecrash.com.sg so make a date with us, va rog (please)!
Pe curand (See you soon), multumesc mult (thank you very much) and Pa (bye) !

In case you are worrying at this juncture, the entire play will be in English. The 13 of us will continue to work hard on our accent. After all, Rome wasn't built in a day. Young & W!LD, let's persevere and do a good job!

Posted by Audrey

Ceausescu's Last Speech leading to the Revolution

Not just a standy - it's installation art!

JBJ's run is the perfect opportunity to capture attention for Mad Forest, so up went our standy last night. Jon (Lim) came up with the idea of dead branches framing the piece, turning it into an installation art piece of sorts. The image is also in line with the visual branding that Ghaz came up with for our poster. Not to mention the attention that a large, woody display would attract at Drama Centre!

The initial concept:
Where did we get the branches and twigs? Suffice to say, the Vladu family was seen in the vicinity of Race Course Road scavenging among the trees...

Set-up begins in Drama Centre at the ripe hour of almost midnight.

We cut dozens of pictures of the Romanian revolution, 'weathered' them and started sticking them up on branches.

The pictures go up.

The dictator is dead.

The finishing touches...
It took loads of tweaking and readjusting to get a visually comfortable balance. And a lot of hands to pick up the numerous little twigs and leaves that flaked off onto the floor.

Finally, after hours of hard work (and fiddling with the annoying Drama Centre lights), it's done! We love how the red of the "Mad Forest" in the poster stands out against the dead wood and monochrome of the whole display. Doesn't it look fantastic?

Life inspires...

Last night, we explored through a series of workshop exercises, the reality of Romania during 1989 and what it might have been like living in an oppressive environment with a society ripe for change and revolution. Afterwhich, I went home and as I sat down with my family for dinner/supper, news of demonstrations in Myanmar flashed across the television screen. I found myself riveted at images of monks and protestors marching, all hoping for change. The news commentator warned of possible reprisals from the military government. I found myself drawing correlations between the protests in Myanmar and the world of revolutionary Romania. The reasons for change are similar and the reaction of authorities also mirror revolutions from history. With so many similarities, I thought about the different individuals who are caught up in the protests in Myanmar now and wondered if the characters that I play in Mad Forest are somehow among the protestors currently on the streets. The specifics or country, race, religion, culture, etc. might not be there, but as humans, our reactions would probably be the same.

My contemplations then went back to an exercise that we did. In the exercise, we took to the streets of Little India (specifically Buffalo Road) and under the curious gaze of tourists and passersby, I discovered that I (and my character) could do almost anything for self preservation - including getting someone else into trouble. With that knowledge, how then would I react when I see thousands of people on the streets, marching for change? Would self preservation overcome the desire for change? What would it take to join those lines of people? The exploration continues...

And as my dinner/supper came to an end, I had a thought of how far removed my reality is from that of Myanmar or Romania. The exploration continues indeed...

the romanian research wall goes up....

Creating a world for a play involves a tremendous effort of immersion from the actors (and everyone else of course), and when I act, I've always found it useful to surround myself with images and objects evocative of the world i'm trying to channel for the audience. Its amazing what a photo or a piece of text, a map or an artifact can do - just as a trigger, an inspiration, an evocation, a piece of background, a borrowed memory, or just an after-image in the eye...

so to begin bridging the gulf between 2007 Singapore and 1989 Romania, the imaging begins .....