REVIEW/ THEATRE

PEEPBIRD

The Finger Players

Esplanade Recital Studio

Wednesday (Oct 7), preview

Crows have long endured a bad reputation. In Singapore, the agressive birds are often seen as pests and were once the bane of shoppers in Orchard Road.

And yet, as The Finger Players' enigmatic new show suggests, these birds are also beautiful and highly intelligent. Peepbird, a non-verbal puppetry perfomance, takes a sympathetic view of these misunderstood creatures, while profoundly unsettling the boundaries between crow and (wo)man.

The play begins with two bird-like performers (Vanessa Toh and Al-Matin Yatim). Intriguingly, they move like prehistoric automatons, their motions more bionic than naturalistic. Walking near the two crow-like creatures - "gliding" more like - is an otherworldly woman (Jo Kwek) dressed in black from tip to toe. Her hat is dipped low, its brim evoking the beak of a crow. Eventually, the lines between bird and woman dissolve, and out of the baggy clothes - fittingly designed by Max Tan - the woman emerges as a sleek, powerful crow.

Peepbird is one of several small-scale live performance pilots that have been given the green light by the authorities amid the pandemic. While Wednesday's show had sold out, only about 40 of the 245 seats in the Esplanade's recital studio were occupied.

The Finger Players' new artistic directors Myra Loke and Ellison Tan, who respectively directed and wrote this play, have spoken about their desire to put puppetry at the forefront of the company. They have done so in Peepbird, raising some provoking questions about the relationship between puppet and puppeteer: the performers only sometimes manipulate puppets (crafted by Loo An Ni). Their own bodies often move in puppet-like fashion the rest of the time, somewhere between the primal and artfully contrived.

The actors put forward assured, energetic performances in a series of scenes that pay homage to the practices of crows - their habit of gathering around their dead, for example, as well as cooperative breeding, where they look after one another's offspring. The play also ponders, quite literally, the murder of crows.

The performance invites all sorts of anthropomorphic tendencies and intepretations, such as a pram with a baby crow in it, and another scene where a petite, glamorous crow-woman sits on a park bench, pulls off her heels in anguish and trembles, perhaps at some heartache. Later, when another crow arches its wings, I think of Disney's Maleficent, another maligned, misunderstood figure.

The thing about non-verbal performances is that they often pull the audience in, demanding that they weave their own narrative in an attempt to make sense of what is going on. And an attempt is all it can be - after all, we are dealing with crows.

Most of the strings in this puppet show are the ones in the music by sound designer and composer Darren Ng. The soundscape provides much-needed direction, and offers sensitive accompaniment - the tremolo of the strings, for example, echoing the shaky boundaries between bird and person.

So, where does all this lead us? After the hour is up, I don't really know, and I'm not sure the producers do either. Peepbird is a bundle of clever ideas which tease and provoke but never quite coalesce. But do they have to? This was a haunting, evocative experience, and I'll never look at a crow in the same way again.

- Peepbird runs again at the Esplanade on Thursday (Oct 8). Tickets are sold out.