‘My appetite for despair is gigantic': Ellison Tan on directorial debut Scenes From The Climate Era

Straits Times

6 days ago

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SINGAPORE – Australian playwright David Finnigan's vignette-driven Scenes From The Climate Era is pitched as a dark comedy, but reading the script, Singapore actor Ellison Tan did not laugh once.
The 35-year-old confesses a niche sense of humour – 'Very few things make me laugh' – but Tan, with a matter-of-factness about her, also has no qualms stating that she found some of the scenes unrelatable.
She says before rehearsals at the Esplanade – Theatres On The Bay: 'I felt quite distant and couldn't relate. Some of them are geographically really far from where we are now, so I felt like I wanted it to reflect a more regional warmth.'
The former co-artistic director of puppetry company The Finger Players is making her directorial debut from July 18 to 20, as part of the Esplanade's Studios season centred on the theme of Land.
After receiving a phone call from an Esplanade programmer, who asked if she would take on Finnigan's work, she began a process of negotiation with the playwright to re-order scenes and insert new ones – a correspondence that astonishingly took place mostly over email.
A frog scene has been retained – featured prominently on the banner art – as well as debates over the ethics of child rearing, and the impudent statement that 'No one's ever built a wall in the ocean to trap a glacier before'.
Otherwise, Tan has orders to stay tight-lipped about her and Finnigan's new inventions. She reveals only that one of them is based on her experience of a focus group discussion in the United States, now re-contextualised to Singapore.
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'I was intrigued by similarities that I found in Our Singapore Conversation,' she says, referring to the year-long exercise involving more than 600 dialogues with 50,000 Singaporeans, in which she participated as a student in 2012.
The result is about 20 scenes over a run time of 70 minutes – this cap on the play's length was one of Finnigan's few stipulations.
'If we talk about this for too long a time, we are really overstaying our welcome. When you drone on about it, it feels like we are moralising – and we don't have the right to do that,' Tan says.
Tan, who spoke in Malay in Teater Ekamatra's recent Artificial Intelligence play National Memory, has an ear for how one's mother tongue might break down the artifice of theatre.
Though Scenes From The Climate Era is performed entirely in English, she still made it a point to incorporate elements of multilinguality in her rehearsals.
A snapshot of how she runs the room – 'always communicative, open and most importantly, kind' – is instructive.
'There was one scene about banks where I got the cast to do it in different permutations, and each time, they would go at it with a new prompt. 'Say it in your mother tongue' or 'Say it as though you are teaching it to school children' to get at the heart of it,' she says.
The approach stems from a strong commitment to representation, which Tan repeats several times is crucial to her practice.
The multi-ethnic eight-member cast allows for portrayals of how the climate crisis affects those of different races and genders.
One of the actors, Claire Teo, who is visually impaired, has also worked to ensure all contextual clues for the scene changes are embedded in the dialogue and soundscapes, part of the reason that keeping the play under 70 minutes was initially a 'tall order'.
Tan says of what she has come to realise is a guiding principle: 'It's really important for me that people in the room are representative of what this country looks like, so I wanted to make that happen on my own terms.'
In all this, Finnigan was a relatively detached figure, checking in only with the rare phone call when he needed more information.
Tan persuaded him to do a self-introduction and answer some questions via a Zoom call, which she recorded and played for the cast while workshopping the play.
Their response, among no doubt more serious takeaways: 'They said he was handsome.'
Tan, who chooses her words meticulously, speaks more easily about the concerted effort the team has made to reduce waste in their staging.
The entire set was repurposed and props were excavated from the Esplanade's basement 'cage', where items from previous plays are stored.
She is most enthusiastic about the set's central piece – a giant table on which all eight actors will have to stand.
'It was built for the Singtel Waterfront Theatre opening and we found it on top of a cargo lift, unloved and abandoned. We had to fork lift the whole table down,' she says.
'We assigned people according to the weights of the actors to test if it would hold, and it was such a huge affair that so many staging guys came down because it was just so fun to jump on it.'
But do not ask her if the play holds within it hope for those pessimistic about climate inaction.
Her paradoxical logic holds clues to her stoicism. She believes herself climate conscious in her daily life and watches everything by David Attenborough.
Yet she says: 'I have an appetite for despair so gigantic that it doesn't really affect me.'
Book It/Scenes From The Climate Era
Where: Esplanade Theatre Studio, 1 Esplanade Drive
When: July 18 and 19, 8pm; July 20, 3pm
Admission: From $32
Info: str.sg/kuP7