Frontmezzjunkies reports: Jovanni Sy’s Stratford comedy invites us to feast on the lives of the rich, then asks us to see who prepared the meal
By Ross
I have always had a weakness for a theatrical party where everyone onstage is behaving terribly, and I’m invited to enjoy every delicious second of it. Give me a few scheming lovers, ridiculous socialites, extravagant costumes, a family full of secrets and enough romantic confusion to keep everyone running in circles, and I am usually very happy to see where the chaos leads. Jovanni Sy’s The Tao of the World at the Stratford Festival’s Tom Patterson Theatre gives us all of that in abundance, wrapped in the glittering world of Singaporean high society, playing with our senses and our desire to be swept away by pretty surfaces. Inspired by William Congreve’s The Way of the World and infused with the energy of a modern Asian rom-com, this wildly ambitious comedy begins as a sumptuous feast of Restoration-style wit and romantic scheming. Then, out of the blue, the second act shifts, asking us to look inside the looking glass, and we realize that Sy has magnificently played us by serving up something considerably sharper and much more layered.
A gong signals the beginning of a story about “how I married the love of my love,” but our socialite narrator is getting ahead of herself. We first have to travel back to a time when Arabella Flynn, beautifully played by Agnes Tong 唐若馨 (StratFest’s Salesman in China), is living inside her own carefully tinted view of the world. She sees what she wants to see, expects people to behave according to her wishes, and has very little reason to question the privilege that allows her to move through life this way. The setting is Singapore, and the object of everyone’s attention is Edward Lim, playfully embodied by Angus Yam 任孝聰 (Gateway’s Anne of Green Gables). He is a famously handsome cricket star who has also become something of a pop-culture fixation. And Arabella has her eye on Edward as they are, in her mind, made for each other. Sy dives headfirst into this glimmering world, knowing how comfortable we all will be with its glamour and absurdity before the machinery of romantic chaos kicks in. It is a smart set-up because we recognize the equation immediately. Beautiful people, beautiful surroundings, complicated desires, and the assumption that happiness is something money and determination can simply arrange.
That is where Sy’s Restoration comedy roots become especially useful. We are accustomed to being fascinated by wealthy people behaving badly. We enjoy watching them scheme, flirt, manipulate, and demand things that most of us would consider entirely unreasonable, especially when the whole thing is dressed up to be irresistible. It’s like we have been given a tasting menu at a high-end restaurant, one we could never afford, but are giddy with the surprise invitation. Lorenzo Savoini’s expansive set, Ming Wong 黄慧明’s deliciously sharp costumes, and Sophie Tang 汤语菲’s superb lighting make this Singaporean world look exactly like the kind of place we want to enter, with every surface polished for our pleasure. We happily gobble up all the delicacies without ever really thinking about the invisible people working hard in the background to make the feast possible, serving food they could never afford themselves. The characters reinforce that seduction by talking openly about the value of being “exotic,” “handsome,” desirable, and socially useful. At one point, someone suggests they can “Henry Higgins him,” reducing a person to a project that can be shaped into something more appealing. Rom-coms and Restoration comedies are forever asking us to see past this type of selfish shallowness, and generally we do, quite happily, for the sake of love, romance, wishful thinking, and perhaps a bit of envy. Sy, however, has a different plan, and it’s a tad sneaky. He lets us enjoy the feast fully before asking us to look at it from a different angle and notice who has been serving it.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, much like our narrator does with that first declarative sentence.
The romantic complications for these beautiful people arrive in earnest. Edward loves Arabella, but he is not in love with her. His heart belongs to her younger cousin, Millicent Tan, played with delicious charm and modern intelligence by Heidi Sy Damayo (StratFest’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream). That revelation sends Arabella into full rom-com scheming mode – think Julia Roberts in “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” add a few million dollars, and you get the picture. Arabella is determined to disrupt the relationship and somehow make Edward understand that she is the woman he truly wants. Yet Millicent is not nearly as naive as she pretends to be, and Arabella’s increasingly desperate attempts to control the situation reveal just how little she understands the people around her. Tong makes Arabella’s obliviousness delicious rather than merely irritating, giving her enough desperation beneath the entitlement that we remain willing to follow her into increasingly ridiculous territory. It really is a place of privilege, but those rose-tinted glasses make it very hard for Arabella to see that. In trying to fulfil all the demands she has placed upon the world, she is becoming, one manipulation at a time, the very epitome of her mother.
Her mother, Lady Helena Yu, played by the scene-stealing Manami Hara 原真奈 (StratFest’s Forgiveness), is a spectacular embodiment of the same entitlement. Hara arrives with the decadence and certainty of a queen filled with the absolute certainty of someone accustomed to having an audience. Her first appearance on the balcony carries an unmistakable Evita quality, and the production soon makes the connection itself, turning Lady Yu into Singapore’s own glamorous Queen Bee with a backstory that feels ready for its own musical. But Arabella’s ‘mommy’, the regal Lady Yu, has no intention of approving Edward for Millicent, particularly because her own understanding of relationships is built around people doing precisely what she expects them to do, and Edward has already failed that particular test in the most personal way possible. Arabella responds by constructing an elaborate plan to destroy her cousin’s romance and claim Edward for herself. And surprisingly, we are ready for it all.
But there are a few snags in that plan, including that wonderfully bothersome Trevor, played with hilarious commitment by Tim Campbell (StratFest’s Anne of Green Gables), whose presence makes Arabella’s money-tinted view of the world even more entitled and ridiculous. Sara-Jeanne Hosie (StratFest’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) is equally hilarious as Eleanor Marwood, Lady Yu’s lackey, Trevor’s scheming sidekick, and all-around horrible human being. The way she saddles up to Lady Yu while plotting her own takeover with her lover, before finally crawling away on hands and knees, is delivered with such perfect comic commitment that the ridiculousness becomes another sharp little window into what The Tao of the World is skewering. Her performance makes Eleanor almost as delicious as the people she is plotting to climb over, giving Sy another wonderfully vicious way of exposing the machinery of greed, desire, and privilege.
Then there is Devan Pillay, Arabella’s devoted best friend, played heroically by Karthik Kadam (Bard on the Beach’s Henry V) with a wonderfully grounded combination of affection, frustration, and humanity. Devan knows exactly how oblivious Arabella can be, yet familial and social loyalty keep pulling him back into her orbit. Derek Kwan‘s Jackson Lee, whose loyalty lies with Edward, sees the situation with greater clarity and repeatedly pushes Devan to recognize what is happening. Their relationship gives the comedy another layer of tension and emotionality, because their love exists inside a society that does not legally recognize their partnership, even as Lady Yu insists that she loves them while refusing to accept the legitimacy of their love. Kwan brings a tenderness to Jackson that makes that contradiction particularly painful. The resulting complications have the deliciously messy quality of a classic comedy in which everyone knows something someone else desperately needs to know, but Kadam and Kwan wisely establish something else beneath the farce. Devan is already living in a world Arabella barely notices, and that makes him important long before the play asks us to understand why.
It’s a pretty darn perfect set-up. Shakespeare and Congreve would be proud as I watch the actors run wild over that long thrust stage at the Tom Patterson, with room to move, pose, and dance through this privileged world at high speed. There is a delightful visual echo of those young lovers in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, playing in repertory on the same stage, as desire and social expectations keep colliding around them. We feel the same sense of mischief and magic in the making. Sy knows exactly how much fun this can be, and for much of the first act, the comedy is having an absolute blast.
One of the production’s most unexpectedly touching threads belongs to Michael Man’s Dr. Wilson Wong, a character who could easily have existed simply to provide another target for the comedy. Instead, Man gives him an awkwardness that becomes genuinely endearing. The character is ridiculous in ways that the play is happy to expose, yet Man (Shaw/NAC’s Snow in Midsummer) also allows us to see the vulnerability underneath the pretension. I must admit I fell in love with the awkward Wilson and his complicated coming out process. It’s a juggling act this play does really well, allowing privilege, homophobia, and elitism to become subjects for laughter without erasing the very real pain underneath them.
Then comes the turn.
Act Two shifts the focus toward the people who have been almost invisible to us while the wealthy characters have been pursuing their romantic disasters. The household staff has been present all along, watching, listening, serving, and pampering the people whose problems have occupied our attention, and suddenly the play asks us to stop and look at them. We have spent an entire act happily accepting the same rose-tinted glasses worn by Arabella and her world. “All the people who work are invisible to you all,” we are told, and the line lands because it is not only an accusation directed at the characters onstage. It catches us all in the act as well. The joke changes, the light shifts, and our position as an audience changes with it. The pandemic sits behind this shift, particularly in the wealthy longing to return to an old version of normal, but the statement that “Normal was never that good” cuts through that nostalgia with startling clarity. The people who sustained that normal are finally given space to speak, and the play asks us to acknowledge how willingly we participated in not hearing them.
The people we have barely noticed now become especially important, including Nadine Villasin‘s Kamila and Nestor Lozano Jr.‘s Toto, two staff members who have been present all along. Both performances beautifully capture the ache of those who have spent much of their lives navigating other people’s needs while still finding tenderness, humour and affection inside that position. Together, they give the second act an emotional centre that the first act deliberately kept out of sight. When the play asks, “Where’s my happy ending?” the question suddenly belongs to more than Arabella. Toto, the gay male servant who magnificently storms out of the theatre, has his own claim to happiness and wants it with all his heart. The staff members preparing the celebrations have their own lives beyond the walls of these extravagant homes. The banquet can still be beautiful, the champagne can still flow, and the caviar dreams can still arrive on exquisitely designed plates, but someone still has to carry it into the room.
I do think the production’s second-act shift, as brilliant as it is, moves through its social argument too briskly. Sy has opened a door onto a much larger conversation about class, privilege, homophobia and the meaning of restoration, and I wanted the play to stay inside that discomfort for a little longer. The comedy has spent so much time teaching us how to enjoy these characters that the moment when it asks us to examine our own complicity carries real potential. That potential is touched upon, but then it races back toward its comic momentum, leaving me wishing we could dig into the dilemma before immediately trying to escape it. Still, that tension feels central to what Sy (StratFest’s Salesman in China) is doing. We have been trained to look at one group of people, and suddenly the play insists that we take off our noise-canceling headphones and rose-tinted glasses and turn our heads toward the others in the room. As Linda Loman says so distinctly in another Stratford production, “attention must be paid“.
And then The Tao of the World gives us what we are craving: a wonderful Restoration-comedy ending. Romantic knots are tied, marriages are contemplated, declarations are made, and Annie Lennox takes us home, although through a different cultural lens and language that belongs entirely to Sy’s world. The structure is familiar, even comforting, like a Shakespearean comedy. After all the scheming, somebody gets the romance they wanted. It gives us the ending we came for, then surprises us by making us question who was truly entitled to that ending in the first place. The servants remain the people doing the work that makes the celebration possible, and yet there is “no restoration for us,” we are informed. That line hangs over Arabella and all of us, turning the familiar comic resolution into something considerably more uncomfortable.
That first gong and the promise of a story about marriage, love, and happy endings are what pull us into The Tao of the World. It teases us with the idea of romance, giving us the glamour and the comic chaos we have come to expect from a world built around wealthy people falling in and out of love. But when the lights come up on the people who have spent the evening serving that world, the question shifts and becomes much harder to ignore: whose happy ending are we actually celebrating? Sy’s great joke is that we have been laughing along from the beginning, happily consuming the luxurious feast, while the people who prepared it have been standing just outside the frame, barely saying a word. The feast is still magnificent. The music is still playing. But I can no longer quite look at the celebration the way I did when the gong first sounded, because I have finally noticed who is holding it all together, making the celebration possible without ever getting a piece of the wedding cake.
