Life! 25th Aug 2003

Love's a matter of Balance

by Tan Shzr Ee
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When Balance opens to a crowd in a scented nursery sown with plastic flowers, a woman (Emma Yong) in a flimsy dress scuttles across the room.

It is the first of many delicate whiffs � of gesture, sound and silence � to traverse the play.

The ephemeral strokes are anchored by a text recycled in five incarnations. A man (Gerald Chew) reviews his life choices, replaying alternative memories of a time spent with a lover. He searches the what-ifs for catharsis.

The work marks the second collaboration between director Low Kee Hong and playwrights Paul Rae and Kaylene Tan this year.

Pulse in April expounded on women�s dark neuroses. Balance is touted as the mellow sequel charting the emotional landscape of a man trapped in postmodern love.

Once, this was pursued � and escaped � via the sex game; or bypassed by couples fearing misplaced promise. Here, couplehood has been gracefully sublimated into a precious, if over-comfortable, relationship between Yong and Chew.

They wear out the promise of love into a state of uber-absorbed emotional intimacy. They dare their practised co-dependency into territories playfully teasing breaking point. Love morphs into longing, absorption and jealousy.

Tan and Rae turn virtuosic poetry, masquerading as He Said/She Said dialogue, into quivers of insouciance, tenderness and disaffection.

Yong is pitch-perfect. She upstages Chew, as if sent in just to temper her subtle mood shifts. For a play recorded from Man�s point of view, it is Woman who holds � or withholds � the answers.

�Did you hear that?�

���

�Turn off the TV.�

The sentences are clipped. Unsaid words are buoyed by synapses of mutual mind-reading.

Man and woman fumble in a build-up of sexual desire, the waning of which poises on a split-second of eternity when no condoms can be found. The dithering over who should rouse to prepare a midnight snack is negotiated gingerly with immaculate second-guessing.

The stories stack up in space, time and movement, interlocking with three film insertions by Ben Slater unveiling different facets of the same sequence.

Balance is not a game a la Sliding Doors. Neither is it stability gained through facing off upheavals of passions.

Instead, it manages a finely calibrated equilibrium by treading on love�s liminal spaces.

When the interplay of these possibilities and inevitabilities spiral into a dawn so bright and loud, it is suddenly deafening.