Diary of the Women

There are no stage directions in Sarah Kane's Crave and the characters are simply called A, B, C and M. A is an abuser, B is an addict, M the maternal figure, C is a timid, tortured child. All four are deeply traumatised by life, lives which the characters find they have no control over.

It is slightly reminiscent of the tale of the old Hokkien woman, who leaves her her house looking for her cat in a world that has alienated her, a world run by her English / Mandarin-educated children. Kuo Pao Kun's famous 1988 play Mama Looking For Her Cat takes a long hard look at progress-obsessed Singapore, which has forgotten the traditional, the old and the simple.

In 1999, aged 28, Sarah Kane committed suicide. Today she is acknowledged as a major figure in British theatre, whose highly influential work is widely performed in Europe. Her themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, cruelty, pain and death, are treated with poetic intensity, pared-down language, experimental theatrical form and violence - but Crave is considered her most mature and calm play.

Today, the name Kuo Pao Kun (1939 � 2002) is synonymous with pioneering Singapore theatre, and his Mama Looking For Her Cat remains as powerful, as relevant and as emotionally hard-hitting as ever.

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SYNOPSIS:

Kuo Pao Kun: Mama Looking for Her Cat
Sarah Kane: Crave

Two women, both so strong and yet so weak, grace our stage on the same day. First, Kuo Pao Kun’s eternal Mama, still searching for her cat, fights all efforts (mostly unintended) to crush her identity. In this ‘fight’, she displays enormous strength despite her apparent inability to express that strength. Then Sarah Kane, exploding words and scattering energy, shares her pain with such excruciating eloquence. But does she fight off her demons with equal ease?

Come experience these women’s journeys through life and victory...

The Playwrights
Kuo Pao Kun (1939 - 2002) dominated Singapore theatre for two decades, and continues to exert a significant influence. He can be credited with much, but was surely instrumental to bringing about multilingual theatre in Singapore, and in the process, creating a seminal work like Mama Looking for Her Cat.

Sarah Kane (1971 - 1999) wrote about redemptive love, sexual desire, cruelty, pain, torture – psychological and physical – and death. Her plays are characterised by poetic intensity, pared-down language, bold exploration of form and, in her earlier work, extreme and violent stage action. She was inspired by expressionist theatre and other non-naturalistic forms, including Jacobean tragedy. Her work is thus different from the tendencies of much of 20th Century English theatre.

Director Noor Effendy Ibrahim
Noor Effendy Ibrahim is an interdisciplinary artist now pursuing his MA in Contemporary Practice at NAFA. In the second ‘A’ Levels Theatre Studies and Drama (1990/91) cohort at Victoria Junior College, he went on to get a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2000). Effendy has written and directed plays for Malay Theatre since 1991, and was the artistic director and producer of Teater Ekamatra from 2001 to 2006. Effendy crossed into performance art in 1994 and has since created solo and collaborative performances in Singapore, USA, Malaysia, Poland, India, Indonesia and Thailand. Effendy has also performed with Teater Kami, Teater Ekamatra, Cake Theatre and Spell#7. He was a member of the Singapore National Arts Council Board from 2004 to 2006, and is currently an Associate Artist with the Substation. He also teaches drama at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) School of Performing Arts.