Warm, sunny afternoons in Edinburgh are rare and precious. I wasted one. Through no fault of RJ Thomson, we started 20 minutes late. He opened by saying that this was not so much a performance as a press conference. We were in a lecture theatre. This was billed as a piece of conceptual theatre. The idea is to talk about a play, not see it. The play, such as it is, is outlined on a board. The play is Singapore, the place. The characters are everyone who has or will be in Singapore. It runs from when the name Singapore is first used to when it is last used. After introducing this idea the author invited a member of the audience out to read a piece of his writing, a manifesto on the theatre of the impossible. Then he started a question and answer format where both sides have to ask and answer a question. This time just him and the volunteer. This was followed by handing out a hongbao, the traditional chinese red envelope, containing a crisp fiver, to everyone present. This was accompanied by the wish of ‘Health, happiness and prosperity’ to the recipient, appropriately offered in two hands. I suspect that this was partly to offset any demand from the audience for a return of their admission price; if you were a concession you had even made a profit.Now we heard that RJ Thomson had married a girl from Singapore in February. In this section and the following Q+A session he introduced a number of epithets, some more pretentious that others. I will not repeat them but the crux appears to be that life, like plays, is contradictory and that we discover this as we live. This is not news. At least he admitted that the play echoes Singapore in smelling of ‘rotting jungle vegetation’. We closed with a toast in ginger tea to the ghosts of Singapore. I wish him well in his marriage and future life in Singapore but I don’t need to waste a sunny afternoon in a subterranean lecture hall, nor does he, and he knows it.
