Instead of watching the Fireworks, Pretensions spent Saturday evening at the new National Library Drama Centre watching an avant-garde play on the downfall of Singapore. Called Apocalypse: Live!, it was written by ex-Straits Times political journalist Kenneth Kwek, who had a rather unfortunate interview with the always formidable Lee Kuan Yew during the 2006 elections. P thinks that this play was his therapy session.

P first blogged about the play and the Singapore Theatre Festival in June. Back then, she already knew that the premise of the play involved Singapore being hit with "fire and brimstone from the unremitting heavens" and the chaos that ensues. To give credit to Samantha Scott-Blackhall's direction, the opening of the play did start with a bang literally, as a simulated explosion rocked the theatre, and the lights came up on a destroyed urbanscape mixed in with what looked like the aftermath of the Great Singapore Sale. Wong Chee Wai's set of towering piles of clothes strewn with the odd TV set was extremely effective in generating a surreal atmosphere and transporting the audience to a devastated city.

Almost immediately after the disaster, Brendon Fernandez takes the stage as David Fong, anchor of CMM's Newsnight. He contacts veteran reporter Lisa Takahasi (Risa Okamoto) who is on the scene in what-was-formerly Clementi town centre, but is interrupted by news of a military coup. Apparently, the Prime Minister and most of the cabinet were killed in the explosion, claims General Abdul Aziz (Gene Sha Rudyn) who now finds himself in the role of military dictator. Meanwhile, Lisa has located two key players in the rebuilding of Singapore, husband and wife team Pastor Simon Sitoh (Loon Seng Onn) and Jessie Soon (Janice Koh) and interviews them for the channel. However, the self-styled PM of Singapore is not pleased with what is admittedly a somewhat self-serving effort at rebuilding/demolishing and sends a military squad out to capture them, with instructions to gun down anyone who gets in the way. David also has to deal with his personal problems in the form of his always-on-the telephone mother who wants him to find his schoolgirl sister Amanda, who has been missing since the bomb/apocalypse. Things escalate as the General slips into his role as an Idi Amin clone and David realises that the average Singaporean's priority in disaster is him/herself.

Basically, the play suffers badly from an identity crisis; it can't decide if it wants to be a humorous satire or a serious tragedy. As a result it oscillates between the two, throwing in not-always-funny singlish jokes at awkward moments. Sometimes the humour does work and works well, but too often, it feels very strange set against the serious stuff going on on stage. Another problem is the usual Singapore playwright's tendency to want to throw in every reference and narrative strand that he or she can, resulting in a very confused mishmash of narratives for the audience. I noticed this even in veteran Alfian Sa'at's Homesick in 2006 and it is much worse in this play, 'though a mitigating factor is that it is playwright Ken Kwek's first play.

Another problem for P was Ken's tendency to tell rather than show. All his characters were very obviously mouthpieces for points he wanted to make. Some of these were very valid points about media censorship, the materialism and selfishness of the average Singaporean, the lack of rootedness etc etc. However, the result was a cast of very one-dimensional and unsympathetic characters that the audience couldn't really identify with. Obviously, the David Fong character was a representation of the playwright and his frustration with the system, however, aside from his pain over his lost sister and his defiance of a dictatorial system, we never really learned anything about David Fong's motivations and inner landscape and he remained a distant figure. Gene Sha Rudyn is obviously a very good actor and has a wonderful sense of comic timing. However, his General was even more one dimensional than the David character, and came across as a cardboard cutout meant to represent tyranny and generate laughs by his well-timed riffs on meritocracy etc. P came out feeling like she'd been lectured by a fire and brimstone preacher - "Singaporeans, repent ye now of your materialism, your spinelessness and lack of identity or be destroyed by the thunderbolts of our neighbour!"

Having said that, there were some valid points made and P did enjoy the humour at times during the evening. Unfortunately, there were just too few moments of levity in a play as cluttered as its set.