Too much restraint turns an innovative breakup narrative into a snoozefest.

In an edition of the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) that has focused so much on formal experimentation and exploration, it’s always exciting when a company like chelfitsch comes in with a new form they’ve been developing for several years, seemingly promising an original work that feels more established in style.

Enter EIZO-Theater, a new type of theater by playwright/director Toshiki Okada and stage and video designer Shimpei Yamada, which attempts to ‘transform display space into theatrical space’ through projected images. In their work NEW-ILLUSION, this is presented in the form of a near empty black box space, with a single channel video projected across two screens, a single gap leaving a literal blank in the projection.

The ‘performance’ comprises a man and a woman (Tomomitsu Adachi and
Ayana Shiibashi) who begin talking about a play that was performed in the theatre, before everything has been cleared out, leaving behind an empty space. As they continue to speak, it becomes clear that all this acts as a metaphor for a greater problem – the breakdown of their relationship.

One lauds the production for having recorded the entire performance in a single take, and capturing a moody, bleak feeling of being lost in a void in the immediate aftermath of a breakup (helped by musician Jeong Jung-yeop sitting in the background, slowly plucking at his guitar for quiet, mood music). In addition, Toshiki Okada has crafted a deeply esoteric, cerebral script that couches this breakdown in existential philosophy, and meandering musings about the line between reality and fiction.

It’s a difficult script to take in for any audience member that demands total concentration to follow the arc of conversation, and likely requires second viewing or reading to fully absorb, as the two converse about truth and illusion, and what really matters in life. The topics of conversation themselves are already complex enough, such as slow debates over the existence and form of a chair, obsessing over the tiny details that lose us from the main plot. But NEW-ILLUSION doesn’t make following this an easy task at all.

The performance itself by both actors is incredibly restrained, where dialogue moves at a snail’s pace, their faces almost completely devoid of emotion, and quite simply, making it next to impossible to want to care or follow the trajectory of this relationship’s breakdown. Moving back and forth across the two screens, at times completely obscured as they hide in the blank space between, there is also the sense that they are both almost dead inside due to their monotone voices, and this translates to the audience energy as well.

While EIZO-Theater claims to be a new form of ‘video theatre’, NEW-ILLUSION seems to instead prove it to be a restricted, limited form of video installation, where the audience, rooted to a single spot for the entire hour, is left disengaged and seeing only the ghost of a performance, rather than feeling the energy of live theatre. There are times our eyes are indeed tricked to imagine these life-sized projections of actors truly are there, but it is fleeting at best. While the intention is to reinforce the feeling of existing in the dark limbo between being in a relationship and broken up, the effect is distracting and execution convoluted.

NEW-ILLUSION is a work that has an interesting concept and script, but is lacking in execution. It is difficult to feel connected at all to these two characters undergoing a sedate breakup, and the longer it lasts, the more clinical it becomes, deeply discomforting to watch as this slow crumbling of two people falling apart becomes mechanical and forced. In its final scenes, a fog machine begins to spew a thick mist onto the screens, a beautiful image constrained by the limits of the screen. A theatrical setting simply does not feel like the right medium for such a work, and ultimately, none of it feels real enough to invest in, and so we leave, unmoved and unconvinced by EIZO-Theater.

Featured Image Credit: Ryohei Tomita

NEW-ILLUSION played on 3rd and 4th June 2023 at the SOTA Studio Theatre. More information available here

Read our interview with Toshiki Okada here

The 2023 Singapore International Festival of Arts runs from 19th May to 4th June 2023. Tickets and full details of programme available here

Production Credits:

Playwright/Director: Toshiki Okada

Video Director: Shimpei Yamada

Cast: Tomomitsu Adachi Ayana Shiibashi Jeong Jung-yeop

Music: Jang Young-gyu Recording & Sound: Raku Nakahara (Luftzug) Lighting: Masayoshi Takada (RYU) Kousue Ashidano (RYU) Lighting Operator (Singapore Performance): Arisa Nagasaka (RYU) Costume: Kyoko Fujitani (FAIFAI)

Stage Managers: Daijiro Kawakami Marie Moriyama

Recording: Yuki Sato OHSHIRO SOUND OFFICE Inc. Video Assistants: Shiori Saito (AOZORA) Yuki Higuchi (AOZORA)

Interpretation: Nawon Lee English Translation: Aya Ogawa

Producer: Megumi Mizuno (precog) Production Manager: Nanami Endo Assistant Production Manager: Ema Murakami (precog) Production Desks: Yuri Saito (precog) Kumi Hiraoka (precog) Commissioned by: Ob/Scene Festival Produced by: chelfitsch Planning & Production Management: pecog co., LTD.