It seems jarring that a musical adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange should be staged in Singapore.
The city-state had banned the celebrated 1971 movie adaptation by Stanley Kubrick and lifted it only in 2011. Since the prohibition, too, Singapore has grown into a model state of progress, peace and stability — features otherwise lacking in Burgess’ dystopian portrait of Manchester, England, in the future ruled by street gangs and politicians trying to take the hard line on urban violence.
But amid the lingering euphoria of SG50, the touring production of Action to the World’s Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange that has been playing to a sizeable audience at the Esplanade, serves up a horrible vision of the future that should comfort Singaporeans about what makes the West wrong and the East right.
In any case, the horror that stage director Alexandra Spencer Jones serves is musically and choreographically mediated. It should suit up to the contemporary global vogue for musical narratives (Mamma Mia and Les Miserables) and EDM. Burgess himself was a prolific composer and this should explain the strong element of music in his narratives, such as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Clockwork Orange. In fact, he made a stage version of the novel and gave it strong musical elements.
The original 1962 novel tells the story of the juvenile delinquent Alex and his “Droogs” on a wild campaign of mayhem and rampage that they call in their subculture patois of cockney British and Russian as “ultra-violence.”
Already sensationally depicted in the novel, the ultra-violence is further sensationalised and perhaps glamorised in the Kubrick film almost a decade later.
When Alex subjects himself to the “Ludovico Technique” to escape further detention, he becomes a Pavlovian dog who abhors violence but himself becomes the subject of violence from former his peers and victims. Worse, he becomes a pawn in the conflict between the establishment and the counter-establishment.
Removed from all of his natural moorings, he becomes a “clockwork orange,” a mechanical contraption masquerading as a man, subject to the forces of control, hate and violence.
The all-male ensemble takes on all of the important characters in the novel, including the women’s, so that the horror of the gang rape and the grandmother’s assault is lessened. It likewise provides the opening for the homoeroticism that Spencer-Jones insinuates as the overlying logic of the street gang, something that was missing in Burgess’ novel but has emerged as a strong thesis in today’s cultural studies or more specifically, “queer,” studies.
The eroticism becomes somewhat adult material in certain instances but Spencer-Jones provides it in stylised form through her choreography.
Jonno Davies is too old to play Alex, who’s 15 in Burgess’s novel, but no actor in this era of child’s rights will be young enough to play Alex in any case. (Come to think of it, Malcolm McDowell was in his late 20’s when he appeared in Kubrick’s movie.)
But gifted with good looks and strong stage presence, Davies delivers a highly effective, energetic and very sustained performance. The rest of the ensemble, particularly Damien Hasson as the kind priest who opposes the Ludovico experiment, does likewise.
Does “Clockwork Orange” have “Singaporean” origins? Perhaps. Burgess himself (1917-1993) was a British colonial education officer in Malaya prior to independence and might have visited Singapore. A lecturer in phonetics, he said he drew the phrase “clockwork orange” from several sources, one of which was the “orangutan” or Southeast Asian primate. To some extent, then, his novel’s dystopian portrait is a caveat on progress: does it build a future that’s nothing but a relapse to the primitivism of violence and barbarity under the guise of science and development?
A Clockwork Orange runs from Nov 4-8pm at Esplanade Theatre, tickets via Sistic.
