PIE was entertaining, harrowing, and surpassed my expectation. It is an openly experimental, overtly political play, ostensibly about the the murders of three people, and the interrogation of a suspect - a playwright whose work seems to foretell their deaths. But it is also about the blurring of ‘real’, ‘official’, and literary narratives, and transcends any one particular genre.

The cast as a whole was impressive — Suchitra Seb as the interrogator, Lorenzo Montani as Yew Beng and Iris Li as Wan Ling stood out especially. At times I wished the production had been injected with a little more drama; the play is so hysterical and incredible that the acting felt a little too naturalistic. The opening scene was perfect in this way; it was so delightfully ridiculous, extravagant, and comically tragic that it worked. Later scenes, particularly the monologues, could have gone further. They needed to be freakish, obscene, but instead they were elegant, slightly muted. They were still excellent, but there was nonetheless a sense of missed opportunity.

 "Delightfully ridiculous, extravagant, and comically tragic"

The set worked well with the performance, but didn't make itself too noticeable. Then again, the script demands quite a specific layout, and the Corpus playroom is so unconventional. Swathi Nachiar and Ong Si Min faced a difficult brief from the outset, and they appear to have met it: the suspended steering wheel worked well, and the newspapers on the wall fitted the constant changing of location. 

The lighting was slick. It shocked when it needed to shock (I quite liked the very bright white light), cast the stage in a sea of red for the more ominous moments, and also softened for more intimate scenes. It guided the audience nicely through intense twists, although at times the red wash was perhaps a little too literal. The attention to detail was breath-taking; everything fit together snugly, despite a few illegible projections towards the end.

"This is absolutely a play worth seeing, especially for those interested in Asian narratives in a Cambridge theatre scene that so rarely addresses these stories."

It is worth mentioning the sheer magnitude of the script; it deals with so much — race, class, country, poverty, time, and more. Siddiqui clearly considered all of these elements carefully; his treatment of the play is sensitive, and he managed to convey its tonal shifts admirably (it switches between comedy and high drama with alarming speed). 

The production stayed dignified, perhaps a little too dignified at times. Chong’s script has the potential to shake to the core, but this production of Pan Island Expressway achieved an impressive tremor. There are, however, worse criticisms than being called too intelligent, too sensitive – this is absolutely a play worth seeing, especially for those interested in Asian narratives in a Cambridge theatre scene that so rarely addresses these stories.