Reckless youth at a cost

Wild Rice's Serangoon Gardens Techno Party Of 1993 is a funny, pacey work that highlights how life can change drastically because of one's actions

- Clement Yong Correspondent

Teenage ennui gets an expletiveladen, adrenaline-fuelled night out in this supremely confident tour de force by playwright Joel Tan, hiding within it a very adult lesson on how actions have consequences.

It could have been written only by somebody who has lived and mellowed, and embodied only in someone as full of aggressive life force and adept at going against the current as lead actress Coco Wang.

Wang is 16-year-old Candice, first drunk on frontman Morrissey of British band The Smiths, then on alcohol and then on something much harder.

The play is peculiarly Singaporean in its moral panic fuelling the very angst it fears, the Christian revivalism in the 1990s and even the simple pleasure of watching the Great Singapore Workout overlaid with techno music.

On an enveloping set of sanitised white grids, onto which soft, coloured lighting and videos shot in slow frame rates are projected, Wang's Candice is sick of the mediocre greyness of Singapore life, pining for trickled-in images and snatches of Western rock music.