A GOOD DEATH

Another reason that I put the play on a thrust stage was that it would give the audience a different perspective depending on where they were seated. This resonates with my own worldview that we always see in part and not in full, and how we perceive something or someone sometimes has more to do with us and our vantage point than with them - the issues, the people themselves. Our experience of the play echoes this. It's as arbitrary as: I was seated here so I saw more of this character's face and the agony on it, so I feel more for him/her. None of the stories in the play are more important than another; we just tend to privilege what we connect with. And for everything that I see, I'm still missing something. The idea of human subjectiveness/limitations runs through the play. One of the first things Dr Leong tells us is that there are some patients she likes more; one of the pivotal moments in the play is where she becomes almost cruel to Ms Tan, whom she's always struggled to like. The fact that she tries makes her quite beautiful, and we aren't surprised when she fails. Like most people, she is a beautiful, complicated being, and fucks up.

I love that the play pushes against the monologue form, insisting on multiple voices that speak for themselves, and that the narrator is dragged into the narrative with everyone else. (In fact, she kind of gives up halfway and comes back to the role of narrator at the end.) We start the play with a large marble slab, a monolith taking up most of the space on stage, and Dr Leong as narrator shaping whom and what we can see. Then it cracks, splits open quite literally. Dr Leong is now at home, tending, with more strain, to her own father, who has dementia. The breaking of the monolith is when she becomes a fuller/richer character - rupturing is productive, as with the party popper exploding into confetti - etc. The other, more exciting, thing about this shift from being the narrator to only being a participant in the narrative is that it's never quite clear whether we're supposed to be seeing this. It feels like we're trespassing into her personal life. One of the things that struck me when I was talking to palliative care doctor Jamie Zhou, who was with us throughout the journey, was how deeply intimate, almost transgressive, the job is. It's not so much calibrating the treatment sometimes as it is convincing that estranged son to come see the patient for the last time. And she bears witness to the final moments of patients, standing where only family and close friends would stand. In a way, the play enacts a similar process - a benign trespassing, intruding in order to help. Exposing Dr Leong's private moments and interactions allow us to relate to her more, as a daughter learning how to relate to her father with dementia, a sibling trying to convince another about the care-giving arrangement for their father. We watch her running round and round the marble block, her own story echoing off it too, a single person tending to the needs of her patients and loved ones, running herself into the ground.
​