Written by Swiss playwright Erik Gedeon and adapted by Benjamin “Mr Miyagi” Lee, Forever Young chronicles the life of a group of retired actors living in a nursing home in 2071. These zany nonagenarians – former pillars of Singapore’s Arts scene – are determined to prove that it is not all behind them.
Directed by Hossan Leong, Forever Young features Karen Tan, Julian Wong and Leong himself who will reprise their roles. They will be joined by radio personality Denise Tan, Mark Waite, Kimberly Chan and Gurmit Singh, Singapore’s iconic funnyman, who makes a comeback to the theatre scene after a hiatus of 16 years.
In this essay, Benjamin shares how his own experience with his late father – who suffered from dementia and Parkinson’s Disease – made him identify with an obscure European cult-hit musical script and motivated him to adapt it for a Singaporean audience
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“Where’s mummy?”, Papa asked as he noticed that from the lack of light from his window that it was night.
“She’s still in the office. Should be home later”
“So late”
“I know. Always like that right?” I offered.
Then he made a noise that sounded something in between a grunt and a sigh – non-verbal utterances that had become increasingly frequent the more Parkinson’s loosened his grip on every controllable muscle in his body.
As I sat with him scrolling mindlessly through my phone for the next half hour – he’d ask where my mother was again for at least three more times. I’d look at my watch and give the same response. That she was held up in the office, as usual, and would be home soon.
I was mindful that he’d sometimes try to make eye contact with me, suspicious that I was hiding something from him, which of course I was.
Mummy had passed away suddenly the year before. When it happened, almost every family friend had expected Papa would go first, since he had been frail and bedridden for the preceding five years. He survived her, but you could not say the same about his short-term memory.
His face was etched with grief when we broke the news of her passing, and he wept for most of the day of Mummy’s funeral. That evening, he asked my siblings and I, “Where’s Mummy?”
We took a few seconds before we explained that she had passed away, and quite a bit longer to compose ourselves after we witnessed him being heartbroken with grief again.
I visited him every few days in the weeks that followed, and he would ask every time I arrived, “where’s Mummy”, and for a while, I’d pause and tell him the truth, and he would fall apart the same way, every time. I even tried explaining that he had attended her funeral service and that she had been buried at Choa Chu Kang cemetery, perhaps hoping that loading the sad news with as much detail as possible would make it a little less painful.
Eventually, I stopped delivering the heartbreaking news and started lying about my mother still being in the office, being held up by unreasonable clients, you know, the usual ones that are very demanding and always pay late. I named names. Papa would eke out a smile and what seemed like a wistful shake of his head followed by a nod or two. Come to think of it, it was probably Parksinsons doing that.
Speaking of which – the tremors – the physical manifestation of Parkinsonism – probably made their debut on my father possibly fifteen years before he died. We had heard of the disease, but never quite understood that it would form a cascading decline of his other faculties. These were much harder to handle and to understand.
It began with the commonplace forgetting of names, faces, and places – and his repertoire of a single party trick at Chinese restaurant meals – insisting on using chopsticks to deliver a peanut into his trembling mouth. (My brother and I used to bet on whether he’d succeed. Terrible sons we were).
Then as the years went on, this broad thing called dementia and a slightly less broad thing called Parkinson’s diminished Papa. But this was gradual enough to be sneaky – like cashiers squirreling five cent coins into their own purses – it took awhile before we realised we were losing him.
I didn’t handle it well, and as always, used humour to defer any real dealing with his condition. Apart from his regular Chopsticks Olympics, it became a sport to watch Papa insisting on drawing a cheque to be encashed for household expenses – the odds were around ten to one that the branch wouldn’t bounce the attempt on account of his always changing signature – he was quite literally drawing on the cheque.
As he began his regime of medications, he started having disturbed sleeps – where he’d talk, and strangely sound more lucid than when he was awake. There once was an entire confrontation with an invisible counterpart played out in his sleeptalking monologue. “TODAY I AM NOT AN ACCOUNTANT, YOU SHOW ME WHERE THE MONEY IS!” being the most memorable excerpt from one of these episodes.
Papa usually drifted in and out of naps when I had the time to visit him, and some days he’d be up, alert, and talkative. He’d tell me how he had followed a paper trail that had uncovered a financial conspiracy involving his church pastor who had been siphoning money from the parish (this was a few years before the City Harvest Church case, so he couldn’t have plagiarised). He was also very convinced that my mother had been involved, and asked that I help him look into it and notify the authorities.
Never did crack the case of course. There were also other smatterings of recollections of events imaginary and real in Papa’s increasingly unintelligible mutterings. Sometimes there was random humming of tunes. In all, he had become a collection of humanoid approximations that I had no longer any emotional engagement with.
A year after Papa passed away, I was recommended to Singtheatre Ltd’s founder Nathalie Ribette as a writer who’d be able to adapt a Swiss/French show script for a Singaporean audience. The show was called Forever Young, and it was supposed to depict a day in the lives of a group of nursing home residents. The script was totally confusing – scenes of the characters stumbling through fantasy and reality, interrupting themselves with full-on performances of music from their youth. It touched me immediately and immensely. I knew what this mish-mash was about.
The first run of Forever Young in 2017 was billed as a “jukebox musical”, partly because it didn’t quite fit the format of a musical, or a play, or a concert. But there’s this very interesting arc that your mind forms to make sense of it – and when I saw it on opening night, I surprised myself with tears. I would put it down to finally connecting emotionally with Pa’s long drawn-out latter years.
Last week at the current run’s final rehearsal, I found myself tearing up again at the same point in the show, as did Gurmit Singh, one of the new cast members. We’d have put it down to his bringing some serious acting chops, but he had mentioned earlier that he also hadn’t expected to be moved to tears by this hodgepodge of geriatric movement.
Sure there are fun musical pieces that’d put a smile behind your masks, but if you were to try to logically follow what the characters were saying or doing, you’d be likely to fail. But you might realise that the confabulated episodes contain elements of each person’s history, personality, and emotions. Somehow your heart assembles what maybe resembles a soul, forever young.
FOREVER YOUNG will be performed at the DRAMA CENTRE from 22 September to 3 October 2021.
Tickets from $50 – $75
