Whoa. Four Kuo Pao Kun plays in 12 months. That is a lot of long titles to handle in such a short period of time.

Incidentally, three of the plays were presented by Five Arts Centre and now this one, though presented by The Actors Studio, is directed by Five Arts Alumnus Lim How Ngean. Unfortunately it looks like Lim missed out on the evolution that the Five Arts style has been undergoing recently.

Last November, Five Arts Centre staged Kuo Pao Kun’s The Descendants of the Admiral Eunuch , directed by Chee Sek Thim. Telling the story of Laksamana Cheng Ho and his favourite appendage, this play employs the abstract physical theatre style that has come to be associated with Five Arts Centre. In April this year, Five Arts Centre with Singaporean theatre company Wild Rice presented a double-bill of Kuo Pao Kun’s The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole and No Parking on Odd Days, with Five Arts Founder Krishen Jit directing. Still physical but not so abstract and stylised, the direction moved the actor towards a more accessible and candid portrayal of characters.

In September, director Nam Ron, a protégé of Five Arts Founder Krishen Jit, gave us Proses, a play which wittily deconstructed the consciously constructed, indulgent, “arts for arts sake” nature of the Five Arts Style. At the same time, Five Arts Founder Marion D’Cruz (wife of Five Arts Founder Krishen Jit), choreographed a dance for the MyDance Festival that was unabashedly anti-Five Arts in style.

Yes, people were talking out in the foyer, on the streets, at the mamak: Will this finally put a rest to all that tai-chi business Five Arts was known for?

Last week, Actors Studio under their Young Directors Showcase programme gave us Kuo Pao Kun’s The Silly Little Girl and The Funny Old Tree, directed by not-so-young Five Arts Centre alumnus Lim How Ngean. And the style? Complete regression, man. After ten minutes of the actors talking to themselves while they fidget inexplicably about, you felt like saying, “Yoo-hoo, the audience is over here…”

The story tells of a girl’s relationship with an old tree that is about to kena hantam from the city council’s tractor. The play is didactic enough, but still the director managed to force in additional monologues about aging people and the proper way to treat them. It is true they created some of the more poignant moments of the play as with the first person accounts of the actors’ experiences with their grandparents and the series of quotes gathered from interviews with young children: “Orang tua berbau busuk.” “Old people believe in God, they go to temples a lot.” The end is great with Darshini Govindaraju’s restrained monologue. Speaking in Tamil, she asks her grandmother, “Atta, where are you going? Can I come too, Atta?”

All this parallel text seems a brilliant device but at the end of the day it limits the audience’s own interpretation of the story.

Now, the old Five Arts Centre style could have been pulled off: if the direction had actually moved the plot (spotty in this case) and the actors maintained an unwavering focus throughout (not all managed to). Since the movements were so highly choreographed, the ensemble acting needed to be tight. When four of the actors combined to become a growling anthropomorphic eight-armed tractor, they almost hit pay dirt. Unfortunately, not all the actors looked convinced by their arm-flailing.

Only Five Arts veteran Ida Mariana and newcomer Leow Chan Ghee were persuasively involved – the former pulled it off without sweat while the latter, bathed in sweat from early on, seethes with controlled intensity. Rachel Jenagaratnam, whose scream broke out cold sweats from the audience at Rep21’s The Crucible, appeared to be trying to achieve the same effect here. Her otherwise credible performance was spoiled by occasional outbursts of incongruous melodrama.

Actors Studio Founder Farida Merican plays the tree. Though she too didn’t seem the least bit convinced by the kicking of her legs and such, she embodies the wisdom and grace of the tree to the very marrow of her being. It was a touching scene as the tree recognises even the limit of its own wisdom when confronted with the girl’s barrage of questions, which include: “Why do people cut down trees?”

With exquisite patience and heartbreaking casualness, the funny old tree asks in return, “Why should I know everything just because I am old?”

Lines like this testify to Kuo Pao Kun’s power. Four staging in one city in a year makes him the Shakespeare of South East Asia. A merely straightforward depiction would have done justice to his beguilingly simple tale. To convolute it with stylistic overtures begs the question: Why?

If he wanted to use the Five Arts style that even the founders seem to have moved away from, director Lim How Ngean needed to show us how the story justified the style. Otherwise, it would just end up as a play with funny old actors making silly little gestures.