A group of men walking out to the Front of House, strip to
their boxer briefs and put on their Number 4 uniform. An actress delivering her
dialogue from among the audience. A bilingual dialogue peppered with Mandarin a
tad too crisp to be colloquial. An EDM-inspired rendition of an age-old army
tune, "Purple Light".
Frago was a concerted effort to be
unconventional. Unlike the many Basic Military Training-centric (BMT)
narratives like Ah Boys to Men and Army Daze, Frago takes
place on an armour unit's seventh reservist cycle. A series of conversation
ensues between all involved: the Lance-Corporal "men"; their
Sergeants; their officers; as well as their Regular-force-warrant-officer and
even Commanding Officer.
It was a series of conversations that trailed usual
small-talk topics like: marriage, children, their careers, reminiscing about
the past. A conversation between Sergeant David Chua and his girlfriend
bordered on the dramatic but then, came to a lukewarm conclusion. Despite its
invigorating musical interlude, Frago came off as
underwhelming personally - nothing happened apart from a series of
conversations; We get a rough sketch of the characters and some alluded to
backstory but that, frustratingly, didn't crystallise to anything more. What,
then, is the point of Frago?
How influential is the army on
our notion of adulthood? And, more pertinently, how do the relationships
between army mates evolve and shift, and how does it shape each man
differently?
In his playwright's message, Lucas Ho shares the above
questions that anchored his play. Was Frago then
insinuating that relationships formed in the military rarely go deeper and are
stuck superficially?
I entered the theatre expecting to gain new insight on the
army with Frago. But perhaps, for someone who is currently
still serving the nation with no benefit of construing Frago as
a reminiscence of the "good old days", we are left with a mirror of
my life - a mundane cycle interspersed with brief moments of self-induced
mania.