The Staff Room is theatre collective, Impromptu Meeting's, latest offering in a series of Xiao Ming-related shows following The Chronicles of Xiao Ming (2019) and 晚安你好 (Wan An Ni Hao): The Late Night Show with Xiao Ming (2021). Held on video-conferencing platform, Zoom, and shown as part of NUS' ExxonMobil Campus Concerts programme, The Staff Room explored our uniquely Singaporean education system through the teachers' perspective.
Unlike the previous shows, The Staff Room featured four subject teachers of Xiao Ming Secondary School fighting among themselves for a prestigious teaching award. The four candidates include: by-the-book Mathematics teacher, Miss Natasha Tan (also Assistant Director, Cheryl Tan Yun Xin); art-is-life Head of Aesthetics, Miss Deirdre Hamley (also writer, Miriam Cheong); Physical Education teacher, Mr Reihan Arif (also Director, Adeeb Fazah) who try to appeal to students by following youth fads and a disembodied Chinese teacher that the audience hears but never sees.
The evening was as packed as a school day as the three teachers conducted "special" classes to appeal to the audience, who were collectively referred to as Class 4D for the evening. Miss Tan conducted a warped game of mathematics bingo pairing nostalgic primary school mathematics questions with an audience bingo sheet. Miss Hamley conducted a Kahoot quiz featuring famous art works reinterpreted with cartoon characters. Mr Rei conducted a PE dance lesson inspired by viral dances from video-centric social media platform, TikTok.
The earnestness in the team's experimentation with the Zoom platform during each of these special class segments was commendable. However, the interactive elements felt ill-timed. Miss Tan's math questions dragged on a tad too long and became hard-to-follow if the audience member (guilty as charged) lazily zones out instead of doing the required calculations dutifully. Miss Hamley's Kahoot-quiz-cum-crash-course on art came off as a lose-and-lose especially when one encountered an unfamiliar work and Miss Hamley could not finish her trivia in the thirty seconds between questions. While Mr Rei's dances were cute, it also felt awkward when only a quarter of the audience joined in. Or maybe it was all a ploy to lull us back into our collective secondary school memories?
After all, these classes were also interspersed with drama that was dotted with Easter eggs - that may or may not have resonated with other audiences. The main rivalry between Miss Tan and Miss Hamley turned out to be a CHIJ girls' school rivalry which caused a stir to audiences who knew about the infamous clashes between two of Singapore's oldest girls' schools. The ending, however, felt a little contrived with each teacher celebrating the other two once all the drama had played out. The plot twist with the disembodied Chinese teacher winning was also not unanticipated.
On the other hand, the madcap comedy did dip its toes into bigger issues of Singapore's education. The teachers' shots at each other personified the evergreen struggles of Singaporean students contending between different subjects. Similarly, the minor plot point about how both CHIJ-alumnus teachers - known to be more "branded" - were unaware about the new "Sports Science" 'O' Level subject was a veiled reference to the disparities across different schools.
Perhaps the highlight of the evening was that the Zoom chat was no holds barred. Audience members mischievously brought back adolescent memories of forgetting to bring homework, annoyingly reminding the teacher about due homework and laughed cheekily at the "naughty number 69" mentioned. Yet at the end of the night, I felt embarrassed when I spotted a child amongst the audience. Should we have been stricter when admitting audiences and how so in an online platform?
The Staff Room was a comedic experiment tapping into the common struggle Singaporeans face with our education system, letting audiences relive their love-hate relationship with their youth. Xiao Ming appears to be one of the more lasting experiments in the digital performance space thrust upon by the COVID-19 pandemic. I look forward to future productions that gives the audience space to play, connect and take home more than a textbook-moral-lesson.
Performance attended: 3 September 2021, 8pm.