Ghost Writer leaves a lovely but empty feel

IN the great and drastically underrated film Wonder Boys (2000), directed by Curtis Hanson, a young student (Katie Holmes) reads the overlong novel of her English professor (Michael Douglas) and cannot hide her disappointment. She tells him: "You teach us that writers need to make choices. (Your novel) reads like you didn't make any."

There is something of that disappointment when watching Ghost Writer, the latest play by The Necessary Stage, written by Haresh Sharma and directed by Alvin Tan, with dramaturgy by Charlene Rajendran.

Ghost Writer blends different artistic disciplines to tell the story of an aging bharatanatyam dance teacher (the amazing Sukania Venugopal) searching for a successor for her dance school.

Well, on paper, that's what the story is about. In reality, that story is buried under a barrage of slick choreography, poetry recitations, film excerpts and multimedia mayhem.

Individually, these expressions of drama, film, poetry and dance are elegantly executed by Ghost Writer's various collaborators, including choreographer Ole Khamchanla, multimedia artist Brian Gothong Tan and musician Bani Haykal.

But they never connect into a story with any momentum, so the play lurches from one superficially beautiful moment to another.

It's as if no one person is making the tough decision of telling a story, tightening its focus and trimming the fat - allowing instead dozens of beautiful but tangential ideas to proliferate around a skeletal narrative. As hard as you try, the pieces of the puzzle just won't fit.

The odd thing is that Ghost Writer is a reworking of the company's 2014 play Gitanjali (I Feel The Earth Move), which already had the problems of an indistinct focus and a lack of integration between the various disciplines.

Tan and Haresh's last non-naturalistic play was 2015's restaging of untitled women. Though abstruse, it had a unity of purpose, vision and form. It was so entrancing in its complexity, it left one searching for its elusive but revelatory ideas.

Ghost Writer is the opposite - it is both cluttered and dispersed, and one feels its ideas are somehow not worth searching for.