Fresh take on an iconic matriarch

IF the burden of expectation weighed on Karen Tan's slender shoulders, it didn't show. The actress took on the role of the most iconic character in Singapore theatre - and carried it efficiently.

As Emily of Emerald Hill, Tan's performance directed by Alin Mosbit is shrewd, measured and shorn of melodrama - a sharp contrast to two previous milestone performances, Margaret Chan's famously commanding turn and Ivan Heng's flamboyant "material girl" one.

Tan's Emily has neither the larger-than-life presence and grand gestures of Chan's Emily, nor the subversive uber-femininity of Heng's. Tan's Emily is simply a penniless bride married into a rich family. She is striving to get to the top of her Perakan household hierarchy because she has to - anything less than becoming its reigning matriarch might endanger her place as wife and mother.