The weight of a heartbreak

AN exquisite sensuality suffuses every inch of The Weight Of Silk On Skin, Huzir Sulaiman's award-winning monologue about an ageing playboy. The backdrop is a large walk-in wardrobe with expensive shirts and shoes. A lounge chair rests on one side, while a half-mannequin stands watchfully on the other. It is all so tightly art-directed that it almost feels airless.

And then Adrian Pang walks in, leaving some gasping for air.

As 40-something libertine John Au Yong, Pang perfectly embodies the wealthy, debonair and outwardly misogynistic character. On first impression, John is a bona fide b*stard. He talks about women as if they were cattle: "A woman is the tautness of her flesh ... what you think doesn't matter, miss." The metaphor is transposed later when he compares the making of classic leather shoes to the way a beautiful woman casts her spell.

But John is not all smugness and swagger. Underneath the fitted suit is a broken man - a man who, despite his material successes and obsessions, can't get over the real love of his life, ex-girlfriend Anna. Even after countless sexual conquests and a calculated marriage to an alluring woman, he is still haunted by her.

As he gets dressed for a black-tie fund-raiser where the newly-divorced Anna will be present, John sinks into a deep reverie of how it all went wrong.

The Weight Of Silk debuted in 2011 with Ivan Heng in the role of John. It clinched the Life! Theatre Awards trophy for Best Script, despite facing formidable contenders such as Tan Tarn How's Fear of Writing, Alfian Sa'at's Cooling-Off Day and Chong Tze Chien's Turn By Turn We Turn. But the script's structural elegance with its shifting focus of depth and surface, as well as its intoxicating details of John's decadent lifestyle, really places it in a class of its own.

Here, actor Pang and his director-wife Tracie have transformed John into a pure Gatsby-like romantic hero, surrounded by luxury but haunted by love. John's melancholy is so finely played that it could absolve him of his shameless misogyny - possibly to the chagrin of some.

But that's exactly the play's gamble - to deconstruct a libertine before the audience and have his persona judged to be something of a sham, a masterful illusion hiding a sad boy still nursing a broken heart. Pang's dazzling last minutes, a heart-wrenching turn that would be remembered years from now, puts John squarely in the judge's favour.

The Weight Of Silk On Skin is part of Esplanade's The Studios: fifty series that celebrates 50 iconic local plays. The series is on till May 10. Tickets available from Sistic