Angela (A Strange Loop)

by Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg

Singapore International Festival of Arts 2024
Victoria Theatre, Singapore

Something is wrong with Angela. She's a TikTok influencer who's holed up in her apartment making videos about her daily life. Various people visit her: her boyfriend Brad, her mum, a friend called Susie. They eat and make small talk. When they speak, it is robotic, detached, mechanical. It soon becomes apparent that the actors are in fact lip-synching to recorded dialogue. Her stuffed cat comes alive on a screen and speaks to us with the air of a self-help guru. Her kitchen itself is a projection. We are greeted with text that proclaims "This play is a reconstruction of real events". So what exactly is real and what isn't? 

Conceptualised by German director Susanne Kennedy and multimedia artist Markus Selg and presented as part of the Singapore International Festival of Arts, Angela (A Strange Loop) is as baffling as it is bizarre. A key concern is the disconnect between the real and the virtual worlds. Angela spends so much time on social media that she can't seem to function properly in real life. Over the course of the play, it becomes obvious that she is unwell and retreating into her mind. Events repeat themselves, words seem to lose meaning and her walls shift and distort before our eyes, resembling a video game with a never-ending stream of content. She imagines her mother cradling her as an infant and coughs up a baby of her own. Exits and entrances, life and death, being born and giving birth. It's one endless, maddening cycle. 

Kennedy and Selg have crafted a work that slickly marries art and technology, grappling with important themes such as mental illness, the dangers of losing one's grip on reality and the fundamental question of what it means to be human. Unfortunately, the concept doesn't quite cohere. At nearly 100 minutes, the production outstays its welcome and the sensory overload starts to grate. An audience member started applauding towards the end when the other characters began applauding Angela, seemingly for getting through her funk. As it happens, she wasn't quite done. Neither was the show.

The Crystalwords score: 2/5