Lockdown: Class is in recession

SINGAPORE — After The Way We Go, I found myself, yet again, back in class with a teacher with issues and some mischievous students.

Hatch Theatrics’ Lockdown is somewhat like a mix of Lord Of The Flies, Dangerous Minds and The Usual Suspects, which, while sounding like a pretty interesting concoction is actually way too much to handle, let alone for something clocking in at an hour.

Written and directed by Raimi Safari, Lockdown sees secondary school counselor Nora (Shida Mahadi) trying to deal with three boys (Farez Najid, Ziyad Bagharib and Andy Yew) who are in danger of expulsion after sneaking into the staff room and attempting to steal a teacher’s laptop. In the middle of the interrogation, a fire breaks out and they find themselves trapped inside the room. She’s got claustrophobia, the boys are getting tense and tempers flare.

You’ve got a rather interesting quartet here. While Shida has a tendency to overact, there’s something femme fatale-ish in her uptight character that seems to be worth exploring — particularly given the heightened situation and context of her power play confrontation with the young students. The three male actors manage to flesh out well their respective characters, who all have some simmering intriguing backstories: There’s the cocky truant Wan (played with a healthy dose of snarl by Farez), his loyal Malaysian sidekick Jason (a more passive Yew) and the awkward, timid pushover Izz (Ziyad, who’s my pick of the lot).

The catch, however, is that they’re trapped not just inside the room but in layer upon layer of implausibility.

There’s an attempt to piece things together, as the scenes move back and forth through time and we are introduced to what, in hindsight, are laid out as clues to the penultimate explosive climax. But it’s a rather underserved one as everything is so rushed you simply skim over the surface of what, had it been properly developed, has the makings of a potentially promising psycho-drama. Lockdown is simply too short for too ambitious a work — the result of which are a lot of loose threads and weak set-ups.

For instance, what extremely high-tech school has such “lockdown” technologies as to affect everyone’s phone signal — and also ensure complete isolation inside a school?

And I, for one, find it hard to imagine, in a realistic play, a teacher and a student having an impassioned, philosophical debate about “choice” and a messed-up educational system inside a room with two dead bodies as a result of heads bashed repeatedly against the floor. Or, for that matter, a teacher who has all these already planned in her head like a Keyser Soze waiting for guillible young boys to take the bait for a final lesson.

Granted, these could very well happen, but it would have to take a very convincing build-up if one wants to convince the audience to get into that particular mental zone. So unfortunately, a piece that started out as something relatively promising eventually ends up sounding like the rants of an angsty young man.

Now that I think about it, Lockdown seems an incongruous title for something set in an educational institution. Its connotations lean more towards prisons (and there’s no hint until much later of the work’s attempts to link the two). It’s generally a way to maintain order after someone goes amok or things get out of hand. If anything, it’s the play itself that needs to go on a temporary lockdown of its own, just to calm down and organise itself a bit more.