Natalie Hennedige’s Illogical choice

SINGAPORE –Natalie Hennedige’s plays may be what some call “experimental”, but the playwright-director admitted she’s quite conscious about their accessibility.

“Honestly, in my mind, I’m always apologising to the universe about how difficult my work is. This time around, no, I’m not going to apologise. I’m just gonna bear the consequences,” she laughed.

Her newest play, Illogic, opens on June 13, and it’s her first work in one and a half years. It wasn’t exactly a case of burn out for the artistic director of Cake Theatrical Productions, although the hiatus had done her good.

“I think I’m kind of wired to just keep going — I’m actually very much a workaholic, but something kept telling me, ‘Look, if you want to dig deeper, you just need to stop’. And I really appreciated having space to take my time with something,” she said.

Hennedige took her time creatively, but the company was still active — in 2011, they launched the Decimal Points series, which saw associate artists and collaborators creating their own shows, and also took part in the Singapore Night Festival. Last year, they were commissioned for the Singapore Pavilion at the Yeosu World Expo and produced a work-in-progress by The Substation artistic director Noor Effendy Ibrahim. A few months ago, their youth group In A Decade put up a show at the Esplanade.

It had been time to grow Cake’s identity and now she’s ready for, well, a “personal kind of indulgence.”

Illogic centres around the “very complex, fraught relationship” between a male director (played by Edith Podesta) and an actress (Noorlinah Mohamed), who are also lovers.

“That’s the storyline that holds it together,” she said, but hastened to add: “But you know, in Cake’s work, the storyline is not the thing.”

So yes, the audiences can expect “quirky, quite bizarre” episodes in the first act and some “plays within plays” in the second. “There’s still some of what you can recognise from Cake but I’m pushing it a little bit more and exploring other ground,” she said.

“The ‘ghost’ of the company was telling me that when it comes to Illogic, just be true to yourself artistically, so I would say it’s really what I want to do at this point.”

Working on Illogic was also a kind of “dialogue” with her craft. Art-making, she said, was put into perspective against a backdrop of general tragedy. “Where does art stand in relation to the hard stuff, the loss of lives to illness and deaths and the difficulties of getting through it?”

It’s the reason why, yes, there’s no apologies this time around for being “experimental”.

Said Hennedige: “Why do I have to be logical with my art? There’s no apology to the fact that art can go into these kinds of non-linear, dream-like places. Life’s a bit like that, too. So if we surrender to the mystery of life, certainly art can surrender to meaninglessness and senselessness.”

Illogic runs from June 13 to 15, 8pm, Drama Centre Theatre. Tickets at S$35 and S$45 from Sistic.