Force Majeure’s band of unfulfilled artist siblings aptly opens Pangdemonium’s finale season

A theatre review of Force Majeure, Pangdemonium's opening show, explores themes of art, privilege, and cultural stagnation. Read more at straitstimes.com.

PangdemoniumVictoria TheatreMarch 7, 3pm

Force Majeure opens with the return of a prodigious artist – from Europe to his South-east Asian home – as Western art havens crumble and his ascendant native land starts pouring money into the arts. After being grilled at his homecoming exhibition, the patriarch John’s season of migration to the south ends abruptly in death, and it is his artist children who live in that aftermath.

John’s (Ebi Shankara) youngest daughter Irene (Rebecca Ashley Dass) despairs that her art practice is languishing and yearns to return to Europe for a fresh start. Act after act, however, she sinks even deeper into her sweltering existence within a decadent Straits Eclectic home where her father’s triptych of his three daughters looms imperiously over the motionless lives of the household.

In Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s bleak 1901 drama Three Sisters, the three titular sisters are coping with the ennui of provincial life during the waning years of Tsarist Russia. London-based, Singapore-born playwright Stephanie Street cleverly transposes this into a story of privileged artist siblings withered by life in a cultural backwater amid profound global changes.

Moscow is the paradise for Chekhov’s sisters to which Europe – where “art is at the heart” – is Street’s equivalent.

It is apt and with bittersweet irony that Pangdemonium, which unexpectedly announced the conclusion of its 16-year run by the end of 2026, is starting off its finale season with a self-reflexive work interrogating the existential conditions of art-making. In Street’s script, the arts play no major role in public life and are increasingly determined by technocrats and capricious funders.