Bedok Reservoir. Photo courtesy of Pinball Collective. You know what, I think Singapore can actually do a supernatural theatre festival. Top of my head there’s The Spirits Play, H Is For Hantu and Boom—and I’m sure there are more. And in fact, after last week’s Pantang, you’ve got another one this week with Bedok Reservoir. A brand new production by yet another new theatre group, Pinball Collective, it recalls the same ghosts-unable-to-let go themes seen in Hantu and Boom—but this time around, it's a watery grave. Filmmaker Wesley Aroozoo’s debut play, directed by fellow theatre newbie Elina Lim, is about three naval divers in search of two missing people—a scenario inspired by the alarming series of deaths/suicides/murders(?) at the site last year. I’ve to qualify this post by saying I’ve only caught the final dress rehearsal yesterday before the short run began tonight, of course, a bit of leeway should be given. But performances aside, the play’s structure seems like an apt analogy of what transpires onstage: Things are simple and straightforward on the water's surface. But when you dive down to the bottom, things get especially murky and rather over-complicated. The unresolved deaths that transpired back in 2011 potentially offer a rich background for Bedok Reservoir to sink its clammy hands into, but aside from a brief comment about media sensationalism early on, Aroozoo goes for a more personal, human (or otherwise) take—the story of a paranoid mother (Chio Su-Ping) who commits suicide and takes her eight-year-old son along with her, intertwined with another thread involving one of the search divers (John Cheah) with his own emotional baggage to unpack. This surreal underwater encounter is balanced by the more casual, lighthearted, and realistic banter between the two divers waiting on top (Ghazali Muzakir—who, after Hantu, finds himself talking to ghosts again!—and Erwin Shah Ismail, who does pretty well when he, ahem, channels his inner youth later on). The play bobs up and down between these two parts fluidly. In fact, perhaps, too fluidly as I found the overall tone that night to be consistently neutral. I hesitate to talk about the performers' intensity because, as I mentioned, I only caught a full dress. But I do want to at least point out the importance of soundscape in a play with a dichotomised structure. Instead of merely indicating scene shifts, the bells, splashes and underwater SFX could’ve been used to heighten or accentuate differences between what went on above and below the water, even as the situations bleed into each other. While I’ve got one big question mark about the play (let’s just say that it’s easier to accept the idea of someone talking to a ghost underwater than it is for two living dudes to do so) and there's the fact that one gets entangled in the twists and turns involving the dead woman and the diver, I did like Aroozoo’s attention to detail, which comes out in much of the dialogue. Sure, it needs a bit more work (I find it hard to imagine an eight-year-old kid talking about “darkness” so vividly) but it’s definitely there. Plus, like the folks behind Pantang (and while we’re at it, all those small theatre groups putting up independent works), the peeps behind Bedok Reservoir deserve to be commended for just pushing ahead—they’ve staged it via crowdfunding and are releasing an accompanying book. It’s hard not to admire people who take the plunge. (Bedok Reservoir runs until Saturday. Details here.)