SINGAPORE — “Voyage is our constant, stillness our enemy,” a seafaring character tells his noob companion. And indeed, just as their sampan drifts to nowhere in particular, subject to the whims of sea and sky, this debut piece from a new collective comprising familiar faces, The Seven-Headed Dragon, seems equally hyperactive and rudderless as a whole.

You’ve essentially got two main threads weaving into each other: The adventure of the aforementioned orang laut (Rizman Putra and Fared Jainal) and the recurring character of the storyteller (Najib Soiman) in various permutations, including a hilarious history tour guide.

In the beginning, these two elements are wonderfully complementary. Rizman and Fared’s hysterical oh-so-intense and oh-so-serious parts are a great contrast to the self-assured and relaxed presence of Najib (the stand-out performer during opening night) as the production’s wild card funnyman/wiseman commentator with a powerful haunting singing voice.

It’s a balance that I thought the collective gets right initially, and it isn’t hard to see it as a meta-update of traditional storytelling.

In The Curve Of The Wanton Sea dips into historical narratives (The Malay Annals, Sir Stamford Raffles and William Farquhar, for instance) and autobiographical (heart-on-sleeve confessionals from Najib and playwright Zizi Azah, for instance). It’s irreverent, self-referential, and mixes everything up for a textbook postmodern piece that deals with themes of belonging.

There are moments that surprise and delight, such as one particularly absurd and convoluted thread involving an effeminate Raffles arguing with Farquhar that somehow eventually alluded to the Singapore-Malaysia separation.

Unfortunately, the cheekiness and irreverence, the piece’s strongest aspect, isn’t quite sustained. Or to put it another way, the party had to stop.

And in this way, it would seem that the play eventually contradicts its own ethos by deciding, in the end, to finally head to a certain direction. The freedom and fun at the start eventually gives way to settling down and underscore its allegorical ambitions about Singapore.

Perhaps that’s why, for all the initial fun and intensity, it doesn’t really come across as particularly impactful for me — because it backtracks on its own potential to defy convention till the end.

Or perhaps it’s because a lot of it simply feels like toned down instances of deja vu — its storyteller-meets-orang laut segments strongly remind me of the spell#7/Zai Kuning collaboration Epic Poem Of Malaya; the occasional rough physicality, of Cake Theatrical Productions’ The Comedy Of The Tragic Goats (incidentally starring involving Fared, Rizman and Najib); and its overall pomo-history angle, of The Necessary Stage’s Singapore.

In The Curve Of The Wanton Sea, thankfully, is only the first production from the group, which is a three-year project conceived by Choy Ka Fai, who, I must add, in taken great pains to stay in the background, seems to have ended up rather invisible in the piece as its multimedia man (the other members are performer/dancer Norisham Osman and sound artist Zulkifle Mahmod).

Hopefully by the time the next show comes around, they’ve got their compass fixed.

(In The Curve Of The Wanton Sea runs until July 27 at the Esplanade Theatre Studio. Tickets from Sistic.)