May 6th, 2022
Brighton Fringe (Digital)

For my first show of this year’s 2022 Brighton Fringe Festival I tuned into a performance by Cheryl Ho called Lou Ye Gui Gen “Getting home”. It was about a woman who finds herself far from her home in Singapore after leaving for Melbourne Australia. It was an online show from her many points of view of looking at travelling and realities of living in 2022.

In her many faceted act, where screen changes were aplenty we were taken to another side of the world and in the highs and lows that were involved when creating a big uprooting in life. She introduced us with feeling of personal potential with compassion using examples of indigenous folk who make up a large percentage of population.

Looking back on the show her varying personalities have come together with the feelings being iterated, from great striding confidence to soft, lonely, whispers. It was very conclusive and very vague in her attitudes of what she ‘had to do’ like leaving home.

She was an actor with potential employment in the field also working in the arts. The vain she hit had such a commonplace, community based yearning for success as she took important phone calls, messages and corresponding letters.

She despaired, she succeeded and was able to compose herself for every turn of event. And as she taught she changed; making a template for other future projections. She took on a few characters who were necessary in one way or another, always looking at the spiritual sacredness of love and life.

Calling on the sacrifice of ancestors as the main theme for the play she directed good and gracious gratitude to life through her family and friends. She particularly enjoyed her relationship with Aunt Ah Ma, it was saying goodbye to her Aunt that pulled her heart chords the most when she left Singapore for the chances of an enriching future.

She was dramatic, personal, calm, serious and to each of these gave her greatest forbearance; showing us that links are made in the mind so as to see everything through until reasons behind it all can be revealed. And as it went by with the scene changes it would return with feelings that also partook in the plot whose unravelling was written with great compunction also by Cheryl.

She knew that the world was for her but from her increased sense of the unknown she dove into crippling doubts that fed her animated philosophy into something for kindness and love. Her professional intentions are rich as she portrays to an exact level what she wants to be heard in her plights for the real world.

There are earthquakes to deal with offering a towering height to things, scene changes that become real and structurally important. Taking closeness and distance to things. She was shown in bed or at a desk or in front of a wall written with notes for life. But finally in her magnanimity she finds out what really matters with ‘when are you coming home’.

Daniel Donnelly