The Lonesome Death of Eng Bunker is an exploration of thelives of conjoined twins Eng and Chang Bunker in a genre-bending deep dive into the strange and tragic experience of the Bunker twins and the conundrums their story presents. Performer and writer Tobi Poster-Su uses puppets to explore a self-described childhood fixation he developed with Eng and Chang as he acts out versions of the poetic, ridiculous, horrifying and upsetting final hours of the brothers. The show returns to the refrain that Chang died first and Eng lived for one hour, attached to his brother’s body, likely knowing he was going to die as well.
Photography by Ikin Yum @ikinyum
Directed by Iskandar Sharazuddin, the play tonally flips between mocking the melodrama of the brothers’ lives as well as ruminating on the exploitation and difficulties they experienced. The movement sequences are brilliantly choreographed, with moments where the puppet appears to crawl over Poster-Su (Jasmine Chiu). At first these tonal shifts risk coming across as insensitive or cruel, however as the piece progresses the humour earns its place. There is singing and music (composed by Tom Poster) as well as unsettling body horror. In a segment resembling an open mic, Poster-Su spews off-beat puns, occasionally interrupted by nightmarish convulsing and arresting lights (Cheng Keng) and sound (AJ Turner). The use of music occasionally felt under-developed and somewhat unmemorable, however the impact of the playful choreography and general brevity made for an engaging and joyful element.
The set (Erin Guan) is striking and evocative of the more macabreaspects of the show. A red and blue spherical flat with a shiny grey floor lit with punchy side lights are utilised to match the various tones of the show, from a campy striptease to a poignant soliloquy. A metal bench, representing both a morgue
slab and a kitchen counter grounds the segments and provides a stage for the smaller puppets.
The puppets are both characters and part of the set, hangingfrom the ceiling and assembled in front of the audience (Aya Nakamura). The human sized puppets attach to Poster-Su and quickly appear autonomous under skilful puppeteering. The use of puppets in such a bizarre form raises fascinating parallels between the act of puppeteering and the action being depicted. A scene of caring for an elderly family member is heightened by the puppeteering of said character. Similarly, as raised by Poster-Su in the post-show Q&A; puppeteering can be a tool for dehumanisation. In the twin’s life they
were prodded and poked and their bodies were the source of their demise and livelihood, as so, the puppets are dissected and thrown around at the whim of their puppeteer.
In a self-referential moment in the show, Poster-Su reflectson the Bunker twins’ status as model minority members of US society before the civil war and their position as slave-owners as he speculates the cruelty they inflicted on enslaved people at the time. In a more self-reflective light, Poster-Su admits that his childhood memories of the Eng and Chang’s life story were conflated with memories of his grandmother and confusion with the story of a different pair of twins, demonstrating the unreliable nature of the narrator’s memory. The play returns to its core refrain: Eng woke up to find himself attached to his brother’s dead body. It is impossible to understand what that must have been like, but the Lonesome Death of Eng Bunker doesa superb job of exploring the possibilities and its larger themes of death, autonomy and history in a strange and fascinating performance.