Interview with Matthew Cohen, Typhoon Live: Getting Married and Dogs critic

Interviewer: From either play really, what were the highlights for you in each play?

Matthew: Yeah, I also liked the dialogue in Dogs, which was funny and edgy and very nuanced culturally, very attentive to the pace and rhythm of Singaporean life. It was in many ways a fascinating play, with a strange experience of being exposed to ' in-your-face' Singaporean way of living as a dysfunctional family. In a London theatre, this kind of cultural space-time warp phenomenon for me was really quite exciting. To be present to in the middle of a domestic dispute which was happening in Singapore in the imagination, here in London, many moments of that standing out, having some fluency in Malay for example, and hearing the wife' s constant use of Malay throughout the play, using terms of endearment, as well as insults of the most crude sort, with minimal attempt to translate that for a London audience was a great pleasure in fact, to find that as a cultural resource. So those were linguistically those were some of the most fun, funny moments as well.