The trials and tribulations of a long-term relationship are explored in all its messy, complex, touching, and frustrating glory in Love Budget, a Malaysian-Chinese romance play from W Productions, based on a 2014 play titled First Love: Love Budget.
Dickson Chai, the director-writer of the original show, returns to deliver what can be considered a spiritual sequel, injecting his story with a decade of experience and recent cultural phenomenons that brings his story closer to the 2020s zeitgeist.
And he’s not the only one. Penny Ng and Swei Ang reprise their role as the main couple, whose trouble over their seven year relationship has led them to conduct budget meetings over their romance, quantifying dates, holidays abroad, and arguments into statistics and numbers.
For a show that promised itself to be a discussion on the quantification of love, I was expecting cold, robotic dialogue from the couple that would maybe heat up as tensions started to ramp up throughout the show.
So I was very pleasantly surprised when the arguments started almost immediately. Foot on pedal, they immediately presented stats on who spent how long at the mamak, the rate of flowers sent over the past year, and who was photographed getting too chummy with their university friend.
It was a perfect portrayal of a couple clearly fed-up with each other, willing to bicker over every little discourse within their relationship. And, at least initially, it was fun and amusing. Penny Ng and Swei Ang performed Dickson Chai’s dialogue with impeccable delivery, through rapid fire back-and-forths that sometimes made the English surtitles struggle to keep up.
Swei Ang, playing the Boyfriend, was a kinetic, active ball-of-energy that seemed clearly fuelled by their intense arguments. And he is beautifully contrasted by Penny Ng’s Girlfriend character, whose quiet zeal is expressed through her controlled and firm demeanour.
The dialogue barely takes a breath, moving from one topic to the next as rapidly as it comes. Funny moments and anecdotes (how the couple still don’t hug because of COVID) sometimes are immediately snuffed by more serious issues (why aren’t they married despite being together for 7 years).
We’re not just subjected to the thorns and thistles of their relationship though, as flashback sequences, highlighted by strikingly beautiful lighting changes, give us glimpses into the couple’s honeymoon phase.
These are, in the kindest words, diabetically sweet, but perhaps too much. The contrast between the grounded, authentic relationship we see in the present and the fairy-tale meet-cute of the past was a jarring disconnect.
These scenes could have been from the perspective of the couple themselves, portraying their naive, romantic innocence, but it still never really felt as impactful as it might have liked.
But these elements never detracted from the present story, which I felt was always strongly portrayed.
As the couple’s arguments devolved into something messier and disturbingly personal, laughter became genuine discomfort. A memorable moment came, when possibly 50 minutes into the play, we finally learn of one of the character’s name, as it’s screamed out by the other character in a fit of anger, followed by deafening silence.
That is one of the play’s most defining features, its brilliant use of silence. When that constant fighting suddenly stops, when neither of them are able to say a thing, it never fails to feel as if someone had just sucked the air out of the room, and we’re begging for the couple to breathe it back in.
Each moment that spur the silence feels longer and longer each time, dragging the audience deeper and deeper into the pit of these characters. In the final moments of the show I felt absolutely enraptured by them, having watched their struggles, dreams, and love tested and brought to its brink.
In fact, I felt so caught up in the catharsis of the last twenty minutes of the play that it only took me until I went back home that I realised I didn’t actually like the ending.
It was far too clean and neat, a happy-ever-after that felt like it thematically clashed with the rest of the story.
Paradoxically, I can’t help but forgive it as it was able to make me ignore, or at least accept, the weaknesses of that ending. I had wanted these characters to do well, so much so that it seems I had thrown my objectivity out of the equation.
This is once more a testament to Dickson Chai’s authentically-written characters, portrayed brilliantly by Penny Ng and Swei Ang, who gave so much character and depth in a performance that brought these troubled lovers to life.Love Budget played at the DPAC Black Box Theatre from April 24th to 27th.
Darren Tio is a KL-based writer who grew up in Pontianak, Indonesia, and has a degree in creative writing.
This review was generated by Artsee.net as part of its Young Arts Writers’ Sandbox Programme. It first appeared on New Straits Times on 22 May 2025 [#SHOWBIZ: A ledger for love and heartaches]
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