First Emperor’s Last Days
September 13th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Video clip from Theatreworks’ original production
Performed at Victoria Theatre, Singapore, 13 -14 June 1998
September 7th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
FEAR OF WRITING
An absurd play
Written by Tan Tarn How
Directed by Ong Keng Sen
Premieres on 1 September 2011
Tel 67377213 / Email tworks@singnet.com.sg
NEW PLAY: Fear of Writing
September 6th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Fear of Writing portrays a playwright’s creative handicap—the writer’s block—under intense anxiety and scrutiny. Through this crisis, Tarn How uncovers the existentialism of self-censorship and freedoms in Singapore. An urgent provocation of the country’s boundaries—as bound to art, artist, citizen and humanity.
Fear of Writing proposes a theatrical parable for the politics of today, a future for the Singapore dream:
“This play is about the complacency of the average Singaporean, of theatre audiences and practitioners because there is no danger, no real change enacted by our works. It is about the commercialisation of theatre; hijacked as entertainment rather than being an engine of change. Can we find a real political theatre, where the audience goes in X and comes out Y? This is the difficulty in writing this kind of work in this day and age, hence the long gap between my last play and this one.” - Tan Tarn How.
Performance Details
Date / Time : From 25 August 2011, 8pm nightly
Venue : 72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road Singapore 239007 (MRT: Clarke Quay)
Tickets : $35
**Early Bird Discount: We urge you to book your tickets now with the Early Bird Discount at $25 per ticket. For students and NSF, tickets are at $10. No booking fee applies.
To purchase tickets, please call 6737 7213 or email tworks@singnet.com.sg
August 26th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Newspaper Articles
- Gender benders express themselves (The Straits Times)
- A harvest of political plays (The Straits Times)
- Wither political theatre? (The Business Times)
Online Media
READING: The First Emperor’s Last Days
August 22nd, 2011 § Leave a Comment
TheatreWorks would like to invite you to a reading of THE FIRST EMPEROR’s LAST DAYS written by Tan Tarn How and directed by Ong Keng Sen. TheatreWorks premiered The First Emperor’s Last Days in June 1998 at the Victoria Theatre. The play imagined four writers tasked – under detention and surveillance – to pen a posthumous biography of a country’s first great ruler.
Read by Lim Kay Tong, T Sasitharan, Lim Yu-Beng and Karen Tan, it is on 27th August 2011 (yes, the day of our Presidential Elections). Time is 3pm and venue is 72-13, Mohamed Sultan Road.
The reading is in conjunction with TheatreWorks’ premiere of Tarn How’s new work, FEAR OF WRITING, his first in ten years!
At the same time, this marks our efforts to introduce Singapore writings developed by TheatreWorks to new audiences whom may not have read or seen these works onstage. Such works bring into focus the dilemma of playwriting in Singapore under nationhood, the state and cultural policy.
Please send your RSVP to KC. Ring him on 6737-7213 or email him at kuancien@theatreworks.org.sg
ST Article: A harvest of political plays
August 18th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Clarissa Oon
The Straits Times
18-08-2011
One of Singapore’s best-known playwrights recently expressed his disillusionment with writing political plays, saying in an interview with The Straits Times that political plays here are “no longer transformative” and “have lost their edge and danger”.
Tan Tarn How, whose name was practically synonymous with political satire and allegory in the 1990s, makes a comeback with a new play next month.
In private conversations, several others in the arts community have voiced similar sentiments to me over the years: that political theatre has become merely crowd-pulling entertainment. This view merits debate, particularly with the ongoing success of the Man Singapore Theatre Festival, where plays explicitly about politics, race and religion are sold out.
I disagree that theatre here has gone soft. On the contrary, I think the climate is right for plays with strong socio-political themes to thrive: hungry audiences, a gentler regulatory environment, corporate sponsors taking a risk, and playwrights at the peak of their powers.
If the momentum continues – and I hope it does – we could arrive at a theatre scene not much different from cultural capitals such as London and New York, where the measure of a good play is not just in what it dared to say, but how well it did so.
The three-week festival of new and restaged plays, ending on Sunday, is presented by home-grown theatre company Wild Rice. Its sponsor is global fund manager Man Investments, which also lends its name to the prestigious international literary Man Booker Prize awards.
The local plays which have sold out their five-day runs at the festival are the national service thriller Charged, inter-religious family drama Nadirah, and Cooling Off Day, a docudrama about the May General Election. The first play was written by Chong Tze Chien, and the latter two by Alfian Sa’at, both National Arts Council (NAC) Young Artist Award recipients.
Cooling Off Day, which I reviewed last week, manages to relive a watershed moment for political participation here with the kind of crackle and immediacy that you can only get with stripped- down live theatre.
Alfian and the veteran cast capture a range of voices, including ah peks and makciks, opposition figures and former political detainees, in vignettes notable not just for their unflinching honesty but also humour, compassion and insight.
If I was impressed by Cooling Off Day, my jaw dropped after reading the script for Charged, a searing, vulgarity-strewn piece taking off from the most extreme, racially loaded scenario imaginable – an investigation into the deaths of a Chinese and a Malay soldier, one having shot the other.
The play was first staged by Teater Ekamatra last December and ended its run at the festival earlier this month. Its script is one of four by Chong recently collected into a book by local publisher Epigram Books. Charged blows out the window at least two out-of-bounds markers that Singapore playwrights are thought not to be able to cross – racial sensitivities and the inviolability of national service.
It is a complex and layered interrogation of the interracial ignorance and prejudice that simmers in society and in national service barracks. It looks at how people sweep certain things they do not want to confront under the “race” carpet – issues that may really be about class divides or a basic level of humanity and decency.
There are two other politically themed works worth looking out for by other theatre companies. One is Tan’s The Fear Of Writing, a new play about self-censorship staged by TheatreWorks, which runs next month.
The other is Gemuk Girls, Haresh Sharma’s biting tragicomedy about the effects of political detention without trial on one Malay family. To be revived in November, it was first produced by The Necessary Stage to critical acclaim in 2008.
Apart from The Fear Of Writing, which has not yet received its licence from the Media Development Authority (MDA), all the other plays have been passed without cuts. Gemuk Girls and Cooling Off Day were given advisories for mature content and recommended for audiences aged 16 and above. Charged had an R18 rating for mature content and coarse language.
This reflects the MDA’s move in recent years away from censorship to age-appropriate ratings, although one could argue the NAC’s cut to Wild Rice’s annual grant for “disparaging public institutions” represents another form of censorship, given how other funding bodies take their cue from the Government.
This is why Man’s sponsorship is so significant. It signals the entry of a global sponsor responding more to a base of liberal yuppie consumers rather than an official government line.
Theatre here has a history of pushing the envelope, and has been given some latitude to do so because of its limited audience reach. The ups and downs of the theatre scene have thus depended partly on the development of its playwrights, and partly on the loosening and tightening of the political climate.
One high point was in the mid-1980s, when Kuo Pao Kun wrote some classic plays, and before the detention of key members of young drama group Third Stage for allegedly being part of a Marxist plot to overthrow the government.
Another peak was in the early-1990s, when playwrights such as Tan Tarn How, Eleanor Wong and Haresh Sharma won audiences and rave reviews.
Chong Tze Chien and Alfian Sa’at could be said to represent a third generation of writers, now in their 30s. In the last few years, theatre appears to be enjoying a new harvest of plays by them and others.
The challenge for playwrights has always been to find a fresh language to talk about society in all its complexity, against the homogenising rhetoric of top-down social engineering. I think great strides have been made in the writing, and I see audiences flocking to watch socio-political plays not simply to taste forbidden fruit, but to feed the soul.
The sensitivities of talking about race and religion in the public domain have been so ingrained that audiences look to drama for more debate and nuance about unspoken tensions. I am an optimist: May the illuminations in a darkened theatre counteract closed minds and knee-jerk prejudices.
ST: Bring back good plays
June 23rd, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Clarissa Oon
SPH – The Straits Times, Life!
23 Jun 2011
A recent post on The Guardian’s theatre blog has the catchy heading, ‘Do we stage too much Shakespeare?’ It goes on to question British theatre’s overdose of Hamlet. In older and more established cultural cities such as London, dusting off a successful or iconic script is the order of the day.
Without going into chaotic extremes, encore productions are also becoming increasingly commonplace here. Some sniff at this as a lack of fresh ideas; I tend to think of it positively, as a sign of the growing maturity of some Singapore playwrights that make their best works worth returning to.
The restaging of well-received plays is not a new phenomenon, but seems to be happening more often in the past two years – perhaps because there is finally a substantial body of work to go back to, after more than 20 years of professional theatre development. There is something bittersweet about resurrecting past plays, an act of not inconsiderable labour compared to the snap rewinding of a film reel.
Age has something to do with it. A core group of full-time directors, writers and actors has spent nearly half their lives treading the boards. They are getting older and hence, conscious of the need to educate young audiences and artists of Singapore’s performance heritage.
Due to the transitory nature of the form, a play may only live for a few days. Once it has proven itself, it needs to be revived every few years to become part of the collective cultural imagination. Otherwise, ‘if we have no sense of what has been done, it is very difficult to move forward’, as Singapore Arts Festival general manager Low Kee Hong puts it.
The festival has led the charge in restaging seminal Singaporean works, with theatre practitioner and sociologist Low making it one of the fixtures of the programme since he took over at the helm last year.
While the tendency with restaging a play is to update or give it a radically different spin, at least two recent festival productions have kept faith almost note-for-note with the original, allowing their forgotten creators to be heard. Last year’s Emily of Emerald Hill saw a grand-motherly Margarte Chan reprise the classic role she first played as a young woman, leaving the script much as Stella Kon wrote it. At this year’s recently concluded festival, it was the turn of Conference Of The Birds, late director William Teo’s pan-Asian take on an ancient fable. Jeremiah Choy filled the director’s chair but kept the texture of the production close to the one in which he had taken part as a performer 20 years ago.
The new Conference had its weaknesses but I liked that it was an unabashed homage to Teo. Singapore drama went through a pan-Asian phase during the 1990s and early 2000s, as part of a search for its own language. Teo was ahead of his time in fusing different Asian performance idioms into an improbably lyrical, syncretic whole. Choy’s production brought that home to me and a new generation that missed out on Teo’s works.
Restagings dominated the theatre calendar last year with quite a few companies celebrating 10- and 20-year anniversaries, including English-language theatre group Wild Rice which revisited its past hits such as the pantomime Cinderel-lah! and comedy Boeing Boeing.
More comebacks are in store with the resurfacing of three critically acclaimed plays. The Necessary Stage will bring back its political drama Gemuk Girls in November, while two plays exploring inter-racial tension – Chong Tze Chien’s Charged and Alfian Sa’at’s Nadirah – will be restaged as part of the Man Singapore Theatre Festival next month.
It has always made economic sense that plays with legs should run and run. In the United States, a good play typically makes a cross-country journey from regional theatres to off-Broadway before finally winding up on Broadway.
Theatre makers here have found ways of telescoping that journey. For example, Nadirah and Charged were small productions first staged by Teater Ekamatra in 2009 and 2010 respectively. They will now play to a wider audience as part of the Singapore Theatre Festival, Wild Rice’s platform for home-grown writing.
That playwrights such as Haresh Sharma, Tan Tarn How, Alfian and Chong have launched or will soon publish collections of playscripts can only encourage more revivals of their works.
Restagings make better practitioners – and audiences – out of us. A cracker of a script can only improve upon successive outings, as long as it is not milked to death – we have probably had enough of Singapore theatre’s favourite Peranakan matriarch Emily for a while, following two different revivals over the year.
With a restaging, audiences who did not see the play the first time around also get to plug that missing piece in the contextual jigsaw of arts appreciation.
As a theatre reviewer in the early parft of the last decade, I watched every show in town. Away from the scene for the past six years, restagings became my way of sifting out the enduring from the forgettable, and I suspect many audiences choose what to watch in the same way.
As a civil society observer with an interest in history, I am looking forward to Gemuk Girls, a powerful play about a political detainee’s family, first staged to rave reviews in 2008.
There are two other plays I would love to see revived. One is theatre doyen Kuo Pao Kun’s Mama Looking For Her Cat, a groundbreaking 1988 multilingual piece that has not been staged as often as his other landmark works such as The Coffin Is Too Big For The Hole, Mama is a sensitive critique of how society treats its elders, written in spare, economical prose that bears further interpretation. I last saw a version of the play staged in 1998 by Toy Factory and have no doubt it would resonate today – witness the recent expose of abuse in an old age home.
Another play which deserves a comeback is Tan’s Machine, a smart, dark riff on postmodern love, which won the Life! Theatre Awards Best Script in 2003. A total of 800 people saw the play, according to Tan. It was subsequently revisited by a different director in a low-key two-night production four years later.
Surely it deserves to be seen by more folks? Bring it on again, I say.
New Book: Six Plays
May 25th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Re-staging of The Lady of Soul and Her Ultimate ‘S’ Machine
April 26th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Links:
- Production website
- Poster
- Lady of Soul on Youtube
- NUS Newsletter
- Preview in Today, April, 2009 [PDF], below:
My playwright’s message: One has the nagging feeling that the label of “classic” some have attached to this work is not fully deserved until it has been produced a few more times. Nevertheless, in this society of the new and the disposable, having the play resurrected for its third staging can be nothing less than gratifying.
I wrote this in the early 90’s, when I was rather innocent, having thought that “art” had the capacity to change society. Society has changed since then, but not always for the better and not by any measure because of the arts. We – or I – thought rather naively that the audience wanted more than song and dance, more than entertainment. But it has come to pass that song and dance is what they really – and largely – wanted. Artists today are in the unenviable position of talking about a variety of things to an audience which seek only one thing, a good night out before they go on to supper at Newton or Adam Road and the rest of their lives-as-usual the next day. Not to denigrate ABBA, whose songs I can sing along to, admittedly rather badly, as happily as anyone else of my vintage, but it is rather symptomatic of our present time and place that a government minister no less could inveigh a gathering of theatre companies to stop indulging themselves with work that is too deep but to instead “do” Mama Mia!
My immense gratitude to Casey, Robin and Jeremiah – and of course also to the hardworking students of the NUS Theatre Studies Class for putting on the show.
