VA: Resources

The Desert Blooms

An accompanying exhibition, titled The Desert Blooms, features nine of these plays. The exhibition details who, when and how these plays were created, and also touched on any resistance these plays might have encountered when they were staged for the…

Singapore Theatre in the 1970s

“Theatre is dead, really.” With original English-language plays by the likes of Lim Chor Pee and Goh Poh Seng in the 1960s, it seemed like Singapore theatre was off to a promising start. But just a decade into Singapore’s independence,…

About “One Year Back Home”

One Year Back Home is the second play of Robert Yeo's The Singapore Trilogy. One Year Back Home is set in 1972, five years after the first play Are You There, Singapore?. Hua and her brother Chye, and their mutual…

Interview with Eugene Koh, Lee Shu Yu & Brenda Tan

Written in 1982, Stella Kon’s Emily of Emerald Hill is one of the most well-known and beloved plays in the Singapore English-Language Theatre canon. And now, 36 years after the monodrama was first written, a group of young theatre practitioners…

Singapore Theatre in the 1980s

The 1980s were an exciting time for Singapore theatre, and English-language drama in particular. In his essay Singapore English Theatre: Dynamic and Diverse, which traces the history of local English-language theatre, Robin Loon called the 80’s the “first golden age…

About “Emily of Emerald Hill”

First Stagings Stella Kon first wrote Emily of Emerald Hill in 1982. With the play, she won the 1983 Singapore National Playwriting Competition – organised by the Ministry of Culture – for the third time. Kon had previously won the competition in 1977 with The…

Shifting Sands: Pasir Panjang Land Reclamation

Singapore's fast-changing landscape has always been rich fodder for the work of local theatremakers. There was Stella Kon's landmark monologue Emily of Emerald Hill (1984), in which an aged Emily Gan laments the new apartment blocks surrounding her mansion on…

About My Grandfather’s Road (2015)

"When I wrote [My Grandfather’s Road], I didn't know what I wanted to do, but at the end I realised it was about mortality and, more importantly, about renewing your relationships with people.” - Neo Kim Seng

Interview with Neo Kim Seng

"There is a strong emotional attachment to the sound of Cantonese although I may not fully understand the words. The project is about reconnecting to a relegated language, sound and people." - Neo Kim Seng

The Plays of “Absence Makes the Heart…”

The Vault: Absence Makes the Heart... looks at the portrayal of Indian characters in Singapore English-language plays throughout history. Here are the plays whose excerpts are performed in Absence, as well as information about their first stagings.

Losing the English Advantage

In colonial Singapore, English literacy among the Asiatic population – Chinese, Malays and Indians – was alarmingly low. In a 1935 report in the Malaya Tribune, the 1931 population census found that: However, among the three largest ethnic groups in…

About The Coffin Is Too Big For The Hole

Synopsis The monologue by Kuo Pao Kun is centred on a man who has been tasked to oversee the funeral of his grandfather. It emerges that the grand coffin is too large to fit into the standard-sized grave that has…

About No Parking On Odd Days

Synopsis Kuo Pao Kun’s 1984 monologue examines the rigidity – and sometimes absurdity – of bureaucracy through a series of confrontations that a man has with the authorities over parking tickets. First Stagings The English version of No Parking On Odd…

About “Playing Mothers”

Playing Mothers is an exploration of the concept of motherhood. The play follows seven characters, both female and male, and all mothers in their own way. In a Straits Times article dated 10 Jan 1996, playwright Ovidia Yu said "anyone…

About “The Lunar Interviews”

The Lunar Interviews is a series of seven monologues in which moon goddesses Chang Er, Diana, and Hina – from Chinese, Roman, and Polynesian mythologies respectively – recount tales of both divine creation and mundane loneliness. The stories touch on…