Centre 42 » The Vault: Gossip Symphony & Other Matters

Singapore Theatre in the 1970s

C42 Admin — Fri, 19 Apr 2019 08:05:42 +0000

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, it was Goh that made the above statement calling time on the local theatre scene.

Perhaps rumours of Singapore theatre’s death in the 1970s had been greatly exaggerated. It’s only with the benefit of hindsight that arts writers like Clarissa Oon can call the decade as Singapore theatre “in transition”, especially with the “first golden age of Singapore theatre” just around the corner in the 80’s.

Here is a glimpse into how Singapore theatre was alive and kicking in the 1970s through three key trends of the decade.

1. A hardy (but amateur) lot
2. A lack of good local full-length plays
3. State interventions

Contrary to expectations and predictions, interest in drama did not collapse.Violet Oon

Early in the 1970s, the withdrawal of the British troops from Singapore spelt doom for a largely amateur and expatriate theatre scene. Stage clubs in military bases like Tengah and Nee Soon wound up as its British members and audiences left the island. In 1971, the Singapore Herald reported that local theatre enthusiasts were predicting Singapore theatre would “die a natural death in a year’s time”. Nancy Byramji for the Straits Times painted a mournful picture of “empty seats” in theatre houses.

But all was not lost. A year later, New Nation’s Violet Oon jauntily wrote, “Contrary to expectations and predictions, interest in drama did not collapse.” Oon pointed out that the void left behind by the British groups was in actual fact space for newer players to emerge, albeit inexperienced.

Active amateur theatre groups of the decade included the Stage Club and The Young Musician’s Society, alongside collectives started in the local university, like Experimental Theatre Club, University of Singapore Society and University of Singapore Drama Society. But while the 1970s in Singapore was marked by high economic growth rates and a newfound prosperity for the fledgling nation, these local theatre groups didn’t seem to be part of the success story, struggling for money, audiences, members, and even space.

Former members of these groups painted a bleak picture. In the Singapore theatre history publication Theatre Life!, Kate James said that Experimental Theatre Club could be performing to an audience of just 20 people, and Lim Kay Tong declared “there was no theatre scene” because productions were far and few between. “Turnover of membership is very high. Our problem is to get a core of members who will be there to keep the interest going,” said D. Murugan, president of the Experimental Theatre Club. Murugan also bemoaned the lack of rehearsal space, with his club wandering from one home of a “kind host” to another.

All these problems were pegged to an absent professional theatre industry. Donald Moore writing for New Nation was harsh in his critique of the Singapore English-language theatre scene at the time: “The Western theatre is the prisoner of its own inevitably amateur status, incapable of producing anything but mediocrity. With the best will in the world, little is possible in the theatre without long and arduous training, professionalism, and a modicum of genius.”

Yet, for all these problems, the amateur theatre groups of the 70’s soldiered on. Amy Chua for the Straits Times called these groups a “hardy lot” who were “self-supporting”, continuing the stage productions year on year out of passion for theatre.
As you write a play, you feel justice will not be done to your work – so you fight shy of writing it.Goh Poh Seng

Local theatre groups in the 1970s preferred to stage Western plays in the belief that local play-writing was both scarce and of low quality. This wasn’t an entirely grim situation. Clarissa Oon wrote, “Although the reliance on foreign plays set back the development of a Singaporean voice, the fact that these [Western] scripts tended to be well-crafted allowed homegrown directing and acting talent to shine.”

Still, a good full-length original Singapore play was an extreme rarity in this decade. Some locally-written short plays did make it to the stage during the decade, and on one occasion in 1972 were described as “show[ing] some promise”. But from the 70’s, only two stand-out full-length Singapore plays emerged.

The first was Robert Yeo’s Are You There, Singapore?, about a group of Singaporean students studying in London. Yeo was then a published poet and a first-time playwright. Are You There, Singapore? was staged by the University of Singapore Society in 1974 to full houses of local audiences. Reviewing Are You There, Singapore? for New Nation, Violet Oon was effulsive in her praise for the original work: “[I]t convinced me more than ever that Singaporeans should act in plays written by our own people because then we can identify with the ideas, moods and nuances. Double meanings can be understood and appreciated. This feeling seems to be shared by other people because it is about the best-attended play I’ve seen.”

Three years later, chemist Li Lien Fung would pen The Sword Has Two Edges based on The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which, like Yeo, was her first full-length English script. Li’s play was staged by the Experimental Theatre Club in 1977 and achieved similar box office success. Oon called The Sword Has Two Edges “undoubtedly the best local play I’ve seen produced so far.”

These two works proved that there was an appetite for Singaporean plays. So why weren’t more full-length local works written during the decade? While Goh Poh Seng admitted that local writing wasn’t up to par, but he also pinned the blame on the amateur groups. “The frustrating thing is that there are no theatre groups in Singapore of any standing or standards at all,” he wrote in New Nation in 1976. “As you write a play, you feel justice will not be done to your work – so you fight shy of writing it. One is always accepting limitations – bad actors, amateur directors, no decent lighting and stage facilities, and so on.” Which should come first – good plays or good theatre groups? “It’s a vicious cycle,” declared Goh.
In 1977, the Ministry of Culture convened an advisory committee on drama comprising a number of theatremakers and chaired by Robert Yeo. A number of initiatives emerged from the recommendations of the committee to boost Singapore theatre-making and -going.

One of these initiatives was the Drama Promotion Scheme, a $2,000 grant for theatre groups to stage productions. The Business Times in January 1978 reported that the scheme carried two conditions: all profits from the production would go back to the Ministry, and ticket prices had to be kept low to encourage public attendance.

The advisory committee’s recommendations also spawned a nation-wide playwriting competition, as well as an annual Drama Festival. The inaugural Drama Festival was a two-week affair in August 1978 at the Victoria Theatre with 15 stage performances. The Ministry of Culture, which organised the festival, intended for the event to “raise the standard of drama performance and encourage appreciation of drama among Singaporean”. The Ministry later described the first Drama Festival as a “reasonable success [with] attendances averaging 60 per cent and above at most performances”.

Also of note was the first Singapore Festival of the Arts in 1977 – a precursor of today’s Singapore International Festival of Arts – organised by The Young Musicans’ Society. (The running of subsequent editions was taken over by the Ministry of Culture and its successors.) The Singapore Festival of the Arts provided yet another platform for theatre groups to create and stage work for local audiences.

But the 1970s was also a chilling time to be in theatre with cultural policing by the State. Some of it was relatively benign, like national policies barring foreign men with long hair from entering the country. Other measures were more restrictive – Ministry of Culture regulated and censored material for public consumption, including play scripts. For example, the University of Singapore Drama Society was banned from staging Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade in 1972 because the Ministry had deemed the script “unacceptable”. A performance permit for Yeo’s sophomore play One Year Back Home was also held back for over a year until sufficient revisions had been made to its overtly political content; the play was eventually permitted to be performed in 1980.

Perhaps most severe of all government interventions in the decade was the crackdown on political dissidents suspected of pro-communist activities. In the mid-1970s, alleged enemies of the state were detained without trial, including many local practitioners of Chinese theatre, which at the time was producing socially and politically charged works. Among the Chinese theatre practitioners detained were dramatist Kuo Pao Kun and his wife Goh Lay Kuan, founders of the Practice Theatre School (now The Theatre Practice). Koh and Goh were detained in 1976 and held for four-and-a-half years and six months respectively.

By Daniel Teo
Published on 19 April 2019

References

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The Vault: Gossip, Symphony & Other Matters features three performance responses to Robert Yeo’s One Year Back Home. The three performance responses are created by the graduating students of the NUS Theatre Studies Theatre Lab, engaging with and responding to the ideas, dramaturgy and theatricalities in One Year Back Home. Gossip, Symphony & Other Matters is presented by Centre 42 and NUS Theatre Studies. Find our more here.

About “One Year Back Home”

C42 Admin — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 09:41:22 +0000

Synopsis

One Year Back Home is the second play in Robert Yeo’s The Singapore Trilogy. Set in 1972, returning characters Hua and her brother Chye, and their mutual friend Fernandez, are back in Singapore after completing their studies in London.

Hua is a single mother to a five-year-old daughter who was conceived during the events of the first play. She begins dating Gerald, but chooses to keep her daughter a secret from him.

Chye and Fernandez become political opponents, the former contesting in the election as a member of the ruling Political Action Party, and the latter, in the opposition Workers’ Party. The play concludes with Chye elected into Parliament and Fernandez arrested for making inflammatory statements at a rally.

First Staging

Buoyed by the immense success of Are You There, Singapore? in 1974 , Yeo wrote the sequel One Year Back Home in 1979. But he had difficulty in finding willing parties to stage his script.

Yeo told the Straits Times‘s John De Souza in 1980 that one producer was “scared” to stage One Year Back Home, fearing retaliation over the play’s political content. Local writing was also much derided at the time – an industry peer allegedly told Yeo, “Why write new plays when there are so many good ones already written?”

Yeo eventually turned to Max Le Blond to produce and direct One Year Back Home under the aegis of the University of Singapore Society, the group that also staged Are You There, Singapore?

But there was another snag in bringing One Year Back Home to the stage. In July 1979, Yeo wrote to the Ministry of Culture to obtain a permit to perform the play in September that year. One month later, his request for the permit was rejected. It was only in May 1980, after more letters, phone calls, interviews and revisions to the script, that the Ministry of Culture permitted One Year Back Home to be performed. (Yeo recounts the 18-month journey to obtain the permit in the preface of the published script.)

One Year Back Home was finally performed from 20 to 22 November 1980 at the DBS Auditorium. (The play would receive one more staging in 1990 in TheatreWorks’ festival of Singapore theatre history The Retrospective.)

Responses

Local audiences thronged the auditorium eager to see the follow-up to Yeo’s Are You There, Singapore?. Theatre critics of the time, however, were divided over their evaluation of the sequel.

Margaret Chan, writing for New Nation, was emphatic in her praise of the production: “Last night I had the closest encounter with good Singapore theatre, and it was thrilling.” She called Le Blond’s direction “artistically and technically tight” and remarked that the Singaporean-ness of Yeo’s text made the experience “living theatre”.

Wong Hsien Cheen, also reviewing for New Nation, and Goh Kian Chee for the Straits Times, were in agreement that Yeo’s text was ponderous and heavy-handed. Wong wrote, “What emerged was a hotchpotch of sterile views which reduced Fernandez and Chye to caricatures… What is evident is that Mr Yeo must find some way of unburdening it of the heavy rhetoric which mucks up the whole thing.”

Goh echoed this view: “I would be failing if I did not point out what I consider to be its two major inadequacies: One, it is too didactic, at the expense of entertainment. And two, it reads better than it sounds, and even at that, there really are too few punch lines.”

In addition, both Chan and Wong noted that the production was drawing laughter from the audience for its portrayal of Singaporean colloquialisms. The lighter moments though, were to the detriment of the production’s more serious scenes. Wong recounted, “At some point in the evening, the humour probably became too infectious, and the final scene when the Internal Security men came to arrest Fernandez was not greeted by the hushed unease of violated human liberties, but unbridled laughter! I suspect that, quite inadvertently, Robert Yeo has written a successful political comedy.”

Goh neatly summed up his experience of One Year Back Home: “Overall, I would not hesitate to recommend One Year to those seriously interested in the development of drama in Singapore. It is not a great play, but it is interesting enough for an evening out.”

Significance

Despite mixed reviews of its debut production, One Year Back Home would become an important entry in the Singapore dramatic canon.

Yeo appears as a sort of maverick for portraying local politics so vividly in One Year Back Home, especially when the sequel was written just a few years after eminent dramatist Kuo Pao Kun was arrested for alleged communist sentiments in his works. Yeo was quoted as saying, “[M]y play is a breakthrough because I’m taking on sensitive material, but I’m doing it from the point of view of an artist and I’m using the medium of a play to say these things.”

Even before the premiere of One Year Back Home, news media reporting on the production picked up on the political content of Yeo’s play. In a preview of the play published in New Nation a month before the production, Chan wrote, “The play, meant to be a social commentary, turned out to be political… Topical issues are aired in the battle [between Chye and Fernandez] such as the need for an opposition for its own sake in a democracy, blatant materialism breeding greed and tragic loss, the chit fund crash of that time and the need to conform.”

One Year Back Home and the rest of the Singapore Trilogy are also noted for their realistic portrayal of Singaporeans and Singapore society. In the infancy of the Singapore theatre landscape, it was Yeo’s belief that writers and practitioners should first focus on rendering Singaporean-ness as closely as possible in text and on stage. “What I’m trying to do is to reflect, to mirror reality,” Yeo said in an interview in 1980. “Now is the time, I feel, to start writing about the things around us… not symbolically or metaphorically, but realistically.”

Academics K.K. Seet and Chitra Sankaran historically situate the social realism of Yeo’s plays in their introduction to the Singapore Trilogy: “Yeo’s political dramas of the 1970s and early 1980s can be regarded as trailblazers, ushering in succeeding decades when Kuo Pao Kun would resort to allegory to question the status quo or Tan Tarn How would infringe on taboo areas and confront conservative political sensibilities through the veil of satire.”

One Year Back Home would also be heralded as one of the earliest examples of successfully representing the local patois on the page. In particular, Hua and Chye’s mother, Mrs Ang, is highlighted for her naturalistic speech in the play. Yeo had found a way to portray how a non-English educated Singaporean might speak English in a manner that felt more authentic and acceptable than attempts by forebearers like Goh Poh Seng and Lim Chor Pee.

“There are some ‘lahs’, and ‘aiyahs’ but the characters being English-educated speak well enough to develop dialogue,” an unnamed local writer observed in One Year Back Home. “Mrs Ang, Chye’s mother is not English educated and speaks broken English. She is Peranakan, and Mr Ang senior is Hokkien. So both compromise and speak English at home. That’s how the wily Robert Yeo has slipped out of the trap of authentic communication in this case.”

According to Seet and Sankaran, Mrs Ang’s language features “a range of linguistic registers [extending] from Standard Singapore English to different forms of colloquial Singapore English […] including rich code-mixing and code-switching”.

Examining the significance of One Year Back Home against the backdrop of Singapore English-language theatre history, academic Robin Loon observed that the play and its box office success in 1980 was an indication that “there [was] an audience for locally-written English language plays [and that] the dramatist and playwright’s voice was also growing and beginning to engage with immediate social and political issues.”

By Daniel Teo
Published on 16 April 2019

One Year Back Home can be found in:

Yeo, R. (1990). One Year Back Home: A play in five scenes. Singapore: Solidarity Foundation.
Yeo, R. (2001). The Singapore Trilogy. Singapore: Landmark Books.

[Both books are available for loan in the Centre 42 Book Den.]

Other Sources:

Chan, M. (1980, October 10). From concern in the wings to centre stage. In New Nation. Downloaded from NewspaperSG.
Chan, M. (1980, November 21). Local idiom brings play to life. In New Nation. Downloaded from NewspaperSG.
De Souza, J. (1980, November 20). A playwright’s reality. In Straits Times. Downloaded from NewspaperSG.
Goh, K. C. (1980, November 21). Not great, but… In Straits Times. Downloaded from NewspaperSG.
Loon, R. (2016). Singapore English Theatre: Dynamic and diverse. In Singapore Chronicles: Theatre (pp. 17-41). Singapore: Institute of Policy Studies & Straits Times Press.
Wong, H. C. (1980, November 23). A success as political comedy. In New Nation. Downloaded from NewspaperSG.

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The Vault: Gossip, Symphony & Other Matters features three performance responses to Robert Yeo’s One Year Back Home. The three performance responses are created by the graduating students of the NUS Theatre Studies Theatre Lab, engaging with and responding to the ideas, dramaturgy and theatricalities in One Year Back Home. Gossip, Symphony & Other Matters is presented by Centre 42 and NUS Theatre Studies. Find our more here.

The Vault: Gossip, Symphony & Other Matters

C42 Admin — Fri, 05 Apr 2019 06:14:23 +0000

The Vault: Gossip, Symphony & Other Matters is a triple bill of performance responses to Roberty Yeo’s One Year Back Home created by the graduating students of NUS Theatre Studies Theatre Lab.
| 00:00:16 “What Matters” | 00:21:53 “Gossip GRLs” | 00:41:08 “Symphony 404″ |

SynopsisArtistsResources

One Year Back Home by Robert Yeo is about the lives of 20-something-year-old Singaporeans returning home from studying overseas in 1972. What will 20-something-year-olds nearly 40 years later make of the play?

First staged in 1980, One Year Back Home was a runaway breakthrough for Singapore English-language theatre. In 2019, students from the National University of Singapore’s Theatre Studies Theatre Lab delved into this landmark play and have crafted three unique performance responses:

Symphony 404 is a riff off the premise in One Year Back Home of old friends reuniting for a shared purpose. A reunion concert for their alma mater goes south when alumni members of a school band end up fighting with each other.

What Matters features Lisa Ang, the daughter of main character Ang Siew Hwa. Now in her 50s, Lisa is a single woman of mixed parentage who is in politics. This performance charts Lisa’s rise to prominence and the reactions of different cross-sections of the public.

Gossip GRLs is a farce that examines the support staff of Grassroots Leaders (GRLs). The performance follows the misadventures of a new volunteer joining the chaotic and competitive world of grassroots leadership.

REGISTRATION

Saturday, 20 April 2019
2.30pm & 7.30pm
@ Centre 42 Black Box

Admission: Give-What-You-Can
(Cash only, at the door)

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

WHAT MATTERS

Desai Shivani Jatin
Lee Shea Shan Mega
Victoria Ow Sue Rey
Yeo Dana
Chew Hwee Chee

GOSSIP GRLs

Cherie Ho
Chermaine Cham
Chimene Khoo
Michelle Simon Hariff
Tricia Ding

SYMPHONY 404

Samuel Ng
Shim Sae Eun
Lau Xuan Kai
Nathaniel Aaron Tan
Jean Tay

DRAMATURG
Dr. Robin Loon
(Module Chair TS3103 Theatre Lab)

PRODUCER
Nora Samosir
(Coordinator TS3103 Theatre Lab)

DOCUMENTATION WORKSHOP FACILITATORS
Daniel Teo & Gwen Pew
(Centre 42)

TECHNICAL CONSULTANT
Henrik Cheng

Reading Material

#1: ABOUT ONE YEAR BACK HOME

#2: SINGAPORE THEATRE IN THE 1970s

Programme Booklet

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The Vault: Gossip, Symphony & Other Matters features three performance responses to Robert Yeo’s One Year Back Home. The three performance responses are created by the graduating students of the NUS Theatre Studies Theatre Lab, engaging with and responding to the ideas, dramaturgy and theatricalities in One Year Back Home. Gossip, Symphony & Other Matters is presented by Centre 42 and NUS Theatre Studies.