The Vault: @thisisemeraldgirl an adaptation of Stella Kon’s much-loved play Emily of Emerald Hill. Created by Eugene Koh and Lee Shu Yu, and performed by Brenda Tan, @thisisemeraldgirl combines new writing, multimedia, and Stella Kon’s original text in a monologue exploring family and social life in a social media age.

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The Vault: @thisisemeraldgirl is an adaptation of Stella Kon’s much-loved play Emily of Emerald Hill. Created by Eugene Koh and Lee Shu Yu, and performed by Brenda Tan, @thisisemeraldgirl combines new writing, multimedia, and Stella Kon’s original text in a monologue exploring family and social life in a social media age.
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The creators of The Vault: @thisisemeraldgirl (from left to right): Sarah Amalina, Brenda Tan, Lee Shu Yu, and Eugene Koh. Photo: Gwen Pew

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 have decided to revisit the work and examine it in a new light through Centre 42’s Vault programme. Titled The Vault: @thisisemeraldgirl, this new creation is written and co-directed by Eugene Koh, co-directed by Lee Shu Yu, performed by Brenda Tan, and stage managed and documented by Sarah Amalina. It mixes parts of the original play text with new writing and multi-media, and aims to explore what Emily might look like in the social media age through a new character called Elisabeth, who the team devised together.

The Vault: @thisisemeraldgirl will be performed at Centre 42 on 29 and 30 June. In this interview, we chat with Eugene, Shu Yu, and Brenda to find out more about what we can expect.

How did the idea for The Vault: @thisisemeraldgirl come about?
Eugene Koh (EK): We were taking the module ‘Singapore English-Language Theatre’ in NUS [National University of Singapore], and in one of the first lessons we were talking about Emily of Emerald Hill, and Dr. [Robin] Loon [lecturer and Centre 42’s co-founder] mentioned that you can never tell who Emily was addressing: the audience in the 1950s, or in the future, or in the past. It made me wonder why, then, is this play so recognized and remembered, if the audience are not sure where to place themselves? And I drew the parallel to YouTube videos, where everything seems like it’s happening in the present, even though you know it’s made in the past. So it started from that idea.

What are you hoping to explore through this work?
Lee Shu Yu (LSY): When you look at Emily as a character, there is a lot of debate about whether you should like her or hate her, so we wanted to capture that through Elisabeth as well. We wanted to represent a kind of performativity of identity through the lens of social media, because nowadays that’s what’s happening around us, so we wanted to represent that onstage.

Brenda Tan (BT): We also wanted to explore how Emily navigates with the space and interacts with different characters through Elisabeth. It’s interesting to see her as a sole character and focus on how her body and voice changes.

How did you go about exploring the characters of both Emily and Elisabeth in your upcoming work?
BT: Emily is a very established character who has been portrayed by a ton of really great actors over the years, and you see different people bringing out a different side of Emily – Margaret Chan was very motherly, Ivan Heng was more performative and funny, etc. So in drawing the parallel to Elisabeth being a millennial who uses the internet and navigates around the social media space, we wanted her to be someone who is approachable. She’s performative in a way, but still true to her own character.

Do you see The Vault: @thisisemeraldgirl as an extension or an adaptation of Emily of Emerald Hill?
LSY: It’s a sequel, adaptation, and reinterpretation all at once. It is a sequel in terms of timeline and Elisabeth’s relationship to Emily; it’s an adaptation because we took our reference from the source material; but it’s also a reinterpretation because we took certain themes and moods of each scene but used them in our own way.

What was your process like in creating The Vault: @thisisemeraldgirl?
EK: It was collaborative.

BT: We literally sat in Eugene’s room, and he had post-it notes of different scenes from Emily of Emerald Hill stuck on his wardrobe door. And we were like, “Hmm this one is nice. Okay, let’s move this here…” And we just kind of see how it fits and which scenes from the original text we wanted to keep.

EK: As for the voice of Elisabeth, most of it came from Brenda. She would improvise certain scenes.

BT: It can be difficult because I also make YouTube videos, so in many of these instances I am being me and I can relate, but at the same time I have to be very careful and remember that it’s also not me.

LSY: So every time Brenda comes up with something, we will take it apart and discuss what’s interesting about it, how it’s similar to Emily, or why it’s relevant to today’s life.

Brenda, you mentioned that you’re also a YouTuber in real life. What’s that like for you?
BT: I started making YouTube videos just as I entered university, so for two and a half years now. My videos are mostly about skincare, makeup, and fashion, but some people who follow me will request videos and I’ll do them. So it became about food, lifestyle, home, and other personal stuff. More recently, I started talking about social issues because not a lot of people are talking about them. It’s been such an adventure. I didn’t expect to have an audience, because I initially made the videos as a companion to my blog. I’ve always been a social media baby. I found that it’s the best way to make very quick, sincere interactions, and I never thought it’s fake because you know how Singaporeans are really shy, so when someone wants to reach out to me, they will write me an email or they’ll slide into my DMs [direct messages] [laughs]. It’s nice to be able to pour my heart out in front of the camera and find that there’s a group of people who feel the same way and actually want to have a sincere conversation about it.

There’s a multimedia element in The Vault: @thisisemeraldgirl. Can you tell us more about that?
EK: Emily of Emerald Hill uses a lot of media that was fairly new at the time – things like voice recording or projector slides – to enhance the theatrical illusion of the play. And for us, we felt that we should pay homage to that by using social media in our performance as well.

LSY: I think one big thing that kept coming up as we were thinking about it was the staging of it. We have multimedia going on in the background, but we also have a live performer. So which is more ‘live’ and which is more ‘present’?

What were some of the challenges that you faced during the creation process?
LSY: Interestingly, the big challenges we had actually worked out pretty okay – in terms of when we were brainstorming about creative ideas, working out plot holes and things like that. The main roadblocks were things like looking for archive footages and going through the paperwork of obtaining them. Thankfully people like [producer] Jeremiah [Choy] and Centre 42 helped.

Who is your ideal audience for this work?
BT: People who are genuinely interested in seeing how Emily of Emerald Hill has evolved – people who are hopefully familiar with the play and the themes that it discusses. Hopefully, our piece will provide them with a platform for deeper conversation.

Do you feel like it’s more for the millennial generation – since you’re referencing the social media world so much – or is it for everyone else as well?
EK: I guess both. Those who are more familiar with the earlier stagings of Emily of Emerald Hill will pick up more on how things have changed. With the millennial generation, I guess they would recognize the environment that Elisabeth is in and, through that, understand what Emily of Emerald Hill is about. So, the net is fairly wide?

BT: Also, if it piques an interest in people who have never read or watched Emily of Emerald Hill to pick up the script to read it, you know, then that’s great!

By Gwen Pew
Published on 21 June 2018

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The Vault: @thisisemeraldgirl is an adaptation of Stella Kon’s much-loved play Emily of Emerald Hill. Created by Eugene Koh and Lee Shu Yu, and performed by Brenda Tan, @thisisemeraldgirl combines new writing, multimedia, and Stella Kon’s original text in a monologue exploring family and social life in a social media age. Find out more here.
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At the time, Singapore was emerging as a new economic powerhouse, and a young generation of English-educated Singaporeans were ready to create and consume theatre. This was the decade when many of the seeds for today’s scene were planted.

By the 1980s, the country was experiencing high levels of economic growth thanks to an export oriented economic strategy. The blip of the 1985 recession nonwithstanding, Singaporeans enjoyed material affluence and, as the fruit of meticulous state-centered planning, a middle class began to emerge by the mid 1980s. Accompanying this emergence were the emotional stirrings over larger questions of national identity and culture. The English-educated middle class was searching for its soul. It was against the backdrop of these emotional stirrings over national identity that a Singapore English-language theatre was born in the mid-late 1980s.

The Theatre and the State in Singapore: Orthodoxy and resistance by Terence Chong. Routledge, 2011 (p.4).

Here are three trends which defined the 80’s in Singapore theatre.

• 1. The Search for a Singapore Theatre
• 2. Proliferation and Professionalisation of Theatre Groups
• 3. State Support for the Arts

• 1. The Search for a Singapore Theatre

  The turning point of Singapore English theatre which heralded this unprecedented activity in 1985 – at a time of economic recession previously unknown in modern Singapore and reducing company sponsorship of the main festival in Singapore – is not something that can be pinned down to one particular event. But chief amongst the many factors must be, I would suggest, an increasing recognition that writers, directors, actors and audiences required there to be a phenomenon recognisable as Singapore theatre.

  Singapore English Drama: A Historical Overview by David Birch. In 9 Lives: 10 Years of Singapore Theatre 1987 – 1997 (pp.41-42).

  Early in the decade, there was an insistent call for original Singaporean plays. Part of the demand was State-led, with annual play-writing competitions organised by the Ministry of Culture and the Singapore Cultural Foundation beginning in the late 70’s. On the ground, theatre practitioners and academics like Max le Blond were leading the charge for the creation of more Singaporean dramatic texts.

  Some of the material available for staging is, in fact, pretty ghastly stuff, totally lacking, even on the most generous of estimates, in the barest essentials of theatrical validity.

  On the other hand, there have been local scripts which have amply proved themselves in performance in recent years – demonstrating their capacity to fill the house for a two-night or three-night run.

  Year of the local playwright? By Max le Blond. In Straits Times (24 January 1982), https://tinyurl.com/y9rorexe

  By house-filling scripts, le Blond, a university lecturer and theatre practitioner, was referring to The Sword Has Two Edges by Li Lienfung, staged in 1977, and One Year Back Home by Robert Yeo, staged in 1980.

  But the problem wasn’t entirely a lack of good home-grown plays. Local plays were not often staged in early 80’s, as theatre academic David Birch points out in 1984:

  If you attended the several hundred English plays that have been staged here since 1959, you would have seen a total of 19 English plays or adaptations written by Singaporeans (excluding schools plays).

  […]

  Is it because there aren’t any writers of English plays here? Hardly. In the 1983 national playwriting competition, half of the 224 entries were in English. That hardly suggests a death of playwrights in English.

  Why are local English plays so rarely staged? By David Birch. In Straits Times (23 September 1984), https://tinyurl.com/y7tlhjpt

  The biennial Singapore Festival of Arts was taking incremental steps to help develop and showcase Singapore theatre. In 1982, it commissioned the musical Samsung and the Chettiar’s Daughter, a local adaptation of the British classic The Beggar’s Opera. It featured an all-local cast, and was directed by Australian Tasker. In 1984, the festival mounted Bumboat!, a showcase of local play-writing and performers. American Tzi Ma was flown in to direct the production alongside Singaporean Lim Siauw Chong.

  In a review of the 1984 Singapore Festival of Arts, theatre doyen Kuo Pao Kun criticised the festival’s tepid attempts at creating opportunities to forge a local theatre created and performed solely by local theatremakers, without any foreign involvement.

  Given the due recognition for Bumboat!’s present success, can we envisage what could have happened to the exercise if it were left entirely to the local talent?

  Two things would have happened:

  Firstly, the development of the indigenous English-stream theatre would have taken a much more advanced step; we would have had a total integration of our writing, directing, acting and staging resources.

  Secondly, the play would have decidedly more indigenous in substance. Theatrically, it could have been a better production, or it could have been one not as good. But it would have been unmistakably more Singaporean.

  …

  From Samseng [and the Chettiar’s Daughter] to Bumboat!, there was a discernible conservative mentality over-shadowing the English-stream which failed to allow the indigenous talents to have a free hand to take over the entire stage and initiate their very own theatre, imprinting a stamp wholesomely theirs.

  Setting the stage for indigenous English-stream theatre here by Kuo Pao Kun. In Singapore Monitor (13 July 1984)., https://tinyurl.com/ybmdsdgc

  The latter half of the 80’s saw some of Singapore theatre’s most iconic works being staged by Singapore theatremakers. These were runaway successes at home and aboard, including – to name a few – Stella Kon’s Emily of Emerald Hill, staged at the 1985 Drama Festival; Kuo Pao Kun’s monologues The Coffin Is Too Big For the Hole and No Parking on Odd Days, premiered in English in 1985 and 1986 respectively; and Michael Chiang and Dick Lee’s musical Beauty World, staged at the 1988 Singapore Festival of Arts.

• 2. Proliferation and Professionalisation of Theatre Groups

  The 80’s was also marked by emergence of many English-language theatre groups. Former Straits Times theatre critic Clarissa Oon attributes this surge in local amateur theatremaking to the English-language education policies implemented in the preceding decades.

  …the 1980s was a time when a Singapore English-language theatre took shape, fed by a groundswell of stage talent and audiences. Education policies of the 1960s and 1970s are key to understanding the shift in the status of English drama from a minority concern to a mainstream activity. As the government decided to promote the use of English for economic development, Chinese-, Malay- and Tamil-medium schools saw dwindling enrolment before ceasing to be viable.

  […]

  The effect of these education policies was swift and significant. Young English-speaking Singaporeans formed their own theatre groups in the 1980s, and English-speaking audiences – increasingly affluent and searching for an identity – were converging at the theatre. At the same time, the supple of talent and audiences to the theatres of the other language streams dropped dramatically.

  Theatre Life!: A History of English-language Theatre in Singapore through The Straits Times (1958-2000) by Clarrisa Oon. Singapore Press Holdings, 2001 (pp. 99-101).

  Amateur theatre groups born in the decade tended to emerge from schools and universities, groups like Third Stage, The Necessary Stage and Action Theatre. The latter two groups would later go on to become professional theatre companies. Third Stage, however, with its focus on original works about Singaporean issues, operated for only four years in the 80’s as its members were detained without trial under charges of anti-government conspiracy in 1987.

  Other notable amateur groups during the decade included William Teo’s Asia-in-Theatre Research Circus, and Christina Sergeant and Shirley Smith’s Actor’s Theatre Circle.

  In the past year or so, many new and talented young drama groups, actors, directors and playwrights have emerged into the public spotlight.

  Most shone in the Drama Festival ’87, held from August to September, and if they develop as well as their debuts promise, should keep local theatre exciting at least until the 1990s.

  The groups range in age from Necessary Stage and Arts & Acts, formed last year, to the barely month-old Play-Acts Productions of Siglap Community Centre.

  […]

  All seem to share common emotions – a fearless, non-academic, “real-life” approach to drama, and a need for self-expression through theatre.

  Dramatic developments by John de Souza. In Straits Times (30 December 1987), https://tinyurl.com/yajhvdcd

  Amongst the first theatre groups to go professional was TheatreWorks, founded in 1985 by Lim Kay Tong, Justin Hill, and Lim Siauw Chong.

  The first professional theatre company for adults has been quietly launched.

  Sixty-seven people showed up last weekend to join TheatreWorks.

  […]

  The TheatreWorks personnel were relaxed and businesslike. The venture has just been registered as a private limited company, so the essential business of compiling files and contacts, taking photographs, holding interviews (average time per candidate was 14 minutes) and the subsequent evaluation of data was conducted cheerfully and meticulously.

  Justin Hill, project manager of the company, fronted an explain-the-aims session – to put on plays of particular relevance to Singaporeans; to entertain; to reject artistic xenophobia; to nurture local plays; to develop potential; to consolidate theatrical talent; to attain high standards in theatre, and, ultimately (“in four or five years”), to have people earning a living in Singapore theatre.

  Launch of play group by Kate James. In Straits Times (9 March 1985), https://tinyurl.com/yalncq9e

  Theatre academic Robin Loon concludes that the 80’s was a time of the “start-ups”, seeding explosive growth in the English-language theatre scene in Singapore in the following decade.

  This period can be best summarised as a foundational period. As much as the audience was looking to theatre in search of its identity, so were these companies and groups. It was in the next five years that all the groups would come into their own, creating a specialised segment and focus in the scene for themselves.

  Singapore English Theatre: Dynamic and Diverse by Robin Loon. In Singapore Chronicles: Theatre, 2016 (pp.31-32).

• 3. State Support for the Arts

  The 80’s was a time when present-day State support structures for the arts were taking shape. National platforms like the Singapore Festival of the Arts (a precursor of the Singapore International Festival of the Art) and the Drama Festival functioned, in part, as commissioning bodies for local theatrical works. Annual national play-writing competitions, beginning in the late 70’s, were organised by the Ministry of Culture and Singapore Cultural Foundation, with cash rewards for prize-winning scripts. The latter organisation also disbursed grants for arts production and scholarship.

  Max le Blond, lecturer at the National University of Singapore and theatre director, was quoted as saying:

  Government support for local theatre is increasing and we have much to be grateful for, but more can be done. No theatre, no matter how eminent and powerful, can survive in a context such as ours without governmental support.

  How we can encourage the birth of a Singapore theatre by Sunny Goh. In New Nation (8 May 1981), https://tinyurl.com/ydbvyr8o

  One of the most impactful and enduring State-driven initiatives to emerge from the decade was the Arts Housing Scheme. It was the brainchild of Juliana Lim, then with the Ministry of Community Development, for disused state-owned heritage properties to be rented out to arts groups who lacked headquarters and rehearsal spaces.

  In 1983 and 1985, we conducted surveys on the housing arrangements for arts groups and found that except for groups which were aligned to clan associations or churches, the majority were “nomadic” in nature.  They held their rehearsals in the homes of Committee members, at the now demolished Drama Centre’s “Practice Rooms A & B” (where the new Annexe of the National Museum now stands), in school halls and community centres, as and when they were available and the groups could afford it.

  […]

  In 1985, I was sent to West Berlin to attend a Seminar on Cultural Administration organized by the Goethe Institut.  There, I saw a railway station and other old buildings converted into arts spaces.  This was also the case in Australia which I toured in 1988 – Gormon House in Canberra, Victoria Meat Market in Melbourne, Gertrude Street in Sydney and many others.

  Every quarter, the Land Office circulated a list of disused Government buildings, mostly disused schools to all ministries. The organisations which normally responded to the offer were the charitable service organizations.  It dawned on me that the arts were as needy as these charitable groups but not knowing whether our requests would be well received, I invited a Mr Rajaratnam of the Land Office for a chat. He was kind enough to come over to my office at City Hall and after sharing with him about “Cultural Vision 1999”, our conversation went something like this (truly!):  Juliana: “Mr Raja, we desperately need buildings for the arts”. Mr Raja: “No one ever told me this before”.  Juliana: “I’m letting you know now!” From that day onwards, Mr Raja became my best ally for arts development. He sent us a seemingly endless supply of buildings.

  The first property to be rented out to arts groups was a former school building that was to become Telok Ayer Performing Arts Centre. Five arts groups moved into the premises in 1986, among which was amateur theatre group Third Stage.

  The school bell no longer sounds at Telok Ayer Primary School in Cecil Street. Passers-by are more likely to hear the sound of Chinese musical instruments, Broadway songs and the shuffle and tap of dancers in rehearsal.

  The classrooms where teachers often used to have sort throats because they had to shout to be heard by students is now home to five cultural groups. And more disused government buildings may be put to similar use in future.

  […]

  Since October, the Telok Ayer school’s 39 classrooms have been let out at a nominal monthly rental of $10 a room by the Ministry of Community Development, which took over the building from the Land Office in September.

  5 cultural bodies move into Telok Ayer school by Irene Hoe. In Straits Times (1 January 1986), https://tinyurl.com/ycezqb8q

Further Reading

Theatre Life!: A History of English-language Theatre in Singapore through The Straits Times (1958-2000) by Clarrisa Oon. Singapore Press Holdings, 2001.
The Theatre and the State in Singapore: Orthodoxy and resistance by Terence Chong. Routledge, 2011 .
Singapore Chronicles: Theatre. Institute of Policy Studies & Singapore Press Holdings, 2016.
Singapore Arts Manager 1980’s/90’s: Memories & Musings by Juliana Lim.

By Daniel Teo
Published on 15 June 2018

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The Vault: Sau(dara) is a contemporary response to Leow Puay Tin’s Three Children. Created by Bhumi Collective, Sau(dara) is an homage to the 1988 production of Three Children which draws from the original text and the performers’ childhood memories, is based on play and traditional Indonesian Pakarena dance, and features newly-composed music. Find out more here.

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The Vault: @thisisemeraldgirl is an adaptation of Stella Kon’s much-loved play Emily of Emerald Hill. Created by Eugene Koh and Lee Shu Yu, and performed by Brenda Tan, @thisisemeraldgirl combines new writing, multimedia, and Stella Kon’s original text in a monologue exploring family and social life in a social media age. Find out more here.
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Synopsis

Emily of Emerald Hill is a monodrama about the life of Emily Gan, a Peranakan matriarch who resides in a mansion on Emerald Hill. Emily talks about her life, from coming to Emerald Hill as a young bride in 1929, to raising her family and managing her home and social life in the 50’s and 60’s, to being a lonely elderly widow with modern Singapore coming up around her.

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 Bridge and 1982 with The Trial. Up till Emily, Kon’s plays had not been staged in Singapore.

In an afterword to the published script of Emily, Krishen Jit quoted Kon as saying she was “Singapore’s greatest never-produced playwright”. Producers had claimed The Bridge and The Trial were unfeasible works because they had large casts (18 and 12 respectively). But even with just one actor, Kon found no one was willing to stage Emily in Singapore.

[W]ell, this one-woman-play format, it was very unseen in Singapore. You know that I didn’t invent the form, I’d seen one-person plays abroad, but it wasn’t known here. So the local directors, they asked[,] how can one person maintain the attention of the audience for that length of time.

Konfrontation and konversion: Stella Kon gets her groove back by Richard Lord. In Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, 1(4), https://tinyurl.com/yclm8vun

Across the Causeway, however, was a different story as Kon’s works had been performed by Malaysian English drama groups in the 70’s. Emily first came to life on stage in a production by Malaysian theatre company Five Arts Centre. Directed by Chin San Sooi and performed by Leow Puay Tin, the monodrama was staged in November 1984 in Seremban and Kuala Lumpur.

Spurred on by the embarrassment of having an award-winning Singaporean play premiere elsewhere, the Singapore Ministry of Culture offered a $3,000 production grant for Emily to be staged in Singapore. The response was lukewarm:

Lim Kay Tong, a journalist and actor, had mulled over the possibility of staging it, but felt it would require ‘somebody quite remarkable’ to portray the role of Emily.

[…]

Max Le Blond, a lecturer at the National University of Singapore and theatre director who has read parts of the play, finds it interesting, but feels he can’t spare the time to stage it at the moment.

“I would like to do it very much but I don’t see myself having the time until next year,” he says.

[…]

Robert Yeo, a lecturer at the Institution of Education and chairman of the Culture Ministry’s Drama Advisory Committee has, meanwhile, been taking the play around, trying to interest people in the production.

But he has yet to get any confirmation from either an actress or a director.

Poor Emily will have to wait by Kannan Chandran. In Straits Times (6 December 1984), https://tinyurl.com/yc8nozyd

Theatre critic Kate Janes wrote a scathing response in the Straits Times:

The real scandal about English plays which are gathering dust in the Culture Ministry is this: One writer has won the first prize on three occasions and yet, not one of the plays has been performed in Singapore.

Neglect your art, neglect your soul. Artistes? Use them, or lose them. Stella Kon is at present living in Britain.

Come on Singapore, stand up for your own plays by Kate James. In Straits Times (30 December 1984), https://tinyurl.com/ybl2ubm2

In 1985, Emily finally came to the Singapore stage as a commission of the 1985 Singapore Drama Festival. Premiering on 4 September, the production was directed by Max Le Blond, and performed by actor Margaret Chan, who was seven months pregnant at the time with her second child.

Responses 

To the 1984 Emily of Emerald Hill in Malaysia:

There was a minimum of stage effects, props and music. The lighting, I thought, could have been better. However, Puay Tin saved the show with her superb performance… In fact, all the other principals concerned – playwright Stella Kon, director Chin San Sooi and producer Su Ong Sok Cheng – deserve our congratulations.

One woman well worth watching by Chin Kee Onn. In Straits Times (6 December 1984).

To the 1985 Emily of Emerald Hill in Singapore:

By the time Margaret Chan had taken her second curtain call, the tears hadn’t yet dried on some faces though they were wreathed in smiles.

[…]

While Leow Puay Tin who played the part of Emily in KL production, was more the nonya, Margaret plays Emily as the person who comes from the outside and controls the family.

Dr Kon said that while Puay Tin’s strength lay in making the transitions from little girl to society wife to doting grandmother, Margaret’s forte was in playing the matriarch.

Tears and smiles greet Emily by Rececca Chua. In Straits Times (6 September 1985), https://tinyurl.com/y8fqlts4

It was beyond stereotype, beyond caricature. Chan’s performance and Le Blond’s dramatic craft yielded a lucid character that was identifiably Singaporean, yet substantial enough to transcend the parochial.

A theatre groping for significance by Krishen Jit. In Straits Times (27 September 1985).

…intellectually and emotionally, it was weak. It did not delve into thoughts and feelings except on a superficial level. We do not come out with any real understanding of Emily.

…the play was also somewhat dissatisfying because of the compression of time. One lost a sense of time frame, especially in the second act.

Sheer indulgence in nostalgia by David Gabriel. In Straits Times (9 September 1985), https://tinyurl.com/ybtqnsxe

Some of the actors who have played Emily

Leow Puay Tin (1984, 1987, 2010)
Margaret Chan (1985, 1986, 2010)
Claire Wong (1989)
Pearlly Chan (1990, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016)
Jalyn Han (1991 , in Mandarin)
Ivan Heng (1999, 2000, 2011)
Neo Swee Lin (2010)
Brigitte Damiens (2015, in French)
Karen Tan (2015)

Further Reading

Classic Singapore plays #3 – Emily Of Emerald Hill by Corrie Tan. In Straits Times (26 August 2014).
Emily of Emerald Hill by Stella Kon. Constellation Books (2002).
Esplanade presents The Studios: fifty (2015).

By Gillian Ong and Daniel Teo
Published on 8 June 2018

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The Vault: @thisisemeraldgirl is an adaptation of Stella Kon’s much-loved play Emily of Emerald Hill. Created by Eugene Koh and Lee Shu Yu, and performed by Brenda Tan, @thisisemeraldgirl combines new writing, multimedia, and Stella Kon’s original text in a monologue exploring family and social life in a social media age. Find out more here.
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