Under the direction of theatre practitioner Zelda Tatiana Ng, the reading of Leng-Geh-Mng was presented in the format of a radio play. Performing the reading were some of the original cast members from the 1998 production. Following the reading, Zelda had a dialogue with Lee Shyh Jih, one of the playwrights of Leng-Geh-Mng, as well as introduced some materials from the original staging. Here is video recording of the 90-minute Performance-Presentation in 2 parts.

SynopsisThe PlaysResourcesVideosPhotos

Leng-Geh-Mng (“Dragon’s Tooth Gate”) is a comedy which spoofs the conventions of pugilistic films set in ancient China. This play was written by playwrights Lee Shyh Jih and Lim Poh Poh and was first staged in 1998.

After nearly two decades, Zelda Tatiana Ng revisits Leng-Geh-Mng in this Vault instalment, alongside some of the original cast members. Under Zelda’s direction and treatment, Leng-Geh-Mng will be retold in the format of a radio play. The actors will read the original Mandarin text, with selected portions refreshed with translations into other Chinese dialects in an experiment with language.

Don’t miss this one-night only performance-presentation. Performed in Mandarin and other Chinese dialects, with English surtitles.

《龍牙門》是仿嘲当代武侠电影的一部古装武侠舞台喜剧。此剧也凑巧地反映了当时许多头条及社会现状，让观众留下深刻的印象。此剧在1998首演，编剧为李世炬和林宝宝。

让颜橦带你重访‘龙牙门客栈’，‘听一听’当年的这部耗资八万元的制作。演读将以多种方言及‘广播剧’的形式呈献。

千万别错过这‘仅此一晚’的演读！呈献付英文字幕。

REGISTRATION

Saturday, 16 July 2016
8pm @ Centre 42 Black Box

Admission is free.

The Vault: Leng-Geh-Mng is supported by the ARTS FUND.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

About 龍牙門 (“Dragon’s Tooth Gate”)

Yue-Liang-Hong is a sneaky character who sells cosmetics to the concubines in the imperial court. He was framed by the Emperor and has to escape from the Imperial Officials ordered to terminate his life. Yue-Liang-Hong ends up at an inn full of highly-skilled martial artists, each harboring vicious and selfish intentions. He then becomes the focus of everyone’s villainous desires.

Reading Material

#1: FIVE TIMES DRAMA BOX BROKE NEW GROUND

#2: FIVE FACTS ABOUT LENG-GEH-MNG

#3: THE BILINGUAL POLICY

Programme Handout

Part 1: Leng-Geh-Mng

Directed and narrated by Zelda Tatiana Ng, the reading of “Leng-Geh-Mng” was performed by a cast of nine actors, some of whom were in the original 1998 production.

Part 2: Leng-Geh-Mng

Following the reading, Zelda sat down with one of the “Leng-Geh-Mng” playwrights, Lee Shyh Jih, to chat about how the play created back in 1998. Zelda then shared some materials from the original production and led a discussion on language.

Theatre practitioner Zelda Tatiana revisits “Leng-Geh-Mng” – a comedy written by Lee Shyh Jih and Lim Poh Poh that was first staged by Drama Box in 1998 – in this instalment of Centre 42’s Vault programme. The presentation on 16th July 2016 takes the form of a radio play, where a cast of ten – including some of the original members from the first staging – is invited to read out the script, with selected parts refreshed and translated into other Chinese dialects in an experiment with language.

Source: Centre 42 Facebook 

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The Vault: Leng-Geh-Mng is a revisit of the first martial arts production in Singapore theatre of the same title by theatre-maker Zelda Tatiana Ng. Under her direction and alongside some of the original cast members, Leng-Geh-Mng is retold in the format of a radio play refreshed with the use of Chinese dialects.
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Leng-Geh-Mng (“Dragon’s Tooth Gate”) is a comedy which spoofs the conventions of pugilistic films set in ancient China. This play was written by playwrights Lee Shyh Jih and Lim Poh Poh and was first staged in 1998.

Under the direction of theatre practitioner Zelda Tatiana Ng, the reading of Leng-Geh-Mng was presented in the format of a radio play. Performing the reading were some of the original cast members from the 1998 production. Following the reading, Zelda had a dialogue with Lee Shyh Jih, one of the playwrights of Leng-Geh-Mng, as well as introduced some materials from the original staging.

Here is video recording of the 90-minute Performance-Presentation in 2 parts:

Part 1: Directed and narrated by Zelda Tatiana Ng, the reading of “Leng-Geh-Mng” was performed by a cast of nine actors, some of whom were in the original 1998 production.

Part 2: Following the reading, Zelda sat down with one of the “Leng-Geh-Mng” playwrights, Lee Shyh Jih, to chat about how the play created back in 1998. Zelda then shared some materials from the original production and led a discussion on language.

The Vault: Leng-Geh-Mng is a revisit of the first martial arts production in Singapore theatre of the same title by theatre-maker Zelda Tatiana Ng. Under her direction and alongside some of the original cast members, Leng-Geh-Mng is retold in the format of a radio play refreshed with the use of Chinese dialects. Find out more here.

When Singapore separated from Malaysia in 1965, the various racial groups were unsure of their standing in the newly-minted nation. The Chinese Chamber of Commerce, in particular, campaigned for Mandarin to be declared an official language:

Moving the resolution to submit the memorandum, the Chamber’s treasurer, Mr. Kheng Chin Hock, stressed the fact that Chinese was being used by more than 80 per cent of the population in Singapore.

Source: Chinese as one of the official languages. In Straits Times (1 October 1965), http://tinyurl.com/zg52pju

To defuse racial tensions, then-Prime Minster Lee Kuan Yew was quick to respond by declaring all four major languages – Malay, Mandarin, Tamil and English – as official and equal.

Mr. Lee ruled out all possibilities of changing the language positions. The new Constitution would simply re-state the status quo of the four official languages, with Malay as the common and national language.

Any attempt by a few people to exaggerate the Chinese majority to justify their agitation would jeopardise the struggle of the Chinese in Malaysia for a fair place for their language, Mr. Lee warned.

Source: Lee’s warning to language agitators. In Straits Times (2 October 1965), http://tinyurl.com/h8x4zu6

And so it was written in the Singapore Constitution.

But there was more for the languages in Singapore. PM Lee envisioned Singaporeans speaking two languages – English, and their ‘mother tongue’.

A people fluent in English thus in step with the world of science and technology – but also steeped in Asian values of thrift, discipline and industry that come with knowledge of their mother tongue.

Source: Lee’s Ideal Singaporean by Leslie Fong, Ngiam Tong Hai & Lee Kim Chew. In The Straits Times (12 February 1978), http://tinyurl.com/zbjhswm

PM Lee was adamant that the Chinese population be bilingual in English and Mandarin, as envinced by his impassioned words:

From my observation, the monolingualist is more likely to be a language chauvinist and a bigot.

He only sees the world through one eye. He does not have binocular vision to see the world in depth, to realise that there are as rich, if not richer, worlds of human experience and knowledge, all expressed in beautiful words, elegantly, vividly and fluently in other languages.

Bilingualism gives a more balanced and rounded view of the world. The Chinese who reads and speaks Chinese has only a sketchy view of the reals history of the world outside China.

[…]

If we are to modernise and industrialise, we must be bilingual.

Source: Bilingual policy will be fairly and equally implemented by Lee Kuan Yew. In The Straits Times (2 June 1978), http://tinyurl.com/zlm3h3v

The new government revamped the education system, introducing mandatory bilingual education for students in Singapore. Students had to learn English, as well as a ‘mother tongue’, a policy which is still in place today.

Our Mother Tongue Language (MTL) policy requires all students who are Singaporeans or Singapore Permanent Residents to study their respective official MTL: Chinese, Malay and Tamil.

Source: Mother Tongue Language Policy. Ministry of Education Singapore (18 April 2016), http://tinyurl.com/zsvj54a

For schooling children from the various Chinese dialect groups in Singapore, this meant that they all had to take up Mandarin.

But for the first two decades, the bilingual education policy saw little success as Chinese students struggled to learn two new languages. In a 1979 Report on the Ministry of Education, the study team, chaired by then-Deputy Prime Minister Goh Keng Swee, found that English and Mandarin were not used at home by 85% of schooling children, who continued to use dialect to communicate with family members.

In addition to revisions to the education system to help Chinese students learn Mandarin at various proficiencies, Mandarin was actively promoted among the Chinese population. In 1979, PM Lee launched the “Promote the Use of Mandarin” campaign.

[The campaign] is in response to recent government statements that the use of dialects, instead of Mandarin, is hampering the Republic’s bilingual educational policy for the Chinese, and overburdens the learning process of the young.

[…]

Some of the slogans include “Make Mandarin the Common Tongue of Our Chinese Community” and “Speak Mandarin Instead of Dialects”.

Source: Lee to launch use Mandarin campaign. In Straits Times (7 September 1979), http://tinyurl.com/gnzvv4o

The Speak Mandarin campaign continues till this day as an annual event.

In over three decades of campaigning, and five decades since the introduction of bilingual education, dialect use among the Singapore Chinese population has fallen from 81.4% in 1980, to 12.2% in 2015.

By Daniel Teo
Published on 15 July 2016

The Vault: Dialects and Dialectics revisits two monologues by the late local theatre doyen Kuo Pao Kun: No Parking On Odd Days and The Coffin Is Too Big For The Hole. Nine Years Theatre’s artistic director Nelson Chia explores the cultural sentiments and grassroots sensibilities of these plays by staging them in Cantonese and Teochew respectively. Find out more here.

The Vault: Leng-Geh-Mng is a revisit of the first martial arts production in Singapore theatre of the same title by theatre-maker Zelda Tatiana Ng. Under her direction and alongside some of the original cast members, Leng-Geh-Mng is retold in the format of a radio play refreshed with the use of Chinese dialects. Find out more here.

《龍牙門》 or Leng-Geh-Mng is a Mandarin martial arts comedy written by Lee Shyh Jih and Lim Poh Poh. Set in ancient China, the play follows Yue-Liang-Hong, a palace cosmetics salesman on the run from the Imperial Court. He winds up at the Leng-Geh-Mng Inn where he meets an assortment of villainous characters. Leng-Geh-Mng was staged in 1998 by Drama Box, directed by Kok Heng Leun. The play also has the distinction of being Singapore’s first martial arts theatre production. On top of that, here are five other facts about this unique play and its 1998 premiere.

#1: Leng-Geh-Mng was inspired by the classic Chinese martial arts film Dragon Gate Inn.

Dragon Gate Inn is a martial arts film directed by King Hu. Set in the Ming dynasty, the Emperor’s chief eunuch Cao Shaoqin has executed his enemy, a noble minister, and sent his children into exile. On their way to the border, the children reach the Dragon Gate Inn. Unbeknownst to them, Cao has sent his men to murder them. However, three swordsmen, and the innkeeper, intervene to save the children.

Premiered in 1967, the film was a box-office success in Taiwan, Korea and the Philippines, and is credited with spawning an entire genre of martial arts films, even inspiring Hollywood smash-hits like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and House of Flying Daggers (2004).

Besides loosely borrowing the title and setting from Dragon Gate Inn, Leng-Geh-Mng also spoofs the conventions of the Chinese martial arts film genre, which include gravity-defying fight choreography and a wailing Chinese instrumental soundtrack.

#2: Leng-Geh-Mng has no good guys.

Everyone in Leng-Geh-Mng, from the many supporting characters, to even the protagonist Yue-Liang-Hong, is a villain. There is no hero in the conventional sense. But in most stories, the audience expects the hero to win in the end. So what happens if the baddie wins? Director Kok explained their intentions for the absence of heroes in Leng-Geh-Mng:

We hope that this unusual plot will start the audience thinking about their own lives and to examine if such similar endings where the bad and not necessarily the good are rewarded, happen in their everyday life.

Thus, all the vices portrayed here must not be seen separately on their own but as means to an end … it is an amoral play about morality.Sex and violence? Yes, but it's R(A) or Really Artistic by Lee Shu Hui. In The Straits Times (10 November 1998).

In the programme notes*, Kok likened Leng-Geh-Mng to the late 19th-century French play Ubu Roi written by Alfred Jarry. Ubu Roi (meaning “King Ubu”), a parody of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, is also filled with villanous characters. The play was so wild and bizarre that it reportedly incited a riot among the audience at the end of the first performance.

Perhaps Kok had hoped Leng-Geh-Mng‘s anti-hero narrative would also stir its audience’s emotions, but maybe with less violent outcomes.

#3: Drama Box gave Leng-Geh-Mng an R(A) rating.

Although Leng-Geh-Mng and its 1998 staging did not contain any nudity or gore, Drama Box, on their own accord, decided to impose an R(A) rating on the production. This meant that anyone below the age of 21 was discouraged from attending the production.

According to playwright Lee, the creative team felt that “this play [was] more suitable for mature audiences”* because of the dubious morals of the play’s characters.

#4: The production cost a whopping $80,000.

Leng-Geh-Mng was Drama Box’s first outing as a professional theatre company, and they marked the occasion by staging an ambitious production which cost twice as much as typical theatre productions. And they had huge plans for Leng-Geh-Mng:

The $ 80,000 production took more than half a year to put together and involved a production crew and cast of more than 30 people.

To transport the audience back into the era, coloured flags and bamboo fire torches will line the sides of the road leading to the entrance of the Drama Centre.

The foyer will also be done up in the style of an ancient living room, complete with a 1.2-m antique oil lamp.

The audience can also expect a spectacular, adrenaline-pumping performance, with special visual effects. Actors will leap up a 2-m wooden plank, hang like a bat, upside-down, on a 7.6cm diameter rod, make a series of cart-wheel turns and jump and roll over tables.Sex and violence? Yes, but it's R(A) or Really Artistic by Lee Shu Hui. In The Straits Times (10 November 1998).

#5: The cast had to undergo five months of martial arts training.

Part of Drama Box’s ambitious plans for Leng-Geh-Mng was for the actors to be convincing martial artists onstage. They had to perform their own fight choreography and stunts. This meant hours upon hours of gruelling physical training months before the production.

[Kok Heng Leun] ensured that all nine actors bought their insurance policies and put them through rigorous wushu training under Mr Low Ee Chiang, a martial arts and gymnastics exponent, for five months or so.Former wushu star to act in a play by Chin Soo Fang. In The Straits Times (16 October 1998).

However, one member of the cast was exempted from all the martial arts training – Chiew Hui Yan, a former national wushu athlete who won two gold medals at the South East Asian games.

Leng-Geh-Mng 龍牙門 (1998)

Image of the programme package.
(Source: The Repository)

Date:	11 – 15 November 1998
Venue:	Drama Centre Theatre (Fort Canning Park)
Playwright:	Lee Shyh Jie & Lim Poh Poh
Director:	Kok Heng Leun

By Daniel Teo
Published on 8 July 2016

The Vault: Leng-Geh-Mng is a revisit of the first martial arts production in Singapore theatre of the same title by theatre-maker Zelda Tatiana Ng. Under her direction and alongside some of the original cast members, Leng-Geh-Mng is retold in the format of a radio play refreshed with the use of Chinese dialects.

Established in 1990 by Kok Heng Leun, the founding artistic director, Drama Box is a theatre company that is best known for staging socially-engaging works in both English and Mandarin. Over the last 26 years, it has collected many “firsts” in its quest to push boundaries and experiment with new forms. We take a look at some of the most notable ones here.

#1: (1992) The first Mandarin gay play to be staged in Singapore

Written by Otto Fong and directed by Kok Heng Leun, Another Tribe tells the stories of homosexual youths and became the first play that explores gay issues to be staged in Singapore. After some negotiations with the Public Entertainment Licensing Unit (PELU) of the Singapore Police Force – who was then in charge of giving out permits for performances – the show was allowed to go ahead. However, it’s the first Chinese-language production here to be given an R21 rating.

Source: http://dramabox.org/eng/productions-anothertribe.html

#2: (1998) The first local martial arts theatre production

The first production Drama Box staged after becoming a full time company, Leng-Geh-Mng – which means Dragon Tooth Gate in English – pokes fun at the conventions that are found in gongfu movies. Written by Lee Shyh Jih and Lim Poh Poh, the comedy uniquely comprises only baddies, with nary a pure, noble hero in sight. To get in shape for sky-high kicks and to land those ultra-powerful punches, the cast of 11 went through actual pugilistic training for five months before the production.

Source: http://dramabox.org/eng/productions-lenggehmng.html

#3: (2001) The first outdoor forum theatre performance in Singapore

Before founding Drama Box, artistic director Kok Heng Leun used to work for The Necessary Stage, which had a history of staging forum theatre performances. Also known as theatre of the oppressed, this genre of performance invites audience members to watch a short play that contains some kind of conflict, and they’re free to intervene at any point to change the action of the characters if they disagree with them. It is an art form that Kok is passionate about, and he continued to work with it through Drama Box despite the fact that he received no state funding due to a ban that lasted from 1994 to 2003.

In 2000, Kok pushed the boundaries by presenting short audio plays on UFM 100.3 with DJ Danny Yeo in a forum theatre format, where listeners could call in and participate. One year later, he applied for a permit to stage a forum theatre show outdoors – which he knew was the only way to really reach the wider public. Have You Eaten?, a play about retrenchment, was given the go-ahead, and became the forum theatre piece to be staged outside the conventional indoors performance space.

Source: http://dramabox.org/eng/productions-haveyoueaten.html

#4: (2005) The first series of satirical plays based on headline news

While this claim to fame may sound a little specific, Dua Dai Ji (News Buster!) was indeed the first piece of mockumentary theatre to be performed here. Staged two years before popular satirical TV show The Noose aired, the play was conceptualised by Li Xie and co-devised by Tay Long Hui, Koh Hui Ling and Epin Chia, and caricaturises current affairs that Singaporeans can easily relate to with a generous dose of humour.

Source: http://dramabox.org/eng/productions-duadaiji.html

#5: (2015) The first inflatable pop-up theatre in Singapore

Having established a reputation for being champions of community theatre, Drama Box decided to reach out further by bringing art to the people. And so the idea to build a mobile performance space that can be transported around Singapore was born. The fundraising campaign for a pair of inflatable domes – affectionately named GoLi after the childhood game of marbles – began in 2013, and they were completed in 2015. A week-long festival called SCENES: Forum Theatre took place near NEX Shopping Mall in Serangoon that year to mark GoLi’s official opening, as well as Drama Box’s 25^th anniversary.

Source: http://dramabox.org/eng/about_goli.html

Other Drama Box’s milestones: http://dramabox.org/eng/about_milestones.html
Drama Box’s online archive of past productions: http://dramabox.org/eng/about_milestones.html

By Daniel Teo
Published on 1 July 2016

The Vault: Leng-Geh-Mng is a revisit of the first martial arts production in Singapore theatre of the same title by theatre-maker Zelda Tatiana Ng. Under her direction and alongside some of the original cast members, Leng-Geh-Mng is retold in the format of a radio play refreshed with the use of Chinese dialects.