In this presentation, the creators and writers shared the experiences of developing a new play through writing collectively, and making documentation a key element in the process. Selected character monologues and scenes were read by the actors to give an insight into the outcomes of this first phase of writing development.

SynopsisThe ArtistsResourcesVideosPhotosNext-Stage Development

Understudy reimagines the post-‘black-out-and-curtains’ world of Tan Tarn How’s Undercover with a special guest appearance by a character from The Lady of Soul and Her Ultimate ‘S’ Machine, and three newly created characters of the next generation.

In 1993, the career of high-flying civil servant Derek is cut short when he refuses to replace his report on the findings of the committee for the cultivation of soul with one rewritten by his ‘friend’ and immediate superior. His punishment – head the country’s only broadcasting corporation.

In 1994, rookie intelligence agent Jane successfully infiltrates a theatre-group-of-interest run by renegade artist Qiang (and falls for the bad boy in the process) while foiling her Deputy’s secret plan to oust the head of the intelligence agency. Jane is promoted and Qiang is “rehabilitated”.

In 2016, Jane, now the Minister of Cultural Affairs, wants to award artist-in-exile Qiang the prestigious Cultural Medallion. The disgraced Deputy, now the Director for the Institute of Public Consensus, wants to stop this travesty. In tow are their respective protégés, Albert, Sophie and Vikram. Together with Derek who has reinvented himself as a media mogul, this ‘magnificent seven’ chart a treacherous path towards art, politics and ceremonial jewellery.

Will Qiang accept the Cultural Medallion?

Conceived and edited by Dr Robin Loon, and organised by NUS Thespis, Project Understudy explores sequels, scruples & satire using a collective writing creation process. Inspired by the processes of devised theatre, seven writers were assigned one character respectively. Not only not only must they create and explore that character thoroughly, the writers also have to ensure their characters interact with one another through plotted scenarios and situations. Instead of taking matters to the floor, the writers took to the screen around a table and created draft 1 of Understudy.

Join the writers as they share with you their process of collaborative writing in Project Understudy and read you excerpts from draft 1 of Understudy.

REGISTRATION

Monday, 23 May 2016
8pm @ Centre 42 Black Box

Admission is free.

Help make Phase 2 of Project Understudy happen!

The writing team is committed to complete the play Understudy to a stageable read. Script development is expected to continue in Phase 2 from September 2016 to March 2017.

THEY NEED YOUR HELP – The goal is to raise enough funds to support the writing team as they work towards a second draft and a reading in March 2017. The Centre is helping to run this fund-raising effort on behalf of the team. All proceeds collected will go to the writing development process and artists.

DONATE NOW

NUS Thespis
Thespis is a non-profit arts interest group founded in 2008 by a group of National University of Singapore (NUS) Theatre Studies students. Thespis is a place for young artists to explore, and create theatre, by experimenting with different creative processes and methodologies. It is a platform especially for collaborative work (between students and alumni), with the interest to nurture and hone the craft of theatre-making among young aspiring artists. Their productions seek to interest and critically engage audiences by rethinking performance concepts.

Reading Material

#1: THE PLAY – UNDERCOVER (1994)

#2: THE PLAYWRIGHT – TAN TARN HOW

#3: THE PROCESS COLLABORATIVE WRITING

Programme Handout

Part 1: Introduction

The seven writers introduce their project to develop a sequel to Tan Tarn How’s play Undercover. Titled Understudy,the writers briefly share their strategies for writing the sequel collaboratively, which include, writing for only one character each, monologue-writing, taking turns to write lines for scenes, and collectively following one master narrative.

Part 2: The Monologues

Four of the seven writers read out the monologues they wrote for their characters in Understudy. These monologues were writing exercises for them to explore their characters and better understand their histories and motivations. Some parts of these monologues were even used in the first draft of Understudy.

Part 3: The Scenes

The seven writers read out four scenes they had worked on collectively over the past few months, voicing the characters they had picked to write for:

SCENE 1 – JANE, ALBERT, KK, VIKRAM
Minister for Cultural Affairs (MCA) Jane has caused controversy awarding the Cultural Medallion to ‘dissident artist’ Qiang. KK Chan, Director of Institute of Public Consensus (IPC) challenges her decision. We discover that the Director and the Minister have crossed swords before – as have their deputies, Vikram and Albert.

SCENE 4 – DEREK, QIANG, JANE
Derek flies Qiang back – they understand each other and reconnect. Jane enters the picture and issues from their past surface – they clash but begrudgingly agree to negotiate further.

SCENE 5 – ALBERT, VIKRAM, SOPHIE
In what is supposed to be a Cultural Medallion negotiation, the three representatives – Vikram, Albert, and Sophie – are sent to negotiate in proxy. Vikram and Albert clash and Sophie mitigates. They create a small zone of understanding – Albert senses Vikram’s fondness for Sophie.

SCENE 9 – KK, JANE, QIANG
KK confronts Jane with the blackmail only to be rebuffed. Qiang enters to fight off KK, leaving KK humiliated. Jane comes clean with Qiang and their secret is revealed.

Part 4: The Last Scene

“It will end with a monologue,” said Dr. Robin Loon, the Chief Editor of “Project Understudy”. Five of the writers were assigned to write monologues for their characters in the final scene of the play. In this final part, these writers read out the scenario briefs that they were each given to develop for the finale Scene 11.

Seven writers came together to write a play. Their collective creation titled “Understudy” reimagines the post-‘black-out-and-curtains’ world of Tan Tarn How’s “Undercover” with a special guest appearance by a character from “The Lady of Soul and Her Ultimate ‘S’ Machine”, and three newly created characters. For one evening only, on 23 May 2016,  the writers shared their process of collaborative writing and performed excerpts from draft 1 of “Understudy”.

Source: Centre 42 Facebook 

The presented script was put through the Boiler Room incubation process comprising phases for construction and writing for further development. Following the incubation process which began on 17 March 2017, the first draft submitted was reviewed by a director with a cast of actors while working through the Test Read, slated for 11 July 2017. Read more about it here.

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The Vault: Project Understudy revisits Tan Tarn How’s Undercover and reimagines its sequel set in 2016 through a collaborative writing creation process. Conceived and edited by Dr Robin Loon and organised by NUS Thespis.

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Conceived and edited by Dr Robin Loon, and organised by NUS Thespis, Project Understudy explores sequels, scruples & satire using a collective writing creation process.

In this presentation, the creators and writers shared the experiences of developing a new play through writing collectively, and making documentation a key element in the process. Selected character monologues and scenes were read by the actors to give an insight into the outcomes of this first phase of writing development.

The 60-minute Process-Performance has been repackaged into an 4-part video recording:

Part 1: The seven writers introduce their project to develop a sequel to Tan Tarn How’s play Undercover. Titled Understudy, the writers briefly share their strategies for writing the sequel collaboratively, which include, writing for only one character each, monologue-writing, taking turns to write lines for scenes, and collectively following one master narrative.

Part 2: Four of the seven writers read out the monologues they wrote for their characters in Understudy. These monologues were writing exercises for them to explore their characters and better understand their histories and motivations. Some parts of these monologues were even used in the first draft of Understudy.

Part 3: The seven writers read out four scenes they had worked on collectively over the past few months, voicing the characters they had picked to write for:

SCENE 1 – JANE, ALBERT, KK, VIKRAM
Minister for Cultural Affairs (MCA) Jane has caused controversy awarding the Cultural Medallion to ‘dissident artist’ Qiang. KK Chan, Director of Institute of Public Consensus (IPC) challenges her decision. We discover that the Director and the Minister have crossed swords before – as have their deputies, Vikram and Albert.

SCENE 4 – DEREK, QIANG, JANE
Derek flies Qiang back – they understand each other and reconnect. Jane enters the picture and issues from their past surface – they clash but begrudgingly agree to negotiate further.

SCENE 5 – ALBERT, VIKRAM, SOPHIE
In what is supposed to be a Cultural Medallion negotiation, the three representatives – Vikram, Albert, and Sophie – are sent to negotiate in proxy. Vikram and Albert clash and Sophie mitigates. They create a small zone of understanding – Albert senses Vikram’s fondness for Sophie.

SCENE 9 – KK, JANE, QIANG
KK confronts Jane with the blackmail only to be rebuffed. Qiang enters to fight off KK, leaving KK humiliated. Jane comes clean with Qiang and their secret is revealed.

Part 4: “It will end with a monologue,” said Dr. Robin Loon, the Chief Editor of “Project Understudy”. Five of the writers were assigned to write monologues for their characters in the final scene of the play. In this final part, these writers read out the scenario briefs that they were each given to develop for the finale Scene 11.

The Vault: Project Understudy revisits Tan Tarn How’s Undercover and reimagines its sequel set in 2016 through a collaborative writing creation process. Conceived and edited by Dr Robin Loon and organised by NUS Thespis.

Access the full suite of materials about The Vault: Project Understudy here.

The Project Understudy Writing Team: (L to R) Isaac Lim, Dr. Robin Loon, Fong Chun Ming, Gabriele Goh, Eugene Koh, Olivia Vong, Matthew Fam

Collaborative writing can be hugely challenging. Without a strategy, writing a play in a group would just be a matter of whoever has the strongest pair of lungs, as was the case with the seven men who collectively wrote the 1971 play Lay By at the Royal Court Theatre in London:

“They sat down in a room with a big, blank piece of paper and all shouted out,” she reports. “The person who shouted the loudest had their line written down.” To make matters worse, Gupta chips in: “They had a woman secretary who wrote everything down for them.”

Source: This could actually work by Maddy Costa. In The Guardian (29 Nov 2006), http://tinyurl.com/jbwyvu7

For the seven writers in Project Understudy, they wanted to craft a sequel to Tan Tarn How’s Undercover together in a slightly less raucous manner. Titling the sequel Understudy, the writing team began writing at the start of 2016, finding their own strategies for multiple dramatists working together on one script.

In using all these strategies, the writing team was able to create a complete draft for Understudy in a few short months. The script is still in its early stages, but continuing to work on it together means that the team can pursue testing out and refining other collaborative writing strategies.

• Strategy #1
• Strategy #2
• Strategy #3
• Strategy #4

• Write for only one character

  

  Each of the seven writers wrote for one character only.

  From the beginning, the writers each picked one character and wrote only for that character. Four writers assumed established characters from Tan’s plays – Jane, Qiang and the Deputy (now called KK) from Undercover, and Derek from The Lady of Soul and her Ultimate “S” Machine. The remaining three crafted new characters from scratch, the protégés Sophie, Albert and Vikram.

  By having to be responsible for only one character, each writer could explore his/her character in-depth. A character-centric writing process also allowed for the next few strategies to be employed.

   

• Write monologues for your character

  

  Monologue “assignments” for each writer/character.

  I decided that for us to get into the character itself, I gave them six to eight scenarios for them to choose from, so they write a monologue – and some of these monologues are really good, they clarify the characters. And then after they read it out for everybody else to hear, so everybody who’s writing the scene also knows where the character is at.

  Dr. Robin Loon, Project Understudy Writer/Chief Editor

  Each writer wrote monologues for their characters, which they would share with each other at writing sessions. Portions of the monologues were used in the first complete draft of Understudy.

  This strategy resembles parallel construction, as used by education researchers Onrubia and Engel in describing their observations of collaborative writing in a classroom setting. The parallel construction strategy involves each group member completing a writing task on their own before contributing it towards the completion of the overall project.

  For Onrubian and Engel, parallel construction is often employed in early stages of collaborative creative projects, in a phase they call initiation:

  During the phase of initiation, the group members make their ideas public, without questioning those presented by others. Nor do they get involved in explicit processes of negotiation of meanings, so that the joint activity gets more of a character of sum of monologues than a dialogue. The phase of initiation includes all those forms of participants’ joint action that result in a first level of intersubjectivity of the definition of the task and what procedure to follow to carry it out.

  Source: Strategies for collaborative writing and phases of knowledge construction in CSCL environments by Javier Onrubia & Anna Engel. In Computers & Education (2009), Vol. 53(4), pp. 1256-1265, http://tinyurl.com/hzz45bq

  For the writing team, the monologues not only allowed them to individually explore their character’s motivations and idiosyncrasies, but also, in sharing the monologues, they could begin to see how their characters might possibly interact with other characters in scenes.

   

• Take turns to write lines in a scene

  

  A screenshot of the Project Understudy Google Docs.

  There’re tables in the middle of the room and then we sit around the table. And instead of an improv session – there’s no acting – [we] just write.

  Matthew Fam, Project Understudy Writer

  The writers worked on each scene together. During their writing sessions at Centre 42, each writer was armed with a laptop logged on to Google Docs. Working on the same document, they took turns to create their character’s lines, akin to the improvisational work performed by actors in devised theatre.

  Onrubian and Engel use the term sequential summative construction to describe this strategy. For them, this strategy encouraged a group to explore a topic together – exchanges between group members tend to be “turns of presentations and acceptance” with few disagreements as the group constructs the work accumulatively.

  Business communication researchers Lowry, Curtis and Lowry call this strategy sequential writing: By taking turns to write, the researchers found sequential writing to be a simple and effective way for coordinating and distributing work between multiple writers.

  However, the researchers highlighted one major disadvantage of sequential writing:

  […] this approach is often problematic without effective version control; otherwise, subsequent writers can easily override the work of others by making new changes.

  Source: Building a taxonomy and nomenclature of collaborative writing to improve interdisciplinary research and practice by Paul Benjamin Lowry, Aaron Curtis, & Michelle Rene Lowry. In Journal of Business Communications (2004), Vol. 41(1), http://tinyurl.com/hw4s4ug

  To solve this issue, the writing team used the next strategy.

   

• Assign one member as the editor

  Dr Loon will start off by outlining the scene that we’re going to proceed on to do today, and tell us generally what we’re going to do, what our characters are supposed to be doing in the scene, what [their] function [is], how the dialogue’s going to go. Then we take it from there.

  Fong Chun Ming, Project Understudy Writer

  Dr. Robin Loon (who writes as KK), served as the Chief Editor of the project. In this capacity, Dr. Loon created the entire narrative arc for the sequel. At the beginning of each writing session, he laid out the objectives of the scene they were working on. He also edited the script generated by the writing team.

  Having an editor on the team can be very helpful as he or she makes the final decision on the work and ensures the writing process moves forward. One example of an editor moving a work forward is Ezra Pound who edited T. S. Eliot’s seminal poem The Wasteland:

  In short, Pound reduced the poem from over 1000 lines to its current 434. In the process, he focused and limited the poem’s message and eliminated a sarcastic tone. The critical view, with only the exception of a handful of scholars, is that Pound’s edited version is an undeniable improvement. Eliot, who was mentally infirm and hospitalized during the period of writing and revision of the poem, acquiesced to almost all of Pound’s revisions and suggestions. [Author of Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius, Jack] Stillinger brings attention not only the extent of Pound’s changes but connects the collaboration to an argument that the resulting text constitutes a co-authored work.

  Source: Collaborative Literary Creation and Control: A Socio-Historic, Technological and Legal Analysis, http://tinyurl.com/z2pg8ff

   

By Daniel Teo
Published on 20 May 2016

The Vault: Project Understudy revisits Tan Tarn How’s Undercover and reimagines its sequel set in 2016 through a collaborative writing creation process. Conceived and edited by Dr Robin Loon and organised by NUS Thespis. Presented on 23 May 2016, 8pm at Centre 42 Black Box. Admission is free. Find out more here.

Tan Tarn How (1960-) has, at various points in his life, been a teacher, a journalist, a scriptwriter and a research fellow. However, he is best known as one of Singapore’s landmark playwrights with his bold, award-winning works which have certainly pushed boundaries over the years.

The timeline below charts Tan’s life through the plays he penned and some selected milestones. Click on each tab to find out what happened during the year.

This timeline is not meant to be a complete record of Tan’s life — for more information, please consult the additional sources listed below.

Tan Tarn How
(Credit: Singapore Theatre Memories)

Watch Tan Tarn How and Dr. Robin Loon chat about Tan’s entire playwriting career in the Living Room:

Additional Sources:

• Tan Tarn How Too – About
• Tan Tarn How’s works are available for browsing in the Book Den.

By Daniel Teo
Published on 13 May 2016

The Vault: Project Understudy revisits Tan Tarn How’s Undercover and reimagines its sequel set in 2016 through a collaborative writing creation process. Conceived and edited by Dr Robin Loon and organised by NUS Thespis. Presented on 23 May 2016, 8pm at Centre 42 Black Box. Admission is free. Find out more here.