The Vault: 汐/Sea is directed by Casey Lim, and features Serene Chen and Zelda Ng who reprise their roles as the sisters. The actresses perform a combination of Robin Loon’s translated text 《汐》 and Haresh Sharma’s original English text Sea; set against the reflection of what the artists remember from the 1997 production of Sea and that period in Singapore history.

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Written by Haresh Sharma in 1997, Sea is a phantasmagoric journey through the lives of two sisters who can’t live with or without each other, but are always with and without each other.

This short play was staged as part of a double-bill in 1997 at the Substation. On stage as the sisters were Serene Chen and Zelda Tatiana Ng. In the audience were Robin Loon and Casey Lim. The performance left its mark on the both of them. It made such an impression on Robin that he was inspired to re-engage Sea through translation, a creative process that produced 《汐》.

Eighteen years on, Serene, Zelda, Robin and Casey revisit Sea, refreshed with a completely new Chinese translation, 《汐》, alongside Haresh’s English text. In tow are their personal reflections on the 1997 staging.

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

REGISTRATION

Monday, 23 November 2015
8pm @ Centre 42 Black Box

Admission is free.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER.

About Sea
Sea is a short but strange conversation between two sisters mysteriously cast adrift in a small boat. Their dialogue is whimsical and peculiar, drifting between past and future events, broaching topics of life and death. SEA’s only staging was in November 1997 by The Necessary Stage as part of a double bill called Moving Home Stories. SEA was directed by Kok Heng Leun and performed by Serene Chen and Zelda Tatiana as the sisters.

About the Playwright
Haresh Sharma is one of Singapore’s most prolific playwrights with over 100 plays to his name. He is the author of celebrated plays such as Still Building; Those Who Can’t, Teach; Off Centre; Fundamentally Happy; and Gemuk Girls.Haresh is the resident playwright of The Necessary Stage. He is the recipient of the Singapore Literature Prize (1993), the Young Artist Award (1997), the S.E.A. Write Award (2014), and most recently, the Cultural Medallion (2015).

About 《汐》
《汐》is Chinese translation of Sea by Dr. Robin Loon. With the memory of the 1997 production firmly etched in his mind, Robin wanted to rejuvenate Haresh’s text by rewriting the play in Chinese.

Translation is more than just finding equivalent words in another language. The translator has to employ creative judgment and intimate knowledge of the rhythms and cultural nuances of bothlanguages. The process involves uncovering the meanings behind the original text and ensuring those meanings are effectively communicated in the translation, even if it means extensive re-writing.《汐》, in this sense, is a completely new work. The Chinese title was chosen as it is a homophone of the English title.

Robin is a senior lecturer of Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore. Apart from his own original works,《汐》is Robin’s second major attempt at translating play-text, the first being 《男男自语》, a Chinese translation of Chay Yew’s A Language of Their Own, staged in 2012.

Reading Material

#1: THE PLAY – SEA (1997)

#2: THE PLAYWRIGHT – HARESH SHARMA

#3: THE PLAYWRIGHT – ROBIN LOON

#4: SINGAPORE THEATRE IN THE 1990s

Programme Handout

汐/Sea comprises three main parts:
1. The prologue which introduces the methodology of this Vault and the actresses’ memories of 1997 production.

2. 汐/Sea, an amalgamation of Haresh’s English text and Robin’s Chinese translation, with Serene and Zelda reprising their roles as the sisters.

3. The epilogue, in which the actresses present their reflections of the Vault process and how the theatre industry has changed over the past 18 years since they performed in Sea.

The Vault: 汐/Sea is a performance-presentation which revisits the short play Sea, a phantasmagoric journey through the lives of two sisters – the elder Su Fen and her younger sibling Tarcy – who cannot live with or without each other, but are always with and without each other. The sisters journey out at sea in a small boat together is filled with short, strange, whimsical conversations, drifting between past and future events, broaching topics of life and death. Written by Haresh Sharma, Sea’s only staging was in November 1997 by The Necessary Stage as part of a double bill called “Moving Home Stories”. The production was directed by Kok Heng Leun and starred Serene Chen and Zelda Tatiana Ng as the sisters. The Vault: 汐/Sea is directed by Casey Lim, and features Chen and Ng who reprise their roles as the sisters. The actresses perform a combination of Robin Loon’s translated text 《汐》 and Sharma’s original English text; set against the reflection of what the artists remember from the 1997 production of “Sea” and that period in Singapore history.

Source: Centre 42 Facebook 

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The Vault: 汐/Sea revisits Haresh Sharma’s Sea and refreshes it with a Chinese translation and memories of the 1997 production. Performed by Serene Chen and Zelda Tatiana Ng, in collaboration with Robin Loon and Casey Lim, on 23 November 2015, 8pm at Centre 42 Black Box.

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Haresh Sharma’s short play Sea was revisited in this installment of The Vault, by playwright Robin Loon, director Casey Lim, and actresses Serene Chen and Zelda Tatiana Ng. Robin translated the English play into Chinese, titled <<汐>>, based on his memory of the production staged in 1997. Serene and Zelda reprise their roles as the sisters in the play. Casey Lim directs this performance-presentation, which combines the reading of both the English and Chinese scripts and the actresses’ reflections on their journey as practitioners.

Here is video recording of the 60-minute Performance-Presentation:

汐/Sea comprises three main parts:
1. [00:35] The PROLOGUE which introduces the methodology of this Vault and the actresses’ memories of 1997 production.
2. [09:35] “汐/Sea”, an amalgamation of Haresh’s English text and Robin’s Chinese translation, with Serene and Zelda reprising their roles as the sisters.
3. [44:07] The EPILOGUE, in which the actresses present their reflections of the Vault process and how the theatre industry has changed over the past 18 years since they performed in “Sea”.

The Vault: 汐/Sea revisits Haresh Sharma’s Sea and refreshes it with a Chinese translation and memories of the 1997 production. Performed by Serene Chen and Zelda Tatiana Ng, in collaboration with Robin Loon and Casey Lim, on 23 November 2015, 8pm at Centre 42 Black Box.

Access the full suite of materials about 汐/Sea here.

Here are 4 things to note about the Singapore theatre in the 1990s, based on the commentary of practitioners, experts and industry observers.

• 1. Growth in Local Theatre
• 2. Cultural Development Policies
• 3. The State and Artists
• 4. The Esplanade and The Substation

• The 1990s was a time of growth and experimentation in Singapore theatre. Homegrown theatre companies like The Necessary Stage and TheatreWorks were focused on creating local dramatic texts as well as staging them. These were plays that were written by Singaporeans, focusing on issues and topics that mattered to Singaporeans.

  The proliferation of local theatrical works was mainly led by young, English-educated artists, who, because of increasing international exposure and training overseas, were more open to experimenting with less conventional theatremaking methodologies.

  By the mid-1990s, original, intracultural, indigenous, and social theatre began to move into the margins, while plays that were influenced by postmodern traits and tendencies gained prominence… Broadly speaking, avant-garde and postmodern forms of theatre belong to the same category: both refer to theatre ahead of its time. Such theatre pieces challenge traditional theatre precepts in many different ways. They give much more importance and attention to interpretation and performance than to the written text on which performance is based. They position the audience – and not the playwright or director – as the ‘author’ or meaning-maker. They are opposed to giving the literary author, playwright, or director of a theatre piece the controlling perspective for an audience to discover; instead, the audience’s perspective is just as, if not more, important. Inevitably, avant-garde and postmodern forms of theatre are opposed quite profoundly to authoritarianism.Source: Theatres and Cultures: Globalizing strategies by Alvin Tan. In Renaissance Singapore? Economy, Culture, and Politics, edited by Kenneth Paul Tan (p.185-6).

  The three companies [The Theatre Practice, The Necessary Stage, and TheatreWorks] created adventurous productions, often formally bold (many of the plays were “devised,” with the scripts created in a workshop setting) and dealing with issues of memory, ethnicity, and other identity issues. These were artistic reactions against the singular and sometimes strident top-down disciplinary modernization of Singapore since the 1960s, which had allowed little space for reflection on cultural or historical issues. What was notable about the theatre of the late 1980s and mid-1990s was that “difficult” theatre – even if text based – formed the mainstream of the more important theatre groups; devised theatre coexisted within companies with fledgling, indigenized Broadway-style musicals. Gender issues were noticeable by the early 1990s. All in all, these were invigorating years.

  Source: Creating High Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert” of Singapore by CJ.W.-L. Wee. In The Drama Review, 47(4), p.85.

  …by the early 1990s, the local theatre community had matured significantly to produce numerous landmark plays, thus making it possible to speak of a recognizable local cultural production. Crucially, this community was led largely by young English-educated Singaporeans who were constantly pushing boundaries of censorship and was supported by the broadening Singapore middle class who now possessed the disposal income to consume leisure activities and desire to reflect on home-made stories and narratives.

  Source: The Theatre and the State in Singapore: Orthodoxy and Resistance by Terence Chong.

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• The 1990s was when the Singapore government, for the first time, pursued the development of the arts in its policymaking. In lieu of the 1985 economic recession, the government was looking for other avenues to sustain growth and development. This led to the 1989 Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts (ACCA), chaired by the then 2nd Deputy Prime Minister Ong Teng Cheong.

  Recommendations from the report steered the cultural-policy direction of the 1990s, which included outcomes such as the establishment of the National Arts Council (NAC) in 1991, a surge in public funding for the arts, the construction of the Esplanade, and the introduction of arts education in schools.

  In 1992, the government began to promote a policy to make the city-state not just a Global City, but, indeed, a Global City for the Arts. Unfortunately, if predictably, an overall instrumentalist attitude predominated. Some leading politicos had discovered that to become a “serious” Global City capable of attracting and retaining the “foreign talent” of senior business executives who could further “globalize” the city-state, we needed Western metropolitan-style cultural infra- and superstructures that would enable Singapore to become a sort of “London of the East.”

  As is often the case in Singapore, an it-needs-to-happen-tomorrow social engineering imperative and paradigm were adopted for the new cultural policy. The entrenched position of this paradigm gave rise to the central tension between the professed wish for a dynamic creativity and the existing instrumentalizing and rationalist mental set. Arts funding increased and theatre, as the most visible art form of the 1980s, was a major beneficiary. The pretentiously entitled Renaissance City Report: Culture and the Arts in Renaissance Singapore (2000) advocated for even more funding to be made available (some S$50 million—nearly U.S.$30 million—over five years), and these funds have started to have an impact on the cultural scene. Source: Creating High Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert” of Singapore by CJ.W.-L. Wee. In The Drama Review, 47(4), p.87.

  With the setting up of MITA [Ministry of Information and the Arts] in November 1990, followed by the creation of the National Arts Council (NAC) in 1991, the government, for the first time, entered the cultural arena in a big and systematic way. The council’s impact can be seen from the dramatic increase in the total amount of grants awarded to the arts group and artists, from $1.02 million in 1991 to $7.5 million in 2000… At the end of the decade, MITA’s landmark Renaissance City Report would provide an additional $50 million in arts funding over the next five years. It would also serve as a statement of cultural policy, building on the 1989 Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts which said that the arts would: “(a) enrich us as persons; (b) enhance our quality of life; (c) help us in nation building; and (d) contribute to the tourist and entertainment sectors”. Source: Theatre Life!: A History of English-language Theatre in Singapore through The Straits Times by Clarissa Oon, pp. 138-140.

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• There was a tense relationship between the state and artists at the time. This was not a new situation by any means, but the key difference in the 1990s was that the government had stepped in to become a key driver behind the local arts scene, albeit chiefly with economic intentions rather than artistic ones. At the same time, practitioners were experimenting and pushing the boundaries of theatre and art, all in the search for a Singapore theatre.

  The combination made for anxious times in the local theatre scene, with government officials and theatre practitioners never quite knowing if a work was crossing the proverbial line. Artists were also bothered by the heavy-handedness of the State when it came to cultural development and regulation.

  The situation calmed down thereafter, until another government crackdown in late 1993—this time specifically on the arts. A 21-year-old performance and visual artist, Josef Ng, who did a performance protesting the police entrapment of working-class homosexual men, and TNS, which practiced Augusto Boal-style Forum Theatre, were accused, respectively, of obscenity and having a “Marxist” orientation. The latter charge, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, could only sound absurd. Performance art remains officially in a position of limbo, and cannot receive National Arts Council funding (NAC). Despite these obstacles, the state’s desire for a commodified theatre and visual arts scene has persisted. Source: Creating High Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert” of Singapore by CJ.W.-L. Wee. In The Drama Review, 47(4), p.87.

  However, while [NAC’s] role was to help the arts to grow, it was also to see that artists were not out of step with the moral majority; a Drama Review Committee comprising academics, community leaders and the like was formed by the council in 1993 to advise on the licensing of potentially controversial plays. Source: Theatre Life!: A History of English-language Theatre in Singapore through The Straits Times by Clarissa Oon, pp. 138-140.

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• Part of the government’s plans to turn Singapore into a “global city of the arts” was the development of arts infrastructure. At the top of the to-do list was the construction of a dedicated “world-class” performing arts centre. Boasting a concert hall and a theatre that can seat thousands, the design for the Esplanade – Theatre on the Bay was first unveiled to the public in 1994. Ground broke in 1998 and construction was completed in 2001 at a cost of S$600 million.

  The development of the Esplanade perturbed some local arts practitioners and commentators, who believed a multi-million dollar performing arts centre, designed for large, big-budget productions, would not be a conducive space for nurturing local art.

  Critics of the Esplanade pitted it against smaller “alternative” arts spaces, perhaps best epitomised by The Substation. Established in 1990 from a disused power station, The Substation emerged from late theatre doyen Kuo Pao Kun’s vision for a space for artists to experiment and grow. The Substation houses multiple studio, gallery and performance spaces, including a 120-seat theatre and a garden courtyard for outdoor performances.

  The crowning infrastructural achievement was the October 2002 opening of the S$600 million (U.S.$345 million) “Esplanade—Theatres on the Bay” arts complex, built specifically for “world-class” foreign acts—a statist attempt to create a commercial Cult of the Beautiful. It remains to be seen how this will affect theatre development, given that the Esplanade has no medium-size theatre space: its major theatre auditorium seats some 1,800 persons—a number that both the older and newer theatre companies would find daunting to fill.Source: Creating High Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert” of Singapore by CJ.W.-L. Wee. In The Drama Review, 47(4), p.87.

  And it is precisely because art has always been about power that we are going to build for ourselves an Arts Centre. It is not an accident that the state’s involvement in the arts has taken the form of a commitment to build a monument to art. For it is not as though the state here is imposing a particular model on art; the state can do so because art – a kind of art – has always made itself available to such appropriations…
  The moment The Substation leaves The Substation for the Singapore Arts Centre [former name of the Esplanade], all that The Substation represents will die – not literally, but symbolically. This is inevitable. For the Singapore Arts Centre is designed as a monument. By definition, monuments commemorate the dead. And there is a kind of reciprocal structure at work here: when you stand before a monument, you not only commemorate the dead, you are struck dumb, silenced. Monuments are designed to work that way – they can’t help it. They are designed to speak on your behalf; and in doing so, they require your symbolic death. That is the general effect of the relationship between the state and art in which both are complicitous.Source: Is art necessary? by Janadas Devan. In Art vs Art: Conflict & Convergence (1995).

  The various attempts to make Singapore a regional hub for the arts have been further enhanced by a huge injection of funds by the state to the tune of S$1 billion to develop new and upgrade old cultural facilities. In particular, a new Singapore Arts Centre (SAC, named the Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay) is being constructed by 2001, with a complex of four theatres, a concert hall and studios…
  Why do practitioners hold this negative view of state initiatives which ostensibly will serve the arts well? As David [pseudonym] (playwright) articulates, it is because with such heavy financial investment in the Esplanade, there is a need to “go for surefire successes” which will cover the cost of renting the spaces and eventually recovering the investment…
  Given the clear signals from the state, practitioners and critics have sought to negotiate their preferred socio-cultural agendas within the constraints of the state’s economic agenda in a number of ways. First, and probably the most effective strategy, is the deliberate but difficult process of developing “alternative arts spaces” in Singapore. Chief among these is the Substation, an arts centre established in 1990…Source: Cultural policy in Singapore: Negotiating economic and social-cultural agendas by Lily Kong. In Geoforums, Vol. 31(4).

  In the first five years of The Substation’s history, under the visionary artistic direction of founder Kuo Pao Kun, The Substation was a pioneer arts space in Singapore. It played a key part in almost every arts event or development of significance. The Substation’s founding coincided with a burst of activity in Singapore such as the emergence of professional theatre companies, new writing in theatre, and a new generation of visual artists inspired by new practices and ideas promoted by artists and groups such as the Artists Village. Experimentation, across all the art forms, was the order of the day. These artists found a congenial home in The Substation which encouraged them to experiment, to try, and most importantly, to fail – and to continue.Source: The history of The Substation by Audrey Wong, http://www.substation.org/about-us/history/

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By Daniel Teo
Published on 20 November 2015

The Vault: 汐/Sea revisits Haresh Sharma’s Sea and refreshes it with a Chinese translation and memories of the 1997 production. Performed by Serene Chen and Zelda Tatiana Ng, in collaboration with Robin Loon and Casey Lim, on 23 November 2015, 8pm at Centre 42 Black Box. Admission is free. Find out more here.

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At 24, Robin Loon already had a clearer vision for his life than most in their twenties. Eschewing a career in medicine as his parents had envisioned, Loon, then an English Literature and History major at the National University of Singapore (NUS), was certain of a life in theatre.

…what would make [Loon] really happy are: “One, to do absolutely nothing, if I can afford such a lifestyle. Two, to be involved in theatre. Three, to travel. If I can’t do any one of them, I think I’ll teach. “Teaching would give me a chance to promote theatre in the schools, which is where we have to start, to cultivate an interest in theatre in Singapore.”Source: Serious Loon by Ricky Yeo. In The Straits Times (8 April 1992).

Loon’s flair for playwriting became evident in his undergraduate years. His first play, Solitaire, written in 1988, won the Shell Playwriting Competition and was staged at the university a few years later.

Loon then joined TheatreWork’s fruitful playwright incubation programme Writers’ Laboratory. At the Writers’ Lab, Loon was schooled alongside some of today’s most illustrious local playwrights, such as Eleanor Wong, Desmond Sim, Ovidia Yu, and Tan Tarn How.

One major work to emerge from the Writers’ Lab was Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder, a heart-rending drama about aging and filial piety. Absence premiered in 1992 and won praise from peers, audience members, and even Straits Times theatre critic Hannah Pandian.

It was during the opening night of Robin Loon’s Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder, and it was in the middle of the play that [an audience member] began to alternately sniffle and blow, rather too loudly, into a handkerchief.

And as the final act reached its climax, his weeping also attained a corresponding crescendo.

The rest of the audience did not seem to mind, for no one said so much as a “shh, shh”. They probably had their own tissues out. At one point I had trouble myself quelling the tears threatening to well up in my eyes.Source: It needn't be 'experimental' by Tan Tarn How. In The Straits Times (13 April 1992).

Naturalistic drama, while always guaranteeing a mainstream audience, is often in danger of settling into oversimplification, because of its lack of challenges in form. But perhaps, it is also Loon’s age (24 years) that has afforded him this two-dimensional view of human nature. Having said that, it is also surprising that Loon, with so little experience behind him, has mastered details of dramatic technique that 50-year-old playwrights in Singapore still have not. He hits on rare, genius moments of stage tension.Source: A Bill Cosby perspective by Hannah Pandian. In The Straits Times (10 April 1992).

Loon’s fascination with history surfaced in his subsequent works. For example, Watching the Clouds Go By (1994) is a romance set in the throes of the Cultural Revolution. Broken Birds: An Epic Longing (1995), which he co-wrote with Ong Keng Sen, tackled pre-war Japanese prostitution in Singapore.

I am constantly amazed at how fragile our reality is – how it disintegrates as we uncover events in our past that were hitherto hidden from us. This is my greatest realisation in Broken Birds. But the task now is not to lament the atrocities of history but to rebuild ourselves with this knowledge of the past. Being a student of literature and history, I found great satisfaction in merging the two seemingly disparate disciplines into one form – fact and fiction fusing in theatre.Source: Robin Loon's message, programme booklet from the 1995 production of Broken Birds (TheatreWorks), http://theatreworks.org.sg/archive/broken_birds/index.htm

More recently in 2012, Loon renewed his interest with memory and historical narratives in Casting Back, a collaboration with theatre veterans Nora Samosir and Christina Sergeant which traces the history of Singapore theatre through the recollections of the two actresses. Casey Lim directed Casting Back, which was commissioned for the Esplanade’s 10^th anniversary celebrations.

Casting Back feels like a performance tailored to fit the theatre in-crowd a little better, with its inside jokes about working with certain theatre practitioners.

“I guess you never forget a fight with OKS,” Samosir says in jest to knowing laughter from the audience, using the abbreviation for TheatreWorks’ Ong Keng Sen. The actresses also chafe at being called “veteran actresses”, cringing at the shorthand for actresses who have, well, been acting for a very long time.

But there are scenes that do work, especially when Sergeant and Samosir recall some genuinely heartfelt moments of their encounters in the theatre, whether it is when shaping some of their more or less memorable characters, admitting their “glorious failures” or describing the intimate times spent in the rehearsal rooms of the old Drama Centre at Fort Canning.Source: Actresses remember fights, critiques and venues by Corrie Tan. In The Straits Times (15 October 2012).

Loon is also effectively bilingual in English and Mandarin, and aspires to translate works between the two languages. He realised this ambition with Chay Yew’s A Language of Their Own, about the relationship between two Chinese-American gay men. For Loon, he saw an opportunity to up the ante on the play’s explorations of race and culture through language.

Loon translated A Language of Their Own into Chinese, deliberately retaining the setting and pop culture references of the original even though they were discordant in the translated work. Once again teamed up with Casey Lim (who also directed the 2006 staging by Checkpoint Theatre) the pair brought the re-titled 《男男自语》 to the stage at the 2012 Singapore Arts Festival.

This play just isn’t an obvious choice for translation. But if a production is judged by its effect on its audience, no matter its provenance, Loon’s version was a smash hit.

It made people laugh and cry. It was playful and lyrical, romantic and utterly devastating. It provided the sort of night one dreams of having in the theatre: a sense that the complications of the world, all its beauty and tragedy, have been illuminated and done justice to, if only for two hours.Source: Elegy in a new language by Adeline Chia. In The Straits Times (21 May 2012).

At the end of the day, my assessment is that this is a fine interpretation of A Language of Their Own. It’s definitely worthy of restaging, given that its initial run was a near-sold-out weekend of five shows, including two matinees. It’s also proof that Robin Loon’s translation works – this script should be performed in other countries, even if the production itself doesn’t travel. Congratulations to all, including the absent playwright. Chay, you’ve got to fly in to see this.Second language by Ng Yi-Sheng. In The Flying Inkpot (20 May 2012), http://tinyurl.com/o76af8j

While Loon these days has been described as a “practicising playwright”, he has not confined himself to the role of a scribe. He has also served as a dramaturg in productions, festivals and arts programmes. (And at Centre 42 as its Founding Board Member and Chief Consultant as well!)

To date, he has also dabbled in a variety of roles in theatre, which include being an actor, director, production assistant, stage manager, festival director, and designer. Loon was also the gamemaster of TheatreWork’s annual 24-hour Playwriting Challenge for several consecutive years, and returned to head the Writer’s Lab in 2006.

In the meantime, Loon pursued postgraduate studies, eventually receiving a PhD in Intercultural Theatre and Performance from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2004. And, as he declared back in 1992, Loon currently teaches Theatre Studies as a senior lecturer at NUS.

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Robin Loon. Credit: 50 Years of Theatre Memories

Selected Plays

2015 – 汐

 2014 – Nineteen Sixty-Four (collaborator)

2013 – LIFT: Love Is Flower The

2012 – Casting Back

2012 – 男男自语

2011 – Mata Hati

2011 – DNR

1997 – Destinies of Flower in the Mirror

1995 – Broken Birds: An Epic Longing (co-written)

1994 – Watching the Clouds Go By
(Text available in the Book Den)

1992 – Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

Additional Sources:

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Faculty Profile [Webpage]

By Daniel Teo
Published on 18 November 2015

The Vault: 汐/Sea revisits Haresh Sharma’s Sea and refreshes it with a Chinese translation and memories of the 1997 production. Performed by Serene Chen and Zelda Tatiana Ng, in collaboration with Robin Loon and Casey Lim, on 23 November 2015, 8pm at Centre 42 Black Box. Admission is free. Find out more here.

Even before joining The Necessary Stage (TNS) in 1987, Haresh Sharma knew he wanted to be a writer. The problem was that he wasn’t sure what sort of writer he wanted to be. In a 2002 interview published in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS), Sharma admitted that his early attempts at poetry and prose did not feel “magical”. But in playwriting, he discovered the freedom to say whatever he wanted, however he wanted:

When I started writing plays, no one could tell me what was right or wrong. Certain rules I made up.Source: That man’s a Sharma (Interview) by Ruby Pan. In QLRS, Vol. 1(4), 4 July 2002, http://tinyurl.com/o2jtf4s

When I started writing, I was watching plays such as The Silly Little Girl And The Funny Old Tree (1987) and Mama Looking For Her Cat (1988). I felt a sense of freedom then, that I didn’t have to write only “conventional” plays with three or four acts. Source: Writing plays with heart (Interview) by Clarissa Oon. In The Straits Times (17 Oct 2015)

Spurred on by The Necessary Stage’s (TNS) Artistic Director and long-time collaborator Alvin Tan, Sharma has gone on to write over 100 plays, several of which have become landmark works in the Singapore dramatic canon. Off Centre, which once drew the ire of the authorities for its true-to-life portrayal of mental illness patients, became the first local play to be offered as literary text in school curricula.

Sharma prefers to create his plays through research and collaboration. He spends time in the field observing real people in real situations, and also workshops with cast members to help hone his writing. As a result, Sharma is able to craft characters which have authenticity and depth, both on paper and on stage.

At the same time, there are aspects of the play, both in its creative process and in the final product, that belie this simplistic description of Good People. For example, the three actors were cast early this year before a single line of the play had been written. They then worked with playwright Haresh Sharma on devising the script through improvisations which were informed by visits to a hospice and interviews with hospice personnel. After Sharma had crafted a working script, this was further redrafted over a few months based on feedback from the cast and director as well as a preview audience. As a result, the play appears before the audience fully formed. At 80 minutes, it is tight and focused with little fat.Sinning Saints by Kenneth Kwok. In The Flying Inkpot (7 Nov 2008), http://tinyurl.com/pqu5zrm

…none of us had any training in theatre. So we thought that the best way to create a play would be for everyone involved to contribute, then whoever was more interested in writing would go off and write the scenes, etc. That’s how our “devising” started. But we decided to continue working that way a lot because there’s a lot of positiveness that comes from that method of working.Source: That man’s a Sharma (Interview) by Ruby Pan. In QLRS, Vol. 1(4), 4 July 2002, http://tinyurl.com/o2jtf4s

There is a timeless quality to Sharma’s plays, thanks in part to their enduring social relevance. Many of his works tackle perennial issues like national identity, mental health, political rights and sexuality, with exacting wit and unflinching honesty. As such, Sharma’s plays always manage to strike a chord whenever they are (re)staged:

Haresh Sharma’s critically-acclaimed play [Gemuk Girls] about political detention under the Internal Security Act first premiered in 2008, presenting us with an image of a Singapore where citizens believed in standing up for their beliefs and being true to their ideals. Just three years on, Sharma’s script is revealed to be not only powerful but indeed prescient. We have just witnessed a landmark general election where, more than ever before, ordinary citizens have unambiguously voiced their feelings against the ruling party and campaigned for change. Furthermore, Malaysia has just passed a law to abolish its own ISA, recognizing the unfairness of incarceration without trial. A revival could not be better timed.Source: Size Matters by Naeem Kapadia. In The Flying Inkpot (10 Nov 2011), http://tinyurl.com/nr68gub

…at the end of the day Sharma is not a complex playwright. There is a simplicity, and clarity, running through all his work that handles a particular theme or set of issues with a social and political awareness designed NOT to say to audiences how clever Sharma is in his observations but for those audiences themselves to leave the theatre with some questions in their minds about their own lives and situations; about their own abilities or inabilities to control their lives and to ponder some of the injustices and untalked about topics that still course through contemporary Singapore – either in the corridors of power in downtown Singapore, or in the heartlands where the majority of Singaporeans live and work.Source: Interlogue: Studies in Singapore Literature, Vol. 6: Haresh Sharma by David Birch. Ethos Books (2007).

Sharma’s writing has won multiple accolades. In 1993, Still Building was awarded the Singapore Literature Prize (Merit). Sharma has also received the NAC Young Artist Award in 1997 and the S.E.A. Write Award in 2014. Most recently, he was conferred the Cultural Medallion, Singapore’s highest award for artistic excellence.

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Haresh Sharma, Resident Playwright of The Necessary Stage since 1990. (Credit: The Necessary Stage.)

Selected Plays

*Artefacts from past stagings of Haresh Sharma’s plays are available in The Repository. Artefacts to selected plays have been linked below.

 2015 – Pioneer (Girls) Generation

2014 – Gitanjali [I feel the earth move]

2010 – Model Citizens

2008 – Gemuk Girls

2007 – Good People

2006 – Fundamentally Happy

2002 – godeatgod

1999 – Completely With/Out Character

1993 – Off Centre

1992 – Still Building

1990 – Those Who Can’t, Teach

 

Additional Sources:

Haresh Sharma wins this year’s S.E.A. Write Award (Singapore) by Clarissa Oon and Corrie Tan. In The Straits Times (13 Nov 2014).

 The Necessary Stage [Website].

Selected Works of Haresh Sharma. The Studios: fifty [Website].

By Daniel Teo
Published on 16 November 2015

The Vault: 汐/Sea revisits Haresh Sharma’s Sea and refreshes it with a Chinese translation and memories of the 1997 production. Performed by Serene Chen and Zelda Tatiana Ng, in collaboration with Robin Loon and Casey Lim, on 23 November 2015, 8pm at Centre 42 Black Box. Admission is free. Find out more here.

Haresh Sharma’s Sea was first staged in 1997 as part of a double-bill entitled Moving Home Stories. Following on from Land (also written by Sharma), Sea depicted the whimsical conversation between two sisters, the elder Fong Su Fen and her younger sibling, Fong Su Fang, also called Tarcy. Fen and Tarcy were first played by Serene Chen and Zelda Tatiana Ng respectively, to much critical acclaim. The pair were directed by Kok Heng Leun.

Here’s how theatre reviewers responded to the 1997 production of Sea:

[Sea] is a story about two sisters who take a boat trip. Each has her problems. Younger sister Tarcy leads a bohemian lifestyle while married elder sister Fen is more proper.

Some parts of the play stray into “magic realism”. Said Kok [Heng Leun]: “The story is rooted in realism but there is a magic feel to it that makes people wonder if what is unfolding is real or whether it is just a dream.”Source: Watch this play, then pay what you want by Selina Lum. In The Straits Times (1 Nov 1997), http://tinyurl.com/q8tdnnv

Sea, then, was a pleasant surprise: two strong performances from Serene Chen and Zelda Tatiana Ng as sisters on a boat in the ocean. The relationship resonates beautifully…

Chen performs, true to her name, with a gentle and quiet truth, and subtlety. She plays the older sister struggling with a troubled marriage, a dying husband, and her desire for children.

As the younger “very garish” Tarcy, Ng lights up the evening. With flair and enthusiasm, she creates a complex character of depth and sensuality. At one point, she balances a banana in the sand and fondles it with her mouth in hope of arousing her sister’s wrath.

The audience was mesmerised. When she applies the same careful and patient licking to her sister’s arm, finally resting her head in the elder’s lap, the connection between these two reverberates with the ancient bond of sisters. If only there had been more such moments.Source: Bountiful sea and dry land by Elizabeth A. Kaiden. In The Straits Times (12 Nov 1997), http://tinyurl.com/oou8dj3

Sea, directed by co-author Kok, adopted a more lyrical, ethereal approach to issues of home and belonging in a production crammed with symbolic gestures and props and carried along by dialogue and voice-overs which embrace the rhythmic and poetic power of language. Kok uses his insider’s take on the text to draw two full characters in Su Fen (Serene Chan [sic]) and Su Fang (Zelda Tatiana Ng).

Su Fang’s gaudy, vampish behaviour is foiled beautifully by the vulnerable naivety of her sister Su Fen. Kok creates tension between the two corners of the stage in which the sisters remain just long enough to make their meeting in the middle a welcome union and the rhythmic pace to Sea allows an undulating ocean to guide the ups and downs of the sisters’ emotions.Source: Tap your roots on Land and at Sea by Ben Munroe. In The Business Times (11 Nov 1997), http://tinyurl.com/psemch3

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In a decade when artistic boundaries were being drawn and contested, Sea courted some controversy when the production was slapped with an R(A) rating after opening night. Audience members below the age of 18 had to be refunded half the ticket price since they were not allowed to watch the second play of the double-bill.

Recently in a TNS’ double-bill production (“Moving Home Stories”), the second play, Sea, had a scene where a character ate a banana in a suggestive manner. Despite the recommendation from an NAC official to censor the scene, we decided not to as we felt it was artistically justified. The NAC reported the matter to PELU [Public Entertainment Licenseing Unit] even before there was any complaint from the public, slapping the production wiht an R(A) rating.

Source: Postmodern elements of theories and practice in the collaborative works of The Necessary Stage, Caryl Churchill and The Wooster Group (Thesis) by Alvin Tan. University of Birmingham (1998), http://tinyurl.com/poce6bt

Sea provided an opportunity to look at the issue of catharsis off the stage as well. It illuminated how theatre in Singapore is itself cathartic and always political. After the production had already begun its run, R(A) signs suddenly went up the entrance. Apparently the outspoken Tarcy’s profanities and her pretended fellatio to bait her puritan and anxious sister, were offensive to the National Arts Council. They requested deletion of this scene, but a compromise was reached in which subsequent performances were “restricted” to audiences over 18 years old.

On the surface the NAC, taking off its “sponsor of the arts” hat and putting on its “advance guard of the immune system of the nation” hat, simply re-asserted their position that sponsoring and policing the arts should be done by an elite group of bureaucrats, and the play became yet another opportunity for this agency to define its identity in public. But more interestingly, NAC transformed the play itself into a cathartic crisis in the larger contextual drama of state politics.

Source: The cathartic banana and other thoughts on Moving Home Stories by Ray Langenbach. In Substance (Jan/Feb 1998).

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The script for Sea is available from The Necessary Stage as part of Shorts 2, an anthology of Sharma’s earlier works.

Serene Chen and Zelda Tatiana performing as Fen and Tarcy in 1997. (Credit: The Necessary Stage.)
To view more production images, please click here.

Sea (1997)

Date:	6-15 November 1997
Venue:	Guinness Theatre, The Substation
Playwright:	Haresh Sharma
Director:	Kok Heng Leun
Cast:	Serene Chen, Zelda Tatiana Ng

Click to view an image of the programme from Sea (1997).

By Daniel Teo
Published on 12 November 2015

The Vault: 汐/Sea revisits Haresh Sharma’s Sea and refreshes it with a Chinese translation and memories of the 1997 production. Performed by Serene Chen and Zelda Tatiana Ng, in collaboration with Robin Loon and Casey Lim, on 23 November 2015, 8pm at Centre 42 Black Box. Admission is free. Find out more here.