Nelson Chia stands before the timeline of Yeng Pway Ngon’s novel, Art Studio. Photo: Gwen Pew

Nelson Chia is a busy man. Just last month, Nine Years Theatre’s production of Fundamentally Happy – Haresh Sharma’s 2006 English-language play – hit the stage as part of the Esplanade’s The Studios 2017 season. It’s the first time the piece had been performed in Mandarin, and Nelson was responsible for both translating and directing it. He also gave a few talks: one at the Esplanade with Zulfadli Rashid (who had adapted another Haresh Sharma play, Hope, into Malay), and one at Centre 42 with actress Aidli ‘Alin’ Mosbit and researchers Wong Chee Meng and Shawn Chua as part of the Living Room series.

But there’s no rest for the wicked – or the artistic.

In the midst of everything mentioned above, Nelson has been taking part in Centre 42’s Fellowship programme, a grant scheme awarded by invitation that supports the research and development of a project proposed by the artist. In Nelson’s case, he embarked on an epic journey between March 2016 and August 2017 to adapt Cultural Medallion recipient Yeng Pway Ngon’s seminal Chinese novel Art Studio into a stage play. The story follows various characters who lived through Singapore’s tumultuous post-independence years.

On top of being recognised for his award-winning work as an actor and director, Nelson has developed a reputation as a translator in the local theatre scene over the years. He founded Nine Years Theatre with his wife Mia Chee in 2012, and has since adapted nine classic plays – including Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men – into Mandarin.

Seeing as Yeng Pway Ngon’s novel and the script that Nelson is working on are both in Chinese, the endeavour may sound like a departure from the latter’s recent work. But he has a confession: “Translation is not my personal interest,” he admits. “I never studied it and I have no real methodology – I do it more by feel.”

What he is interested in is language. Which explains his enthusiasm for the Art Studio project. He had wanted to explore cross-genre adaptation, and settled on the task of converting a local novel into a play. “Reading is quite a private activity, but theatre has an audience. You’re reading aloud, and it’s a [physical and visual] performance,” he explains. “I want to see what the novel and the stage can do that the other cannot.”

He divided the process into four stages. Phase one took place in May 2016, when he recorded six actors as they took turns reading the 496-page Art Studio out loud over the course of three days. Then, in July, he began phase two by running a series of workshops with the actors to begin exploring the text. One exercise involved them creating a physical timeline of the story – which is stuck on the wall of Nine Years Theatre’s Aliwal Arts Centre home like a tapestry – so that they could visualise the structure of the work. Phase three saw Nelson pack his bags to spend two weeks holed up in a hotel room in Bangkok to write. He came back, as promised, with the first draft of the script, which brings them to the currently on-going phase four: the test reads.

Nelson is not required to stage the work as part of Centre 42’s Fellowship, which is more concerned with the developmental process. However, his project caught the eye of Ong Keng Sen, the artistic director of the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA). “Keng Sen met me and said he wanted to do something with Nine Years Theatre, so I told him about the projects I’m working on. He’s interested in Art Studio because it’s something we’ve never done before,” says Nelson. “Technically, it’s our first original work, and it’s pushing the company to do something that’s out of our comfort zone.” The play will be opening this year’s SIFA and performed at Victoria Theatre from 17 to 19 August later this year.

Adding to his already-full plate, Nelson is also directing a Vault presentation for Centre 42 on 5 and 6 May this year, in reciprocation of his Fellowship grant. Titled Dialects & Dialectics, the showcase is a double-bill featuring The Coffin Is Too Big For The Hole and No Parking On Odd Days, two of the most famous monologues by the late local theatre doyen Kuo Pao Kun.

Both plays have been staged numerous times in English and Mandarin since they were written in the mid-1980s, but Nelson has decided to work with actors Tay Kong Hui and Hang Qian Chou to adapt Coffin into Teochew and No Parking into Cantonese. As Nelson puts it, “it’s a translation from one Chinese to another”.

As a result of the government’s 1979 Speak Mandarin Campaign, Chinese dialects have been on the decline, which Nelson believes has also eroded Chinese Singaporeans’ sense of identity and roots. Since both monologues are centred on an individual confronting the larger system, he hopes that “returning them to dialects and using a grassroot language will help bring out the plays’ sentiments”.

In playing with language in so many ways, Nelson has proved that he has come a long way since his first attempt at translation for The Theatre Practice’s 2002 production of Oleanna by David Mamet. At the time, The Flying Inkpot reviewer Adele Tan had called his translation “competent albeit sober”, and questioned why he “aimed for a straight translation and not a rewrite or adaptation”. By 2013, he’s already become a lot more confident, and he was praised by former Straits Times arts writer Corrie Tan for his “refreshing” translation of Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men “that is as lyrical as it is incisive”. And judging by the way things are going, he’ll be pushing himself to try yet more new things for years to come.

But as for taking a break? Nelson shakes his head: “nothing planned yet,” he says. “Maybe a holiday at the end of the year!”

By Gwen Pew
Published on 21 April 2017

Find out more about The Vault: Dialect & Dialectics here, and register for the presentation at Centre 42 on 5 & 6 May 2017 here. More information about Nelson’s Fellowship project can be found here.

This article was published in Blueprint Issue #1.

Playwright Chong Tze Chien was the first artist to be supported by our Fellowship programme. In 2014, he wrote a play titled Starring Hitler as Jekyll and Hyde, which was restaged at Victoria Theatre from 13 to 15 October. Having decided that there’s a lot more he can explore about one of the most reviled men in history, Tze Chien decided to embark on an ambitious project: to create a trilogy that examines different facets of the dictator. The second play, called Framed, by Adolf (previously called The Fuhrer’s Work), questions what would happen if someone discovers a great piece of art by Hitler, who was an aspiring painter and architect in his youth. We ask Tze Chien to tells us more about the work, as well as the research and creative process behind it.

Why did you decide to write Framed, by Adolf?
I’ve always wanted to write a play about Hitler because both the history and the character fascinate me. I wrote the first play back in 2014 for a show at Lasalle, called Starring Hitler as Jekyll and Hyde. After that, I decided I wanted to write another piece – not a sequel, but a companion piece to that first play – and funnily enough Casey [Lim] and Robin [Loon] [Centre 42’s executive director and founding member respectively] approached me and asked if there was any other play that I wanted to write. That’s when I decided to do a trilogy based on this theme. I have no idea what the third play will be yet.

What was your research process like for this play?
I spent about 15 days in Poland and Germany to visit the Auschwitz concentration camps and the museums in Berlin in October 2015. By that time I had already read up quite a bit about Hitler and the history of the Holocaust, but to finally be there and walk on the grounds of the concentration camps put things into perspective.

How did the trip affect you?
It affected me on an emotional level, because you can read as many books as you want – and I’ve seen films like The Schindler’s List and other videos – but it’s very different once you get there. I arrived in Poland in the evening, and I booked the Auschwitz tour for the very next morning. It was raining, it was cold, and it was very crowded and touristy, actually. But once we stepped into the concentration camp, we were silent. We were just looking at all the different exhibits and listening to the tour guide telling us about the various sites and the history and the stories and you could feel the sorrow, you could feel the stories, you could feel the screams and the human drama as though they were still plastered onto the walls.

What were some of the stories that inspired the play?
It’s all very sketchy, but I found this story – which was turned into a film [called Europa Europa] – about this Polish Jewish boy who ended up in a Nazi youth camp by accident, and actually escaped the war by posing as a Nazi. It’s a fascinating, charming story.

You decide to examine Hitler from the perspective of art in Framed, by Adolf – why?
Because at that time, I had already written a play about the Holocaust, and I wanted to take on a more contemporary approach with this second work, so I decided to look at his art. I wanted to see how people look at Hitler’s painting these days, and I tried a few leads and asked quite a few people, but no one wanted to talk to me about it. I tried to find a museum that would house Hitler’s paintings, and I couldn’t find one. I just find it fascinating to have this failed artist to turn into the man that we know today, and to see the tyranny of his work as a politician, which interestingly enough is founded on art principles. Because if you look at the way that he orchestrated his rallies, the way that he drew his uniform, and the way he wanted to remake Germany, he was a man who wanted to turn the world into an artistic state. He wanted to build galleries and museums – and do everything that I as an artist would want. Which is why, as an artist, I’m fascinated by how politics and art could mix and form this rhetoric.

Could you tell us more about Hitler’s paintings based on your research?
They all look about the same! He was very meticulous, and his paintings are all nice and pretty – they’re mostly of pastures and architecture, since he was also an aspiring architect. But the one thing that kept surfacing – and the reason why he was rejected as a visual arts student when he tried to enrol into an art school – is that he couldn’t paint human subjects. He couldn’t paint portraits. If you examine his paintings, all his humans are almost like children’s drawings. Which is why in the play, I decided to have the seller discover a a rare painting of a human subject by Hitler that is drawn well. And that triggers the story from that point onwards.

How did you develop the characters in the play?
I had this image in my head of a Hitler painting with two sides – one is a painting of pastures that we’re very familiar with, and the other side would be a painting that nobody would know Hitler for – a human portrait. I want to ask what would happen if we discover a great Hitler painting. How would that rewrite art history, and how would that rewrite Germany’s history? And if we were to discover that great piece of work, would we reassess our opinion of him, and the war, and the Holocaust? So then that gave birth to the other characters. I wanted an auctioneer, I wanted a buyer, and I wanted a professor. And I needed someone to drive the play, so I needed someone to sell this painting, which became the daughter who inherited the painting from her father – who was the Jew posing as a Nazi. So it kind of wrote itself in that way.

What was the writing process like?
The first draft was written quite quickly. I came back from my trip to Poland and Germany last November, and started writing in January this year. I wrote the first draft in three days because I already had all these thoughts in my head. It just flowed. I didn’t look at it again until last month, when I picked it up again, relooked at it and cleaned up some things.

Why is it important for you to tell this story?
A few months ago someone actually wrote in – because we had already posted news about Starring Hitler as Jekyll and Hyde – and I assume that she’s Jewish, but she said, “this is not your history, so why are you writing about this and claiming this as your own?” But I feel that this story and this character still resonate now, and everything that was going on in 1930s Germany – like xenophobia and racism – is still happening today. I guess it’s strange for an Asian to want to write a story about Hitler and that part of history, because I don’t think many people talk about it even in Europe, based on the conversations that I’ve had. The first questions people ask are always, “why do you want to write a play about this? Aren’t there other Asian stories you can touch on?” But I don’t see it as an Asian’s take on a European history. I just see it as a human take on a story of us, as humans, and that’s all there is to it.

The read on this Friday (9 September 2016) is the first time that the play is read out to an audience – what are you looking to get out of that?
Responses. This is a first draft and it’s a way to help me consolidate my thoughts and put all these ideas and experiences into words, so I’m curious to see how people respond to it. I’m hoping to stage the play in 2018.

Interview by Gwen Pew and Daniel Teo