About “Wills and Secession”
Wills and Secession is the second play in Eleanor Wong’s landmark trilogy Invitation to Treat, which features Ellen Toh, an ambitious lawyer and gay woman.
VA: The Plays
The Desert Blooms
An accompanying exhibition, titled The Desert Blooms, features nine of these plays. The exhibition details who, when and how these plays were created, and also touched on any resistance these plays might have encountered when they were staged for the…
About “One Year Back Home”
One Year Back Home is the second play of Robert Yeo's The Singapore Trilogy. One Year Back Home is set in 1972, five years after the first play Are You There, Singapore?. Hua and her brother Chye, and their mutual…
About “Three Children”
Synopsis Three Children is about three grown-up siblings – two sisters and a brother – returning to their childhood home on Kappan Road in Malacca. There is no linear narrative in the play. Instead, the three characters (and a narrator)…
About “Emily of Emerald Hill”
First Stagings Stella Kon first wrote Emily of Emerald Hill in 1982. With the play, she won the 1983 Singapore National Playwriting Competition – organised by the Ministry of Culture – for the third time. Kon had previously won the competition in 1977 with The…
About My Grandfather’s Road (2015)
"When I wrote [My Grandfather’s Road], I didn't know what I wanted to do, but at the end I realised it was about mortality and, more importantly, about renewing your relationships with people.” - Neo Kim Seng
The Plays of “Absence Makes the Heart…”
The Vault: Absence Makes the Heart... looks at the portrayal of Indian characters in Singapore English-language plays throughout history. Here are the plays whose excerpts are performed in Absence, as well as information about their first stagings.
About The Coffin Is Too Big For The Hole
Synopsis The monologue by Kuo Pao Kun is centred on a man who has been tasked to oversee the funeral of his grandfather. It emerges that the grand coffin is too large to fit into the standard-sized grave that has…
About No Parking On Odd Days
Synopsis Kuo Pao Kun’s 1984 monologue examines the rigidity – and sometimes absurdity – of bureaucracy through a series of confrontations that a man has with the authorities over parking tickets. First Stagings The English version of No Parking On Odd…
About “Playing Mothers”
Playing Mothers is an exploration of the concept of motherhood. The play follows seven characters, both female and male, and all mothers in their own way. In a Straits Times article dated 10 Jan 1996, playwright Ovidia Yu said "anyone…
About “The Lunar Interviews”
The Lunar Interviews is a series of seven monologues in which moon goddesses Chang Er, Diana, and Hina – from Chinese, Roman, and Polynesian mythologies respectively – recount tales of both divine creation and mundane loneliness. The stories touch on…
About Stoma
Stoma – which refers to a natural opening in the body – is a play written by Elangovan, centring on a disgraced former priest who had been defrocked over alleged sex abuse. Over seven scenes, he undergoes a surreal, graphic…
About Smegma
Titled after the cheese-like secretions found in genitals, Smegma comprises a series of ten short plays, each examining the many faces of power and exposing a different aspect of exploitation within society.
About Talaq
Talaq – which means “divorce” – is a one-woman play about Nisha, a Muslim girl from India who is married off at the age of 16 to a Singaporean man twice her age. She finds out that her husband has…
Five Facts About Leng-Geh-Mng
《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…
“Desire Paths” & Other spell#7 Audio Works
After moving into their new home at 65 Kerbau Road in Little India in 2002, theatre company spell#7 wanted to introduce their audience to their neighbourhood. Their initial plan was for performers to bring groups of up to six people…
Undercover (1994)
Tan Tarn How's Undercover is a farce about the Internal Security Department of "an imaginary country". The play revolves around the Head of the department, his Deputy, and their first ever female recruit – a good-looking intelligence officer called Dolly…
Sea (1997)
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…
Four Kuo Pao Kun Plays
These four plays by late theatre doyen Kuo Pao Kun form the primary text for Margaret Chan's investigation into the metaphors of big bird and the cat. Click on each tab to find out about their first stagings and how…
INVISIBILITY and Language
Quah Sy Ren first wrote Invisibility in Chinese in 1996 and it was translated into English by Sim Pern Yiau in 2000. In the translation to English, some meaning from the original Chinese text is inevitably lost, or becomes invisible…
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