Rites & Regulations is a theatre double bill featuring Lin Mingyu's aWake and Mok Cui Yin's adaptation of The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole by Kuo Pao Kun. The show explores different aspects of death, life, and the funerary experience in a city with no room for exceptions, where the living live in standard-sized homes, and the dead rest in standard-sized graves.
An immersive theatrical experience where narrative, lighting, sound, smells, movement, and projections interact to recreate a sense of quotidian banalities, as well as the jarring sensorial experience of Taoist-Chinese funerals in Singaporean void decks.
The audience is first brought into the Void Deck, a designated “empty space” in Singapore's government housing estates, and a ubiquitous architectural feature of the island city-state. A young Singaporean-Chinese girl struggles to make sense of the strange Taoist rituals and practices at her late great-grandmother's funeral wake. After the funeral, the audience follows a white-collar worker as he returns to his apartment above the Void Deck, where he lives alone. As he goes about his mundane daily routine between work and home, he recounts the story of his grandfather's coffin — the one that was too big for the hole — and his encounter with a bureaucracy that just wanted to get things done.
Both aWake and The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole were first staged separately at Camden People’s Theatre in London between 2011 and 2012, after which the two scripts were presented as a double-bill at the 2012 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where the show received 4-star reviews.
Rites & Regulations previewed at the Pop-Up Singapore House in London in July 2012 before touring to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2012 for a 10-day run at ZOO Southside, with the support of the Singapore International Foundation’s Arts Internationale Scheme.
In September 2012, with the support of the National Arts Council, Platform 65 will bring its pop-up theatre to Singapore, where Rites & Regulations will be staged in a series of site-generic productions at 5Footway.inn: Project Sultan's Atelier space, and in The Pigeonhole.
