Fear Of Writing portrays a playwright’s creative handicap – the writer’s block – under intense anxiety and scrutiny. Through this crisis, Tan uncovers the existentialism of self-censorship and freedoms in Singapore. An urgent provocation of the country’s boundaries – as bound to art, artist, citizen and humanity. Fear Of Writing proposes a theatrical parable for the politics of today, a future for the Singapore dream.
“This play is about the complacency of the average Singaporean, of theatre audiences and practitioners because there is no danger, no real change enacted by our works. It is about the commercialization of theatre; hijacked as entertainment rather than being an engine of change. Can we find a real political theatre, where the audience goes in X and comes out Y? This is the difficulty in writing this kind of work in this day and age, hence the long gap between my last play and this one.” – Tan Tarn How