Despite mixed reviews of its debut production, One Year Back Home would become an important entry in the Singapore dramatic canon.
Yeo appears as a sort of maverick for portraying local politics so vividly in One Year Back Home, especially when the sequel was written just a few years after eminent dramatist Kuo Pao Kun was arrested for alleged communist sentiments in his works. Yeo was quoted as saying, “[M]y play is a breakthrough because I’m taking on sensitive material, but I’m doing it from the point of view of an artist and I’m using the medium of a play to say these things.”
Even before the premiere of One Year Back Home, news media reporting on the production picked up on the political content of Yeo’s play. In a preview of the play published in New Nation a month before the production, Chan wrote, “The play, meant to be a social commentary, turned out to be political… Topical issues are aired in the battle [between Chye and Fernandez] such as the need for an opposition for its own sake in a democracy, blatant materialism breeding greed and tragic loss, the chit fund crash of that time and the need to conform.”
One Year Back Home and the rest of the Singapore Trilogy are also noted for their realistic portrayal of Singaporeans and Singapore society. In the infancy of the Singapore theatre landscape, it was Yeo’s belief that writers and practitioners should first focus on rendering Singaporean-ness as closely as possible in text and on stage. “What I’m trying to do is to reflect, to mirror reality,” Yeo said in an interview in 1980. “Now is the time, I feel, to start writing about the things around us… not symbolically or metaphorically, but realistically.”
Academics K.K. Seet and Chitra Sankaran historically situate the social realism of Yeo’s plays in their introduction to the Singapore Trilogy: “Yeo’s political dramas of the 1970s and early 1980s can be regarded as trailblazers, ushering in succeeding decades when Kuo Pao Kun would resort to allegory to question the status quo or Tan Tarn How would infringe on taboo areas and confront conservative political sensibilities through the veil of satire.”
One Year Back Home would also be heralded as one of the earliest examples of successfully representing the local patois on the page. In particular, Hua and Chye’s mother, Mrs Ang, is highlighted for her naturalistic speech in the play. Yeo had found a way to portray how a non-English educated Singaporean might speak English in a manner that felt more authentic and acceptable than attempts by forebearers like Goh Poh Seng and Lim Chor Pee.
“There are some ‘lahs’, and ‘aiyahs’ but the characters being English-educated speak well enough to develop dialogue,” an unnamed local writer observed in One Year Back Home. “Mrs Ang, Chye’s mother is not English educated and speaks broken English. She is Peranakan, and Mr Ang senior is Hokkien. So both compromise and speak English at home. That’s how the wily Robert Yeo has slipped out of the trap of authentic communication in this case.”
According to Seet and Sankaran, Mrs Ang’s language features “a range of linguistic registers [extending] from Standard Singapore English to different forms of colloquial Singapore English […] including rich code-mixing and code-switching”.
Examining the significance of One Year Back Home against the backdrop of Singapore English-language theatre history, academic Robin Loon observed that the play and its box office success in 1980 was an indication that “there [was] an audience for locally-written English language plays [and that] the dramatist and playwright’s voice was also growing and beginning to engage with immediate social and political issues.”
Published: 16 April 2019