Welcome to the wild and wonderful circus that is the 6th edition of the Singapore Theatre Festival! We are so proud to present this singular arts event that's dedicated to celebrating and cultivating new voices and new writing in Singapore.
There are, of course, many avenues for playwrights to develop plays in Singapore. These include workshops, master classes, residencies, peer review circles and other developmental programmes. Many of these culminate in a public reading or, sometimes, a publication. However, the opportunities for these plays to be given a full production are few and far between. That's why we created the Festival in 2006 to begin with.
To premiere a work at the Singapore Theatre Festival allows a young playwright to feel like she or he is a member of a community. Guided by the dramaturg and director, an entire village of actors, designers, production staff and technical crew will contribute to the complex and collaborative process of bringing the play from page to stage. When it finally encounters an audience, their reactions - the laughter, silences and sighs - will help us hone and shape the plays as they're performed.
We are thrilled to present eight brand-new plays at the Festival. A theme that runs through the plays is that of the memoir or biography. In Alfian Sa'at's An Actress Prepares and Ruth Tang's Building A Character, a Malay actor and an Indian actor respectively explore the relationships between their life experiences as minorities and their craft.
In Faghag, Pam Oei throws a party for the favourite men in her life in the form of a big-hearted tell-all cabaret. Tan Tarn How's media exposé, Press Gang, is acutely informed by his former profession as a journalist, while Thomas Lim's Supervision is inspired by the story of one of his relatives spying on her domestic worker.
Back in 2016, we featured three young Malay playwrights. This year, we have a small focus on those who write in Chinese, especially in vernacular Mandarin, as well as our endangered dialects. Cheow Boon Seng's One Metre Square: Voices from Sungei Road is a work of documentary theatre based on interviews with the vendors evicted from Singapore's famous open-air 'thieves' market'. Both Neo Hai Bin's When The Cold Wind Blows and Chong Woon Yong's G.F.E. are critical explorations of masculinity - set in the army and a red-light district respectively.
To add to the enthusiastic buzz at the festival site, we will be facilitating discussions about the individual plays and their respective themes. Artists and audiences can engage with one another in The Art & Life Sessions, Talkback Thursdays and Feedback Fridays. Our late-night offerings, such as the readings of Absent Makes the Heart... and The Insiders, will give audiences a first look at brand-new plays that are still in development.
In 2019, the country will be commemorating the bicentennial of Raffles' founding of modern Singapore. Underlying the celebrations will be the Great Man theory, wherein heroic, intelligent and charismatic men supposedly shape the course of historical events. By concentrating on life stories in this year's Festival - of actors, journalists, domestic workers, soldiers and flea-market vendors - we are affirming that the stories of ordinary women and men are no less worthy of celebration. We hope that the plays in this year's Festival will contribute to an emergent sense of a people's history.
We hope you enjoy the Festival, and we look forward to welcoming you to the theatre!
– Ivan Heng and Alfian Sa'at (Festival Directors)
(Source: Wild Rice Programme)