There’s a particular magic that happens in the theatre the moment the house lights go down: pre-show chatter softens into a hushed murmur and the audience collectively holds its breath in anticipation of what it might find when the curtains rise.
“Every form of performing arts has its own allure, but theatre is special to me because it is exclusively live—a collective experience in which we breathe the same air, laugh and sniffle and share tissues, and bask in the same catharsis with a room full of strangers,” shares Weish. As one of Singapore’s most prominent musicians, she is also the composer and playwright behind Checkpoint Theatre’s Secondary: The Musical, which won Production of the Year at The Straits Times Life Theatre Awards earlier this year. “There is something precious in its transience, something that binds a community together.”
It is this precise magic that makes theatre such an effective platform for telling our local stories. Weish continues: “Much of my formative years as a theatre-goer were shaped by seminal local plays. They made me feel seen and heard, helped me articulate feelings I didn’t know how to process, and most of all, emboldened me to eventually tell my own stories.”
The local theatre productions we see today take on many forms. There are monologues, musicals and comedies; verbatim theatre productions, devised theatre pieces and theatre for young audiences. Still, there’s one thing they share in common: the stories we see unfold on stage are almost always a reflection of what matters most to us.
“When a play is staged, everyone experiences it within a shared context. On one level, that’s the physical space itself. But in Singapore, especially in theatre about difficult issues, that shared context is also a lack of conversation,” explains playwright and author Myle Yan Tay, whose staged works include Checkpoint Theatre’s Brown Boys Don’t Tell Jokes and Statement Piece. “Theatre gives us all an opportunity to approach something we may prefer not to think about and spend some time with it.”
Alfian Sa’at, acclaimed Singaporean poet and resident playwright at Wild Rice, adds: “Presenting these issues as live performance activates the audience’s sensory and sense-making capacities in a way that goes beyond just reading an essay or article.” For Alfian, that means being able to explore topics like race, neoliberalism and colonialism with great nuance.
For Weish, theatre allows her to draw from her experience as a former teacher to unveil both the joys and the heartbreak of the local education system in Secondary: The Musical. Meanwhile, Tay examines the purpose of art in Singapore with Statement Piece, and the relationship between race, masculinity and friendship in Brown Boys Don’t Tell Jokes.
In her plays, Faith Ng, associate artistic director of Checkpoint Theatre, deep dives into specific age groups and their challenges—whether it’s Singaporeans in their 30s struggling with parenthood and identity in The Fourth Trimester or Generation Alpha being faced with the beautiful messiness of youth and friendship in Hard Mode—in order to understand the joys and struggles of everyday life in modern Singapore.
And for pioneering local playwright Haresh Sharma, who has penned over 100 works for The Necessary Stage in his 37-year career, the key is to be sensitive to issues around him that still go underrepresented—like mental health in the arts scene or the invisible disabilities that people around us grapple with every day. “Each writer writes from their own perspectives, with their own influences. They deal with issues they feel strongly about. This is what I find special about Singapore theatre. We care about the society we live in and want to create works that affect the audience,” muses Sharma.
And their works certainly do affect the audience. “Sometimes I wonder, what can my plays do? What change can it affect?” Sharma continues. “But then I meet someone who tells me how much they loved studying my play as a student, or that they performed my play in school, or that they watched a play of mine and was moved and challenged. Then I realise that theatre can have an impact that we sometimes don’t see.”
Ng echoes this, saying: “On very hard days, I remember the heartfelt stories that audiences have shared with me and that keeps me going. I am thankful to have experienced the gift of theatre and I want everyone to experience it too. So I am teaching the craft of playwriting to students in schools and guiding young playwrights as they hone their voices.”
Writing might be a lonely business, Ng reflects, but theatre is the exact opposite. “Theatre is incredibly collaborative; you never work in isolation. You are constantly in conversation with the director, the actors, the designers, all of whom have different talents and points of view from you. Everyone comes together to create a powerful theatrical production and it’s incredible to be a part of such a medium,” she shares.
A particular kinship is needed for the form to exist, not just between theatremakers, but with the audience as well. Ng continues: “The audience plays an important role. It is their laughter, their tears, their quiet nods as they listen intently to the actors that bring the story to life.” After all, theatre is nothing without someone to take it all in.
At the end of the day—whether playwright, performer or audience—“making theatre,” Alfian says, “means assembling a group of strangers in a space and taking them on a journey. If it’s good theatre, the journey will be a transformative one.”
