“Press Gang”: confessions of yet another ex-ST journalist
By Corrie Tan (2,015 words, 10-minute read) “My concern now is how to nurture the critical sensitivity of the playwright, and for that matter theatre and literature and all the other arts. Because I think we have a way of…
“Chinatown Crossings”: A Trail of Echoes
By Akanksha Raja (890 words, 5 minute read) Along the bustling roads of Chinatown and the throngs of long-time residents, local visitors and tourists, there’s an invisible, theatrical time machine that comes to life a few evenings a week, running…
“Framed, by Adolf”: Truth as Shadow-Play
By Akanksha Raja (850 words, six-minute read) In Framed, by Adolf, playwright-director Chong Tze Chien’s fascination with Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust continues from 2016’s Starring Hitler as Jekyll and Hyde, which explored the idea of the dictator as a…
“Fourteen” by Split Theatre: Getting Schooled
By Isaac Lim (810 words, five-minute read) At front-of-house before the doors open, a crew member encourages the audience to walk around the theatre space upon entering, and warns sternly against moving the seats. Neat rows of seats welcome the…
“The Singapore ‘d’ Monologues”: And Suddenly I Reflect Upon My Privilege
By Soultari Amin Farid (800 words, six-minute read) “This body… This body is dangerous. It desires, it delights, it delivers, it dances.” On 25 May, I had the pleasure of experiencing a performance of great chemistry between Deaf and disabled…
A surreal “Citizen Dog” sinks its teeth into your soul
By Corrie Tan (1,540 words, eight-minute read) Halfway through The Finger Players’ trippy, darkly comic Citizen Dog, I pause to consider the philosopher Zhuangzi’s anecdote on how we construct our realities: Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi, dreamt I was…
The Second Breakfast Company’s “The Moon is Less Bright”: A New Phase
By Eugene Koh (1200 words, 8 minute read) The Second Breakfast Company restaging Goh Poh Seng’s The Moon is Less Bright is akin to grabbing this behemoth of a national literary relic by its horns and tackling it. The play’s…
Nine Years Theatre’s “Pissed Julie 茱莉小解”: Third Wheelings
By Daniel Teo (1340 words, six-minute read) In Pissed Julie, the magic number is three. The play begins with a row of three chairs, dwarfed by a succession of three enormous three-sided wooden frames. The actors emerge from the darkness…
“Underclass” twists the knife in your middle-class guilt
Spoiler Alert: If you’re planning to watch Underclass, please note that this review discusses certain plot points. By Corrie Tan (2,200 words, 11-minute read) You know that auntie. You’ve waved her off at the hawker centre, or maybe you’ve apologised,…
Voices on Death Row: GroundZ-0’s “0600” at SIFA 2018
By Kirsten Han (1,080 words, six-minute read) 6am is a pretty unremarkable time. It’s the time Singaporean students are woken up by alarm clocks or family members, blearily rubbing the sleep from their eyes to prepare for another school day….
Shakespeare In The Park’s “Julius Caesar”: I Am She
By Roweena Yip (925 words, five-minute read) The Singapore Repertory Theatre (SRT) Shakespeare In The Park returns to Fort Canning Green, after a year’s hiatus, with Julius Caesar—a play that has recently seen a resurgence in performance, perhaps because of…
“A Dream Under the Southern Bough – The Beginning”: Kun Opera for the Millennial Stage
By Jocelyn Chng (813 words, 5-minute read) A Festival Commission for the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) 2018, Toy Factory’s A Dream Under the Southern Bough – The Beginning is, as the title suggests, the first part of a…
“OCD Love” by L-E-V Dance Company: Mental Illness Plus Dance Equals Ballet and Horror
By Chan Sze-Wei (849 words, 5 minute read) L-E-V Dance company’s OCD Love is tightly choreographed and intense in its physicality, as might be expected from a choreographer issuing from years dancing, choreographing and directing for the iconic Batsheva Company…
“Version 2020”: Dataran Merdeka Sebagai Tapak A̶r̶k̶e̶o̶l̶o̶g̶i̶ Ideologi Tentang Masa Depan
Oleh Fasyali Fadzly (1075 patah kata, 9-minit bacaan) Saya mengambil masa yang lama untuk menyiapkan tulisan mengenai teater Version 2020 yang diarahkan oleh Mark Teh. Ia sebuah teater yang memerlukan pengamatan yang tajam, pengetahuan yang luas dan pemahaman terhadap konteks…
The Glorious Anger of “Leda and the Rage”
By Akanksha Raja & Corrie Tan (2,300 words, 12-minute read) Corrie Tan: When Edith Podesta first told us during our Studios podcast interview that Leda and the Rage would feature the life and paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi, I felt a…
In the Mood of Brian Gothong Tan: Lost Cinema at Institute of Contemporary Arts (via Invisible Flâneuse)
The woman in the cheongsam and upswept hairdo walks into the audience’s line of sight from behind a pillar, carrying a tiffin carrier. She poses, every gesture and expression countenanced to project drama and artifice, and many of her poses are…
“I am trying to say something true”: A Distant Intimacy
By Akanksha Raja (950 words, five minute read) Even before watching Michelle Tan’s monologue, I am trying to say something true, the title struck me: the sentence-case format portends a quiet sense of conversational intimacy, compared to the conventional, title-case…
“Thick Beats for Good Girls” Keeps It 100
By Patricia Tobin (780 words, five-minute read) It is 2007 on a Thursday night, and I am at the old Phuture on Zion Road. “Smack that, all on the floor,” Akon’s hit single Smack That is booming from the club…
Many Lives in “A Good Death”
By Akanksha Raja (1,000 words, six-minute read) Four of the five productions from this year’s season of The Studios are commissioned works revolving around the theme of “Between Living and Dying”. Most of these are new, original monologues recounting deeply…
“Four Horse Road”: buried histories and blind spots
By Corrie Tan (2,400 words, 13-minute read) Four Horse Road is The Theatre Practice’s show pony of the year. It’s got a lot of performance buzzwords going for it – site-specific, interactive, multi-generational, multilingual – and promises an epic odyssey…
The Loud Echo of “In the Silence of Your Heart”
By Corrie Tan (1,160 words, six-minute read) The audio tours of spell#7 – the husband-wife duo of Kaylene Tan and Paul Rae – promise a variety of small adventures. In their previous work, they’ve invited us to move through several…
“Potong” by Teater Ekamatra: Of Kin and Skin
By Akanksha Raja (825 words, four-minute read) We’ve been seeing a variety of theatre revolving around dementia and its effects on families in Singapore over the past few years, such as Pangdemonium’s The Father, The Necessary Stage’s Don’t Forget to…
“Ngopi” by P7:1SMA: Stop and Smell the Coffee
By Chan Sze-Wei (1,110 words, six-minute read) Norhaizad Adam’s second full length work with his company P7:1SMA (say “prisma”) is set in another world. The audience steps through the door of the Drama Centre Black Box into an arena of…
Pangdemonium’s “The Father”: Dementia Becomes Us
By Akanksha Raja (780 words, five-minute read) Pangdemonium’s first play of 2018, The Father, revolves around the 70-year-old titular character, André (Lim Kay Siu), and the harrowing effects of his increasingly uncontrollable symptoms of dementia on daughter Anne (Tan Kheng…
“Kumar50”: More significant than SG53
By Eugene Tan (1,475 words, eight-minute read) Marking Kumar’s 50th year alive, and the start of Dream Academy’s 2018 season at the Capitol Theatre, Kumar50 is a celebration, a retelling of history, but most of all, a show meant to…
“Talk to me and I slap you”: confronting intimacy and violence
By Chloe Chotrani (1,040 words, five-minute read) The one who loves you hits you. The one who hits you loves you. The one who loves you hurts you. This is a piece about relationships, unfortunately. (We can’t get away from…
From the lucid dream of “Cut Kafka!”, a promising new artistic path
By Bernice Lee (995 words, four-minute read) The Esplanade Theatre Studio is awash in red light. It feels like the set of a Marvel movie – gloomy and dystopian; a planet overtaken by villains, awaiting rescue. Red mechanical legs hang…
Life isn’t a beach in “Einstein in the Carpark”
By Corrie Tan (1,300 words, eight-minute read) This review has been translated into Mandarin by Liu Xiaoyi, artistic director of Emergency Stairs. Read his translation here. If the avant garde director Robert Wilson died and went to purgatory, Einstein in the Carpark…
“Adukku Veetu Annasamy 3”: a rip-roaring trilogy comes to a close
By Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai (1,150 words, 8-minute read) The final instalment in Ravindran Drama Group’s trilogy, Adukku Veetu Annasamy 3, picks up right after the lovers Rajendran (Annasamy and Kokilavani’s son) and Prema (Panchatcharam and Gunasundari’s daughter) have parted ways. Their incessantly…
“Displaced” by Ground Cover Theatre at the Singapore Fringe: A Roundtable
The following roundtable discussion was held as part of the Lyn Gardner Theatre Reviewing Training Programme. Particpants Teo Dawn, Ezekiel Oliveira, Isaac Lim, Patricia Tobin, and Richard Chung discussed Displaced by Ground Cover Theatre, staged at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2018….