Theatre

Specially created for award-winning actress Siti Khalijah Zainal by Alvin Tan and Haresh Sharma, Best Of looks at issues of the day through collective stories and personal reflection as told by the protagonist, a young Malay-Muslim woman in Singapore. First staged at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2013 to popular and critical acclaim, Best Of then toured to Penang for CausewayEXchange in the same year. It was restaged at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2014 by popular demand before touring...

Eclipse takes an intimate glimpse into the historical partition of India and Pakistan through the eyes of three generations of men, as they embark upon journeys and grapple with their dreams and responsibilities. A young Singaporean man carries his father’s ashes and makes a trip to the latter’s birthplace in Hyderabad, Pakistan. In doing so, he retraces the original journey made by millions of people—including his parents and grandparents—in 1947, during the India-Pakistan partition. This pu...

TALAQ (First self-published in 1999)Talaq came under the media spotlight in 2000, when the Public Entertainment Licensing Unit (PELU) in Singapore denied it a performance license for its English and Malay performances on grounds that they would offend religious sensibilities. The play had originally been staged in Tamil, once in 1988 and twice in 1999. Concerns were raised over the portrayal of the Islamic faith and Indian Muslim community group South Indian Jamiathul Ulama (SIJU) protested t...

This anthology of acclaimed plays includes Faith Ng’s For Better or for Worse (nominated for Best Original Script in The Straits Times Life! Theatre Awards); Joel Tan’s Family Outing; and Recalling Mother by Claire Wong and Noorlinah Mohamed. It examines with care, intelligence, and honesty the joys and pains of family: the papered-over cracks of a twenty-year marriage; the enduring ties between a parent and a child; the forging of bonds between those not bound by blood.Paperback: 282 PagesPr...

Translated by Marian Schwartz Walpurgis Night, by acclaimed Russian writer Venedikt Erofeev, is considered a classic in the playwright's homeland. Erofeev's dark and funny five-act satire of Soviet repression has been called the comic high-water mark of the Brezhnev era. Walpurgis Night dramatizes the outrageous trials of Lev Isakovich Gurevich, an alcoholic half-Jewish dissident poet confined by the state to a hospital for the insane. In "Ward 3"--a microcosm of repressive Soviet society--Gu...