THEATRE RISING
The Straits Times , 28 April 2011 by Clarissa Oon Chinese-language theatre is enjoying a revival with audiences flocking in droves to watch Mandarin plays. Toy Factory's December Rains became the best-watched production in the recent history of Chinese-language theatre here, playing to 20,000 people at the Esplanade Theatre. Three hundred tickets. During a particularly dry spell in the late 1990s and early 2000s, that was all a local Mandarin play could be guaranteed of selling. 'You would go to the theatre and see everybody you know. It was theatre practitioners watching each other's plays, plus some die-hard audiences who had been around forever, maybe ex-theatre practitioners themselves,' quips director Kuo Jian Hong. Today, however, audiences of all ages are flocking in droves to Chinese-language theatre and it is experiencing a resurgence of sorts, observes the artistic director of Theatre Practice, the bilingual theatre company founded by her late fath