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 father Kuo Pao Kun.
Going by box office alone, last August's musical December Rains was a high point. The Toy Factory Theatre Ensemble production, headlined by Mando-pop luminaries such as composer Liang Wern Fook and singer Kit Chan, played to some 20,000 people, becoming the most-watched Mandarin production in recent
Singapore theatre history.
Theatre Practice and Toy Factory are two of the major groups here producing Chinese-language theatre, which has gone from famine to feast in recent years with longer runs and the resources to stage bigger and more diverse productions.
A third group is Drama Box, known for creating original socially conscious Mandarin plays and multilingual forum theatre plays where actors invite and guide audience members to participate.
Also considered by some observers to be a force in the scene is The Finger Players, an offshoot of Theatre Practice that has come into its own. The Finger Players' puppetry-infused works comprise both English and Mandarin plays.
The growing audience base for Mandarin theatre - now hardly ever shown without English subtitles - includes bilingual Chinese pop fans in their 20s and 30s, and the older Channel 8 crowd previously more at home in front of the goggle box than in the theatre.
At 881 - Toy Factory's current musical offering - chief artistic director Goh Boon Teck is seeing 'aunties and uncles who never came to any of our shows before' making up over half the audiences.
This is the stage version of the hit 2007 film, inspired by the colourful getai shows that invade the heartland during traditional festivals. Its budget of $1.8 billion is just as lavish as that of December Rains. 881 has
sold about 15,000 tickets, and its 21/2-week run at the cavernous Esplanade Theatre ends this Sunday.
Even dialogue-driven plays such as Theatre Practice's I Love A-Ai are running for longer. Written by well-known Hong Kong playwright Raymond To and featuring a Singapore cast, it ran for 21/2 weeks at the mid-sized Drama Centre Theatre earlier this month.
Ten years ago, a Chinese play would open and close in one weekend. While the longer shelf life means efforts by Mandarin theatre practitioners to widen the audience base have paid off, they are not as upbeat about the future as you would expect.
For one thing, bigger does not necessarily mean better, they say. Also, they still face a talent crunch. More than a dearth of Chinese-language playwrights, finding actors, stage designers and technical crew who can
actually read and understand a Chinese script remains a challenge.
Taking stock, Kuo notes: 'The least you could say is that Chinese theatre is no longer the poorer cousin of English language theatre.'
However long-time followers of Chinese drama will question 'whether we are raising the quality of the plays and preserving the intellectual space', she adds.
*Back in its heyday*
Chinese-language theatre in its heyday from the 1950s to the early 1970s was the domain of Chinese-educated intellectuals and activists. Her father, Kuo Pao Kun, who began practising theatre in 1965, is a crucial bridge between that period and the current depoliticised, more commercially driven scene.
He died of liver cancer in 2002, after which his daughter took over the reins at Theatre Practice.
If the elder Kuo and his wife, dancer-choreographer Goh Lay Kuan, blazed many trails for Mandarin theatre, the present generation of bilingual practitioners is preoccupied with 'organising those trails and making them sustainable', says the younger Kuo.
In a competitive arts funding environment, a professional group has to identify its strengths and play to these strengths to secure funds and audiences, says Drama Box's artistic director Kok Heng Leun.
Eight years ago, his group was in the red and had no money to pay its staff.
Its fortunes today are a stark contrast, after finding its niche in drama-in-education, community plays and original commissioned work.
The work it does is now funded by a National Arts Council (NAC) grant of $195,000 a year over two financial years, as well as by school, corporate and community partners and arts festivals. It has six full-time staff and is in the process of hiring two more.
Currently, three out of the 12 arts companies on NAC's coveted two-year major grant scheme produce Chinese language theatre. Apart from Drama Box, they are Theatre Practice and The Finger Players. When annual grants were first given out in 2000,only Theatre Practice made the list.
Another indication of the growth of Mandarin theatre has been the stream of talent crossing over from Englishlanguage theatre and music.
They include singer-actress Joanna Dong, now in 881 the musical, actress Janice Koh who was in I Love A-Ai, and playwright-director Chong Tze Chien, company director of The Finger Players.
Kok, who started a programme to train Chinese-language playwrights three years ago, remains optimistic about the future of Mandarin theatre.
He says his Blanc Space programme has unearthed new young writers such as Entia Seah, 24, and Cheow Boon Seng, 27. Currently the few who can write Chinese theatre scripts include Li Xie and Toy Factory's Goh, both in their late 30s.
Goh himself says Mandarin theatre has come a long way in terms of skills and exposure. He recalls how, when he did his first Mandarin musical I Have A Date With Spring in 1995, 'we designed a revolving set that couldn't revolve and (lead actress) Sharon Au had to go backstage after her scenes and help push the set. Everyone was so inexperienced'.
But passion ran high among theatre practitioners, and he wonders if something has been lost in the transition to a more professional scene.
He cannot recall watching anything matching up to the landmark 1987 Mandarin play, The Silly Little Girl And The Funny Old Tree, written by Kuo Pao Kun and co-directed by Taiwan's Liu Jing-min.
Now that theatre is a paid job for him and other practitioners, there are more concerns. In his words: 'We are always frightened. It's a fear of losing funds, of audiences not coming, of actors who don't want to act for
you. Because there is more at stake now.'
*Remembering a turbulent past*
Back when many Chinese Singaporeans were still educated in Chinese-medium schools, there was a profusion of active amateur Chinese drama groups.
Even though most of their members did not practise theatre full-time, they were very serious about it. In the best Chinese intellectual tradition, they saw the stage as a space for serious reflection and questioning about
society.
While home-grown Chinese plays had been staged since the 1920s, Chinese-language theatre became increasingly politicised in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The turning point came in 1976, when several Chinese-language theatre practitioners, including a young Kuo Pao Kun, were detained without trial under the Internal Security Act for communist-related activism.
Mandarin theatre fell into decline and was slow to recover, with the loss of Chinese-medium schools and general drop in Chinese-language standards. While the scene has rebounded, today's Chinese theatre practitioners are bilingual and can do both English and Chinese theatre, says playwright and theatre scholar Quah Sy Ren.
As to why they have chosen Chinese theatre, 'in some cases, it is the tradition they have inherited; in others, it is the tradition that moves them emotionally and inspires them intellectually', he says.
A few practitioners, such as Drama Box artistic director Kok Heng Leun, are now looking back at the tumultuous history of the theatre and its leftist associations. An upcoming play directed by Kok, HERstory, will look at the leftist labour movement from a woman's perspective.
To be staged at the Singapore Arts Festival, it is the first of a projected three-parter by Drama Box on leftist history. Part Two will look at the leftist student movement, and the third part, the cultural and theatre
movement in the 1970s.
Says Mr Quah: 'Looking back at history, especially the untold chapters, is a major intellectual trend currently.'
For Chinese-language theatre practitioners, there is a certain urgency in reconnecting with the past, he adds. 'This past is perceived as part of the Chinese theatre tradition, which has been lost and is being searched and reconstructed.'
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 father Kuo Pao Kun.
Going by box office alone, last August's musical December Rains was a high point. The Toy Factory Theatre Ensemble production, headlined by Mando-pop luminaries such as composer Liang Wern Fook and singer Kit Chan, played to some 20,000 people, becoming the most-watched Mandarin production in recent
Singapore theatre history.
Theatre Practice and Toy Factory are two of the major groups here producing Chinese-language theatre, which has gone from famine to feast in recent years with longer runs and the resources to stage bigger and more diverse productions.
A third group is Drama Box, known for creating original socially conscious Mandarin plays and multilingual forum theatre plays where actors invite and guide audience members to participate.
Also considered by some observers to be a force in the scene is The Finger Players, an offshoot of Theatre Practice that has come into its own. The Finger Players' puppetry-infused works comprise both English and Mandarin plays.
The growing audience base for Mandarin theatre - now hardly ever shown without English subtitles - includes bilingual Chinese pop fans in their 20s and 30s, and the older Channel 8 crowd previously more at home in front of the goggle box than in the theatre.
At 881 - Toy Factory's current musical offering - chief artistic director Goh Boon Teck is seeing 'aunties and uncles who never came to any of our shows before' making up over half the audiences.
This is the stage version of the hit 2007 film, inspired by the colourful getai shows that invade the heartland during traditional festivals. Its budget of $1.8 billion is just as lavish as that of December Rains. 881 has
sold about 15,000 tickets, and its 21/2-week run at the cavernous Esplanade Theatre ends this Sunday.
Even dialogue-driven plays such as Theatre Practice's I Love A-Ai are running for longer. Written by well-known Hong Kong playwright Raymond To and featuring a Singapore cast, it ran for 21/2 weeks at the mid-sized Drama Centre Theatre earlier this month.
Ten years ago, a Chinese play would open and close in one weekend. While the longer shelf life means efforts by Mandarin theatre practitioners to widen the audience base have paid off, they are not as upbeat about the future as you would expect.
For one thing, bigger does not necessarily mean better, they say. Also, they still face a talent crunch. More than a dearth of Chinese-language playwrights, finding actors, stage designers and technical crew who can
actually read and understand a Chinese script remains a challenge.
Taking stock, Kuo notes: 'The least you could say is that Chinese theatre is no longer the poorer cousin of English language theatre.'
However long-time followers of Chinese drama will question 'whether we are raising the quality of the plays and preserving the intellectual space', she adds.
*Back in its heyday*
Chinese-language theatre in its heyday from the 1950s to the early 1970s was the domain of Chinese-educated intellectuals and activists. Her father, Kuo Pao Kun, who began practising theatre in 1965, is a crucial bridge between that period and the current depoliticised, more commercially driven scene.
He died of liver cancer in 2002, after which his daughter took over the reins at Theatre Practice.
If the elder Kuo and his wife, dancer-choreographer Goh Lay Kuan, blazed many trails for Mandarin theatre, the present generation of bilingual practitioners is preoccupied with 'organising those trails and making them sustainable', says the younger Kuo.
In a competitive arts funding environment, a professional group has to identify its strengths and play to these strengths to secure funds and audiences, says Drama Box's artistic director Kok Heng Leun.
Eight years ago, his group was in the red and had no money to pay its staff.
Its fortunes today are a stark contrast, after finding its niche in drama-in-education, community plays and original commissioned work.
The work it does is now funded by a National Arts Council (NAC) grant of $195,000 a year over two financial years, as well as by school, corporate and community partners and arts festivals. It has six full-time staff and is in the process of hiring two more.
Currently, three out of the 12 arts companies on NAC's coveted two-year major grant scheme produce Chinese language theatre. Apart from Drama Box, they are Theatre Practice and The Finger Players. When annual grants were first given out in 2000,only Theatre Practice made the list.
Another indication of the growth of Mandarin theatre has been the stream of talent crossing over from Englishlanguage theatre and music.
They include singer-actress Joanna Dong, now in 881 the musical, actress Janice Koh who was in I Love A-Ai, and playwright-director Chong Tze Chien, company director of The Finger Players.
Kok, who started a programme to train Chinese-language playwrights three years ago, remains optimistic about the future of Mandarin theatre.
He says his Blanc Space programme has unearthed new young writers such as Entia Seah, 24, and Cheow Boon Seng, 27. Currently the few who can write Chinese theatre scripts include Li Xie and Toy Factory's Goh, both in their late 30s.
Goh himself says Mandarin theatre has come a long way in terms of skills and exposure. He recalls how, when he did his first Mandarin musical I Have A Date With Spring in 1995, 'we designed a revolving set that couldn't revolve and (lead actress) Sharon Au had to go backstage after her scenes and help push the set. Everyone was so inexperienced'.
But passion ran high among theatre practitioners, and he wonders if something has been lost in the transition to a more professional scene.
He cannot recall watching anything matching up to the landmark 1987 Mandarin play, The Silly Little Girl And The Funny Old Tree, written by Kuo Pao Kun and co-directed by Taiwan's Liu Jing-min.
Now that theatre is a paid job for him and other practitioners, there are more concerns. In his words: 'We are always frightened. It's a fear of losing funds, of audiences not coming, of actors who don't want to act for
you. Because there is more at stake now.'
*Remembering a turbulent past*
Back when many Chinese Singaporeans were still educated in Chinese-medium schools, there was a profusion of active amateur Chinese drama groups.
Even though most of their members did not practise theatre full-time, they were very serious about it. In the best Chinese intellectual tradition, they saw the stage as a space for serious reflection and questioning about
society.
While home-grown Chinese plays had been staged since the 1920s, Chinese-language theatre became increasingly politicised in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The turning point came in 1976, when several Chinese-language theatre practitioners, including a young Kuo Pao Kun, were detained without trial under the Internal Security Act for communist-related activism.
Mandarin theatre fell into decline and was slow to recover, with the loss of Chinese-medium schools and general drop in Chinese-language standards. While the scene has rebounded, today's Chinese theatre practitioners are bilingual and can do both English and Chinese theatre, says playwright and theatre scholar Quah Sy Ren.
As to why they have chosen Chinese theatre, 'in some cases, it is the tradition they have inherited; in others, it is the tradition that moves them emotionally and inspires them intellectually', he says.
A few practitioners, such as Drama Box artistic director Kok Heng Leun, are now looking back at the tumultuous history of the theatre and its leftist associations. An upcoming play directed by Kok, HERstory, will look at the leftist labour movement from a woman's perspective.
To be staged at the Singapore Arts Festival, it is the first of a projected three-parter by Drama Box on leftist history. Part Two will look at the leftist student movement, and the third part, the cultural and theatre
movement in the 1970s.
Says Mr Quah: 'Looking back at history, especially the untold chapters, is a major intellectual trend currently.'
For Chinese-language theatre practitioners, there is a certain urgency in reconnecting with the past, he adds. 'This past is perceived as part of the Chinese theatre tradition, which has been lost and is being searched and reconstructed.'
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