The Theatre and the State in Singapore

Orthodoxy and Resistance

Terence Chong

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136869471
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Categoria: Theater

This book provides a comprehensive examination of the contemporary English-language theatre field in Singapore. It describes Singapore theatre as a politically dynamic field that is often a site for struggle and resistance against state orthodoxy, and how the cultural policies of the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) have shaped Singapore theatre. The book traces such cultural policies and their impact from the early 1960s, and shows how the PAP used theatre – and arts and culture more widely – as a key part of its nation building programme.

Terence Chong argues that this diverse theatre community not only comes into regular conflict with the state, but often collaborates with it - depending on the rewards at stake, not to mention the assortment of intra-communal conflicts as different practitioners and groups vie for the same resources. It goes on to explore how new forms of theatre, especially English-language avant garde theatre, represented resistance to such government cultural control; how the government often exerts its power 'behind-the-scenes' to preserve its moral legitimacy; and conversely how middle class theatre practitioners' resistance to state power is strongly influenced by class and cultural capital.

Based on extensive original research including interviews with theatre directors and other theatre professionals, the book provides a wealth of information on theatre in Singapore overall, and not just on theatre-state relations.

1 Imagining the Singapore theatre field

The Politics of Theatre

“It’s hard to be an artist in Singapore,” 22-year-old Benny says matter-of-factly.¹ “Things are much better than before but still you have to be a little crazy, a little romantic and very idealistic to make a living in theatre.” He shuffles his feet and looks around the studio in the Substation where the interview is taking place. “In theatre you have to be an artist, an entrepreneur, a manager and a promoter – all rolled into one. Otherwise you cannot survive.” Benny leans back into his chair and continues,

when I get money from the NAC [National Arts Council], it is never enough to cover my production costs. So I, the scriptwriter, also become the promoter. I have to look for sponsors. One of my plays discussed superstition and fengshui, and I got the idea to get some money from a fengshui shop. The shop set up a fengshui booth to attract the audience during the interval. That’s entrepreneurial. Fortunately for us it was just enough to cover our cost. Unfortunately for them no one was interested in their booth.

In contrast, Ong Keng Sen, a Cultural Medallion recipient, speaks of vastly different production concerns. With regard to his 2002 staging of Search: Hamlet in Denmark, the last of his intercultural Shakespearean trilogy after Lear (1997) and Desdemona (2000), he observes,

I think it is very dangerous to explore Shakespeare if you don’t have a specific purpose … Then I thought – what if we made it in the Kronborg castle? This would be an interesting exercise of reimagining and scrambling culture, cultural authenticity, and cultural possession. And once the castle was confirmed it became an interesting journey, and especially if the castle could be used in a site-specific way and we could go into the bowels of the castle and almost excavate what is the site. It is a very difficult thing to make a site-specific work in a different culture, meaning that I’m a nonEuropean director, directing Hamlet with Asian performers in the site which originally inspired Shakespeare to write.²

The contrasting experiences of the two Singaporean theatre practitioners challenge two popular myths in the art-making process, namely, the artist is a creative but economically disinterested being, and the artistic habitus is a stable and homogeneous identity. The sociology of art has demonstrated that, far from being economically or politically disinterested, artists as social agents have always had to engage within a specific social economy in order to achieve some degree of fame or success (Hauser 1982; Becker 1982). Theatre production is a political activity. Singaporean theatre practitioners of varying experience, located in different positions of the field, will enjoy different social positions and privileges, and undergo different production processes, and yet much of the scholarly attention to Singapore contemporary English-language theatre has been focused on the products themselves, that is, the playscripts and their content. The body of Singapore English-language plays has generally been examined in tandem with the country’s nation-building trajectory whereby the issues that find their way to the local stage are seen as a broader reflection of the contemporary trends and forces with which society is grappling. So much so that certain plays have become literary signposts for the country’s cultural-political development. Goh Poh Seng’s The Moon is Less Bright (1964), beyond its Japanese occupation setting, is a marker of an aspiring postcolonial society’s awkward struggle with its colonial legacy; Max Le Blond’s Nurse Angamuthu’s Romance (1981), adapted from Peter Nichols’ National Health, signals the early confidence of an emerging English-educated middle class finding its voice; while Stella Kon’s Emily of Emerald Hill (1985) showcases a nation coming to terms with its multicultural, multilingual complexion and so on. Missing from the studies of local theatre and drama, however, is the understanding of how the theatre community functions and the consequences that cultural policies have on practitioners. In other words, while the disciplines of critical studies, postmodern studies, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies have been well represented in the analysis of Singapore theatre, sociology, and ethnography have been less conspicuous.³ This is intellectually limiting because there is little inquiry into the motivations of the vast variety of agents such as actors, playwrights, directors, stagehands, arts administrators, arts officials, and theatre managers as they are confronted in their everyday lives with structures such as censorship regulations or state-funding criteria.

Just as one cannot understand the problems of deviant youth without exploring the economic struggles and political structures that underpin the lower regions of social space, one cannot understand Singapore theatre without exploring the community of practitioners, their socioeconomic position within this community and their relationship with the state. Theatre is a complex and polysemous institution, layered with political functions and representations that do not readily avail themselves to the outsider, even one familiar with the nature and workings of the space; and yet, what could be more straightforward and self-evident than theatre? A space, a performance, an audience; these are its powerful invariants which sometimes conceal the fact that it is also a political organization of resources and an economic network of players aligned along the many contours of power and ideologies where individuals struggle against each other, as well as against the state, to achieve their goals. The nature of such struggles – the politics of theatre – is just as influential to the shaping of the artwork as are notions of creativity and artistry. It is in rehearsal studios, over hushed backstage conversations, “behind-the-scenes” meetings with government officials, or what Erving Goffman calls the “back regions,” that the politics of theatre are often played out (Goffman 1959). Far away from the prying eyes of audiences and the press, interests are pitted against each other and decisions made as theatre practitioners negotiate everyday dilemmas such as the last-minute telephone call from a government official informing them that a pivotal scene must be censored, or the unambiguous hints from civil servants that state grants may be withdrawn if the play’s content is not altered, or misrepresentation by local reviewers who see no problem in writing a review without having seen the play in its entirety, or complaints of vulgarity from the public, or the stealing of media attention by bigger more glitzy productions elsewhere and so on. The politics of theatre that play out in the everyday lives of theatre practitioners are indicative of the specific structures of power within the community, the hierarchy of socioeconomic positions, as well as the confrontation between the accepted norms of theatre-making and the dominant values that are invariably brought to bear when members of the public and government officials come into contact with theatre.

The politics of theatre is also about the People’s Action Party (PAP) state’s role in theatre-making. Its monopoly over resources, central position in the distribution of funds for the arts, and its considerable array of regulatory apparatuses that police the production of art make the PAP state a key player in the politics of theatre. Greater scholarly attention must hence be paid to increasingly sophisticated Janus-face state strategies that, on the one hand, continue to serve the raison d’etre of regulating the production of art while, on the other, purport to encourage arts liberalization and deregulation in the journey towards becoming a so-called “Global City for the Arts.” Such attention should also interrogate conventional portrayals of the interventionist state as a necessarily monolithic and homogeneous state. Closer examination of the politics of theatre would find negotiations and contestations between state institutions, thus dispelling the idea of the authoritarian state as a synchronous one.

The politics of theatre is also about resistance. Theatre practitioners, when faced with structural obstacles, learn to negotiate and apply their cultural capital towards overcoming such obstacles. The strategies and tactics they deploy are invariably middle class ones, conditioned by local historical political development, and informed by their economic circumstances. Such forms of Singapore middle-class resistances would not only offer valuable society-state registers of different modes of production, but also show that the resistance of Singaporean theatre practitioners may also be understood as one between different habituses of the same middle class. In this case, when the artistic habitus challenges the civil servant habitus, both of which are resolutely English-educated middle-class identities, over notions of censorship, it suggests a complex politics within the most politically and economically privileged community in Singapore.

Background and Scope

Studies on theatre–society relations in Singapore have generally sought to understand contemporary local English-language theatre by way of two analogies. First, it may be seen as a “lens” to examine broader society and to explain the Singapore condition. According to Peterson, “English-language theatre [is] a primary lens through which to view the politics of culture in Singapore” because the genre has emerged “from the intersection of numerous politically driven factors, such as language and cultural policy, along with the continuing push for sustainable economic growth and development” (Peterson 2001: 3–4). Proponents of this lens analogy, often accompanied by Marxist theoretical thought, chart the development of Singapore theatre in parallel with the economic trajectory of the island’s status as a colonial entrêpot to a postindustrial postcolonial nation-state. Here theatre production is seen as a cultural activity conditioned by, and also a reflection of, the nation’s politics and economics. The fact that local theatre is divided into English-, Mandarin-, Malay- and Tamil-language theatre groups, reflecting the linguistic divides in broader society, lends empirical support to the analogy.

The lens analogy is also convenient because the story of English-language theatre may be narrated in metonymic fashion to retell the larger Singapore story. English-language theatre began in the early nineteenth century and, as part of colonial practice, was restricted to white expatriates. The transplantation and exclusivity of this cultural activity, and explicit racism embedded within the colonial–native relationship, was part of the regimes and practices of the colonial city; a product of the East India Company today lionized as the opening chapter of Singapore’s modernity in popular local histories. Dominating the drama scene were amateur groups such as the Changi Theatre Club and The Tanglin Players that saw to the entertainment of expatriates and provided a pastime for the white leisured class.

In the 1960s, reflecting both the uncertain transition to independence and the echoing legacy of British colonialism were pioneer playwrights like Goh Poh Seng and Lim Chor Pee whose unmistakably Southeast Asian characters were criticized for speaking with an equally unmistakably British register, part of the larger “Commonwealth Literature” phenomenon. This initial attempt to forge a local art form in the language of the colonizer rehearses the asymmetrical core–periphery relationship whereby identity formation is often frustrated by the cultural capital of an imagined colonial civilization. By the 1980s, the country was experiencing high levels of economic growth thanks to an export-oriented economic strategy. The blip of the 1985 recession notwithstanding, Singaporeans enjoyed material affluence and, as the fruit of meticulous state-centered planning, a middle class began to emerge by the mid 1980s. Accompanying this emergence were the emotional stirrings over larger questions of national identity and culture. The English-educated middle class was searching for its soul. It was against the backdrop of these emotional stirrings over national identity that a Singaporean English-language theatre was born in the mid-late 1980s. Theatre groups such as Theatreworks, The Necessary Stage, Action Theatre and the now defunct Third Stage developed with issues of national identity and cultural soul-searching very much on their creative agenda. Local plays began to reflect the preoccupations of the predominantly English-speaking middle class, for example, Kuo Pao Kun’s first English-language play, The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole (1984), which critiqued the uneven power relationship between citizens and government, Eleanor Wong’s Jackson on a Jaunt (1989) which explored the sexual liberation of a consumer middle class, or the challenges of multiracialism and multiculturalism as articulated by Haresh Sharma’s Mixed Blessings (1993). The use of Singlish was also explored as an indigenous vehicle for articulating local narratives and, in keeping with the multiple identities and life-style issues accentuated by material affluence and a cosmopolitan education, themes such as homosexuality were later expressed on stage. For proponents of the lens analogy, the narratives, issues, themes, and cultural politics of local theatre can be examined as a reflection of and conditioned by the larger national forces that organize political, economic and social life in Singapore.

The second analogy is to see the local theatre community as an alternative “critical space.” Under the rule of the PAP since 1959, Singapore has effectively been governed by a one-party state where the divisions between political party, government and state have been blurred, such that scholars have often used the term “PAP state” to articulate the power and hegemony of such an edifice (Rodan 1989). Here, the PAP state’s dominance in public discourse, the exertion of its apparatuses to manage civic life, and its use of legal procedures to silence or curtail critics have been said to result in a sterile and noncritical public sphere. Thus,

Under such explicit and legalised constraints, the responsibility for critical commentary on society, culture and politics have ended up disproportionately on the shoulders of the arts, particularly theatre. Theatres have become a critical space in the constitution of public opinion.

(Chua 2004: 320)

On the surface, local theatre’s status as a “critical space” is rather odd when one considers the presence of the PAP interventionist state. Why has the PAP state allowed local theatre to develop and mature as a “critical space” in sharp contrast to the cultivated compliance of more conventional “critical spaces” like the press and trade unions? The answer lies not only in audience demographics where theatre consumers are confined to a minority of the local middle class, unlike, say, television or radio audiences, but also in the way in which the arts and culture have, over the last two decades, become an integral part of the PAP state’s economic strategy to achieve global city status.

Lacking the audience figures, hence mass influence of local television or radio, theatre has been accorded broader leeway in terms of censorship by the PAP state. This elitism is not out of step with the broader Singapore condition where smaller and select groups, invariably distinguished by education, are deemed better prepared for the exposure to the alternative and better able to filter the immoral and malevolent from the virtuous and civic. Hence, as a smaller and more select space than the local press and trade unions, the space of theatre and its accoutring criticality is tolerated by the PAP state, perhaps even nurtured to a certain degree, to win legitimacy from the international public. This is not to say that the PAP state has never encroached upon the space of theatre. The Internal Security Act (ISA), which allows for detention without trial, was deployed against theatre practitioners in 1976 and later again in 1987.

The “lens” and “critical space” analogies are both sound. They allow us to conceptualize local theatre and its practitioners with a variety of imaginations. They accentuate the intimate links between economy, politics, and culture to account for the production of art. They demonstrate the relevance and vibrancy of local theatre as an essential and trenchant response to dominant ideology and discourse. Nonetheless, they are also limited. For example, it is assumed that the theatre “lens” is a clear and untinted one, an objective microscope to scrutinize the vagaries of the Singapore condition. As Peterson goes on to write,

Nevertheless, I would argue that like it or not, it is English-language theatre, with its direct and immediate connection to the dominant, English-language-speaking and largely ethnic Chinese elites in Singapore, whose culture, is the culture being offered up for export overseas.

(Peterson 2001: 5; original italics)

On a sociological level, Peterson treats the “English-language-speaking and largely ethnic Chinese elites” as ideal types and makes no distinction between this diverse and complex social group, not to mention the difference between the naked commercialism of English-language theatre like that of the Singapore Repertory Theatre or more socially conscious theatre like The Necessary Stage. Neither does he distinguish between the cultural capital and agenda of different theatre practitioners and government officials, both of whom can conceivably be deemed English-speaking cultural elites. While he acknowledges Singapore theatre’s multicultural and multiethnic complexion, Peterson, as most “lens” proponents tend to, does not seek to describe the English-language theatre as a community filled with practitioners of varying reputations and statuses, positioned in different positions of power and driven by diverse interests.

Furthermore, English-language theatre is also a skewed lens, given the generally higher level of education and proficiency in English of English-language theatre practitioners and their audiences, as well as the broader artistic license that comes with it. In other words, the middle-class idiosyncrasies embedded in English-language theatre production and consumption cannot be assumed to be a comprehensive lens to examine the broader Singapore condition. Given the complex economic, cultural, ideological and political divisions and positions within English-language theatre, our lens collapses into a kaleidoscope that presents a fractured and disjointed image of the Singapore condition.

The “critical space” analogy is more satisfactory in that it frees our imagination to conceptualize internal conflict and strife as well as power relations.

In acknowledging the critical nature of this “space,” we intellectually concede its social and political nature as well as traditional sources of conflict such as class, ethnicity, language, culture, and ideology. It allows us to think sociologically about theatre as a community where agents such as directors, playwrights, actors, technical crew, newspaper critics and government officials are situated in different positions of power and privilege. Unlike a “lens,” a “critical space” suggests greater autonomy of intellectual life as well as ideological independence instead of proposing it as a stable and objective receptacle to examine the residues of national politics and culture.

However, one danger of the “critical space” analogy is the essentializing of the theatre community. In describing a space as critical, we presume the criticality of its inhabitants. This presumption of criticality is made all the more persuasi...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. Imagining the Singapore theatre field
• 2. The arts in Singapore: Site of ideologies, fantasies, and orthodoxies
• 3. The Singapore theatre field: “A different world … unique” but not completely so
• 4. Claiming authenticity: Theatre–state tensions
• 5. Cultural intermediaries: The media and the Arts Education Program
• 6. “Because it’s in my blood”: The politics of illusio
• 7. The invisible state: Disciplining the theatre field
• 8. Resistance and defiance: The revenge of the middle-class artist
• 9. Conclusions
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibiliography
• Index