The Death Of Singapore Theatre As Scripted By The Infocomm Media Development Authority Of Singapore

Wild Rice
Ngee Ann Kongsi Theatre, Funan
March 17, 2.30pm

The play begins with the word “no”, shouted at the top of her lungs by Farah Ong, who bursts through the stage doors without the pre-show announcement that usually settles the crowd.

She repeats it, at different volumes, pitches and speeds. There are so many ways of turning someone down – authoritatively, insinuatingly, silently.

But there are also so many ways of rejecting that rejection, and it is upon this masochistic dynamic between the censorship authorities and theatre-makers of Singapore that playwright Alfian Sa’at has built this play with the unwieldy title: The Death Of Singapore Theatre As Scripted By The Infocomm Media Development Authority Of Singapore.

Described by some as the revenge of the playwright, and first performed as part of the Substation’s SeptFest arts festival in 2022, the work is framed as a conversation with a censorship officer but is really a chance for Alfian to lecture audiences on some censorship history.

Ong harks back to the colonial-era Theatres Ordinance that was introduced in 1895 – citing The Straits Times’ articles about its first uses – and quotes verbatim from bureaucrats like Ms Amy Chua, chairman of the board of film censors from 2004 to 2012, whose favourite films are the Harry Potter series and The Bourne Identity.

But to fixate on the facts would be to neglect the real driver of the lecture-performance, a repressed anger that builds to an immense catharsis in the final third of the play. This is a sequence so daring, it is a moment of shock to see it on stage – the chair of an IMDA official is strung up, the balaclava-ed Ong standing in silent solidarity with protesters through time.

To the discordant roars of punk music, she adds her cause to a line of resistance in Singapore, shown via a slide show of real photos of protests on screen. There is the population white paper protests in 2013, an MRT protest against the 1987 Operation Spectrum and, more recently, youth holding up placards against the death penalty, climate policies, LGBTQ discrimination and the mass killing in Gaza.

Yet, even this release is qualified. Alfian, in a finale that involves audience members, does not allow them to breathe easy.

The raspy, rageful breaths of Ong, fists clenched, are the last sounds theatregoers hear. Even set in a future where there is no more licensing required for public performances, Alfian finds it difficult to let go – and by this point, the audiences understand, for they, too, are not in a mood to forgive.

There is a prevaricating quality to Alfian’s set-up that makes it so satisfying when he finally takes the political nature of censorship by the horns. Ong, for instance, spends some time harmlessly ribbing censorship officials at work as seen in archival photos.

The veteran actress is preternaturally relaxed yet magnetic in the role, and one gets the impression that she is doing all this with a remarkable effortlessness.

In drier moments, it is her taking on different voices and mannerisms that keeps the show entertaining, yet she is so fiercely intelligent in her outbursts that nothing feels put on – a rawness matched on stage by the accumulating pieces of strewn debris mirroring the increasingly frenzied state of the artist’s mind.

Irfan Kasban, who directs, also starred in Motherland, a play at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival in 2024 that used similar prop work of a punching bag hanging overhead, the Damocles sword never allowed to drop.

Here, replaced by the chair, the object adds a sense of danger as Ong courageously stands her ground beneath it, not without emotional toll.

Alfian makes many arguments in the one hour-and-15 minute runtime – that the classification criteria are kept intentionally vague to give censors maximum discretion; that, though meant to reflect majority sentiments, censorship could be shaping a more conservative majority instead; that artists learning to game the censorship regime is not a case of artistic, but bureaucratic, creativity.

“Sometimes, I do get angry,” Ong says at one point. “It comes from a feeling that we could be so much, but we choose to be less. We could be so much bigger and we choose to be small.”

Emotionally manipulative, perhaps, but for anyone who has come up against the organs of censorship, it is a cliche that will never stop generating a mix of despair and hope, depending on which clause one chooses to focus on.

Book It / The Death Of Singapore Theatre As Scripted By The Infocomm Media Development Authority Of Singapore

Where: Ngee Ann Kongsi Theatre, Funan, 107 North Bridge Road
When: Till March 30, Tuesdays to Fridays, 7.30pm; Saturdays, 2.30 and 7.30pm; Sunday, 2.30pm
Admission: From $45
Info: www.wildrice.com.sg/event/176172-the-death-of-singapore-theatre