In Getting To Know You, actors get to see the script only when the performance begins
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Co-directors Tan Hui Er (left) and Edward Eng will direct two actors each show, who are invited to cold-perform a script they have never read until the performance begins.
ST PHOTO: LIM YAOHUI
- Getting To Know You features actors performing an unrehearsed script, echoing traditional live theatre practices where scripts are revealed only at performance time.
- The show emphasises human connection and spontaneity, challenging directors and actors to surrender control and embrace uncertainty in performance.
- After Singapore, the production will tour Kuala Lumpur and Japan, showcasing different actors and continuing its experimental exploration of live theatre.
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SINGAPORE – In a professional theatre industry where weeks of arduous rehearsals for actors are the norm, two young theatremakers are flipping the script.
Across four shows of Getting To Know You, four pairs of actors are invited to cold-perform a script they have not only not rehearsed, but also never laid eyes on.
It might sound like a radical proposition, but 32-year-old theatremaker Edward Eng – who is writing and co-directing the show – says his approach merely returns to the roots of live performance.
He says: “In Shakespeare’s time, and in bangsawan and performance traditions in South-east Asia, you get your text very close to the time you go onstage and sometimes are not directed beforehand in a rehearsal.”
The experimental performance by Gangguan Theatre plays four shows at the Goodman Arts Centre Black Box from Sept 10 to 13, opening with a performance by theatre veterans Noorlinah Mohamed and Karen Tan. The other actor pairs are Risa Ann Wong and Xuan Ong (Sept 11); Sharda Harrison and Lian Sutton (Sept 12); and Izzul Irfan and Vanessa Toh (Sept 13).
Eng is the playwright behind the absurdist two-hander Do Rhinos Feel Their Horns?, which travelled to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2023.
He has enlisted Tan Hui Er, 30, a film director with The Hummingbird Co and a founding member of alternative content channel Not Safe For TV, who eagerly said yes.
Says Tan: “Ultimately, this is an experiment in creating something live. But besides all the very big ideas, the minute he said we’re going to hold a performance without rehearsals, I went, ‘Isn’t it fun?’”
The play is ostensibly about two characters navigating the nightlife scene in Singapore, but the co-directors wave away this frame story and say it is more about the connection between people and the conceit of how the performance is made.
While Eng was apprehensive if actors would say yes to an amorphous show like this, convincing them turned out to be the easiest part. He says: “It’s an actor’s dream, basically.”
Not so much a director’s dream, in fact, if that person is a “control freak” – as Eng admits playwrights and directors can be.
Eng and Tan had to tweak their understanding of the director’s traditional job scope, and in workshops scribble down not so much directorial notes, but reminders to surrender. Says Tan: “Not just for me – but how do I get the actors to surrender to the process?”
After Singapore, Getting To Know You will travel to the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre for four shows, with four different sets of actors who are based in Malaysia. The group is also planning a 2027 Japan tour.
Theatregoers who have seen Belgian experimental theatre company Ontroerend Goed’s ongoing Handle With Care, where there are no actors and every event is condensed into a single box, might instinctively compare the two works. But Eng says: “Maybe the impulses are similar, but I do feel very strongly that ours is more a theatre of people, whereas theirs is a theatre of pure ideas.”
In fact, Eng’s inspirations reveal his interest in the social element of theatre.
He had first written a performance-without-rehearsals script under The Necessary Stage’s Playwrights’ Cove programme, and also takes inspiration from the “ragtag” and “flat” collaborative processes of Kuala Lumpur-based interdisciplinary artist collective Five Arts Centre.
More directly, he was inspired by Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2021 film Drive My Car, in which a theatre director learns to give up his agency while directing a multilingual production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.
This, too, for him, is an exercise in divesting agency from the traditional authority of the director.
Tan says: “A lot of us are finding a lot of fun in this. It’s fun to not know the answers and it’s very freeing. So much of film and theatre – at least where I’m at – is that you always try to have a vision and create that vision. But there’s fun in not knowing what it’s going to look like.”
Book It/Getting To Know You
Where: Goodman Arts Centre Black Box, 90 Goodman Road
When: Sept 10 to 12, 8pm; Sept 13, 3pm
Admission: $35 and $27 (concession)
Info: str.sg/NvZj
