SINGAPORE – Four Horse Road, the first casualty of the Covid-19 shutdown of live theatre in 2020, will return to Waterloo Street from Aug 4 to Sept 3.

The traumatic closure of the production after just two of 26 planned shows were staged might have cost The Theatre Practice (TTP) more than $650,000, but artistic director Kuo Jian Hong says of why TTP is reviving the work: “We are just stubborn people.”

The team stowed 14 bulky bus seats, pieces of the set imported from Malaysia, on TTP’s premises in the hope they would one day be put on stage again.

The resource-intensive show has never made financial sense to stage, Kuo says, but “stories like this still need to be told, (so) you collect your coins in order to do it”.

Four Horse Road, a direct translation of the Hokkien name for Waterloo Street (“si beh lor”), is an epic feat of walking theatre that spans two heritage buildings – namely 42 Waterloo Street and TTP’s home at 54 Waterloo Street.

Sixty cast and crew members are required to stage this intricate work, which excavates more than 150 years of the area’s storied past. This includes 11 members who will take on duties of assistant stage manager for each of the show’s 11 scenes.

Written by playwright Jonathan Lim, each scene zooms in to the stories of history’s neglected figures as audiences encounter Japanese prostitutes, a Chinese nightclub dancer and a Malay ghost known as orang minyak (oily man) on the streets.

“History will never be laid out before you, you have to seek it out,” says Lim, who adds that the experience of promenade theatre means that if “you turn the right corner at the right time, you will see something happen”.

Join a different group and your experience of Four Horse Road will change. There are six possible routes through this labyrinthine show and each audience member will get to experience eight out of the 11 scenes.

The pandemic, while scuppering the last staging, did produce a bonus for this production. The crew is using XIMI, a live-streaming technology TTP developed during the pandemic with tech studio Good Work, to seamlessly coordinate six concurrent scenes. In 2018 and 2020, TTP relied on walkie-talkie phone application Zello.

While the term “place-making” has been trendy in discussions about arts spaces, Four Horse Road director Kuo argues that “the place itself has been making itself”.

She says: “A piece of work like this is also place-keeping, where you are hanging on to the things that happened here, but are forgotten or are about to be forgotten.”

The team’s research led to their discovery that Bras Basah jail, which existed where Singapore Management University now stands, was built by Indian convict labour in the 19th century.

Lim, who marvels at how the jail existed beside former school compounds such as St Joseph’s Institution and Raffles Institution, says: “They were our nation’s builders. We don’t have a single road or major monument that was not built by these convicts. The real pioneers are these people who have been forgotten.”

This realisation inspired a scene, set in 1870, involving a friendship between a convict and a schoolboy. It is characteristic of the intimate stories Four Horse Road distils from grand histories.

Waterloo Street, one of Singapore’s oldest streets, has seen its fair share of change since the mid-19th century.

Even the five years since Four Horse Road was first staged in 2018 has been colourful. Theatre development space Centre 42 no longer occupies the whole of 42 Waterloo Street and the towering Waterloo Apartments is now a roaring construction site.

“We almost lost the front street because they were trying to do renovation,” says Kuo. Unlike the two previous stagings, which included scenes at 48 Waterloo Street – home of the Singapore Calligraphy Centre – this show does not have a third building.

“The biggest change is that there are increasingly more controls and regulations with how things are run,” says Kuo. More time and multi-party negotiations are required to obtain permissions and permits for use of spaces compared with 2018.

Lim, who recalls staging Shakespeare at the carpark behind the Old National Library Building in the 1990s with little bureaucracy, agrees. “(Site-specific theatre) used to be something that newer theatre companies can do because it’s affordable and adventurous.”

But, for Lim, Four Horse Road has been wonderfully nostalgic and a chance to let the built environment direct his writing again.

“Every theatre company should do site-specific theatre once every few years just to keep on its toes,” he says.

Book It/Four Horse Road

Where: The Theatre Practice, 54 Waterloo Street
When: Aug 4 to Sept 3, Tuesdays to Sundays, 8pm
Admission: $75 (Tuesdays to Thursdays; Sundays) or $85 (Fridays and Saturdays), excluding booking fees
Info: practice.bigtix.io/events/TTPFHR23