Playwright Joel Tan diagnoses “arrested development” of Singapore teens in new play 

SINGAPORE – With Gen Z

preferring to sober party in a foodcourt basement

rather than spend a night out getting wasted at the club, playwright Joel Tan, 38, laments: “It actually breaks my heart to see young people who don’t want to get f***ed up. The guai kia (Hokkien for ‘well-behaved kids’) have won.”

Candice, the teenage protagonist in Tan’s upcoming play The Serangoon Gardens Techno Party Of 1993, is no guai kia. Convinced that her cushy life in her big landed Serangoon Garden property is too flat to be real – and seduced by the disaffection of rock band The Smiths in her ears – she makes a dash for the rebellious underbelly of 1990s Singapore over a breathless 24 hours.

“It’s a world of punks, hard rock, lascivious expats, unhinged radio deejays – and the police are never too far away,” says Tan of the play’s mad universe. It runs from Oct 17 to Nov 1 at The Ngee Ann Kongsi Theatre located at Funan – the mall which, ironically, hosted

Singapore’s biggest sober party with 5,000 partygoers recently

.

In contrast, Tan’s own teenagehood was tame. The most rebellious thing he did, he notes sarcastically, was “becoming a socio-political blogger” – which seems like his equivalent of sober partying.

Realising this, he adds: “Maybe this play is an elaborate act of wish fulfilment.”

The acerbic playwright diagnoses a form of “arrested development” with Singaporeans – it was only in his 30s that he found himself more rebellious.

“Most people bury their sense of self-discovery. There is this compulsion to conform and behave that comes perhaps from fear. It feels almost as if people aspire to comfort more than they do any sort of radical individuality.”

Candice, played by actress Coco Wang Ling, is modelled after Tan’s kindergarten bully – whom the playwright remembers being “frenemies” with. She would tease Tan mercilessly for his weight, but also lend him videotapes to watch – a dynamic which turned out to be an early education in how class and privilege function.

“I was living in an HDB flat, and she was living in a landed property and had access to all these nice things,” says Tan in this interview held in one of Serangoon Garden’s many chic cafes.

“The location of Serangoon Garden is not incidental – it’s quite a bougie neighbourhood. I’m interested in how class is factored into the way you do or do not engage with the idea of leaving and wanting to leave Singapore.”

Unlike Candice, Tan for a long time found very few real paths out of his mannered childhood.

“I grew up in the Christian church, so my upbringing was very non-secular and I wasn’t exposed to a lot of pop music. My 1990s were very churchy and that’s found its way into the play as well.”

Like Candice, Tan received the world – especially the Western one – through media.

“I was really curious about the world outside Singapore and the way you caught glimpses of it on television, movies and films. I grew up reading a lot of Enid Blyton books and developing a weird familiarity with things like treacle and blood puddings.”

He adds: “I developed a fluency for the British landscape at a young age and felt very curious about the world outside, but also very far away from it all.”

Tan, who was based in London between 2017 and 2020 and continues to split his time between Singapore and the British capital, wrote this play when he was part of the Royal Court Theatre’s Writers’ Group.

“I was thinking a lot about this East-West divide in my life, having spent quite a number of years in the UK at that time, trying to negotiate why it is that I felt so pulled to Western centres of culture.”

The shadow of empire, he concluded, stretches to the present.

He wanted to know, too, if a play so inextricably bound to Singapore could translate to audiences abroad.

Having taken this play to groups in London and New York, he says: “One of the things that wasn’t translating for people was the sense of repression. They don’t understand why the stakes feel so high for the character because the things that she’s doing to act out don’t seem so controversial to them.”

Tan’s Scenes From A Repatriation

– set in the British Museum – played in London to a four-star review in The Guardian. In Singapore, it is his hyper-local plays which have won him acclaim – with his

censorship satire G*d Is A Woman

winning the awards for Production of the Year and Best Original Script at The Straits Times Life Theatre Awards 2024.

He reunites with some of his frequent collaborators –

director Sim Yan Ying

and set designer T.K. Hay – for this newest play.

Calling his working relationship with Sim “playful and telepathic”, he says of this latest work: “It’s a very ill-behaved play. It’s formally quite reckless – and some people might say untidy – but that’s what I want.”

The R18 play is not just about being a teenager, as the consequences of repression stretch far beyond puberty.

Citing the classic Singaporean archetype of a student who goes abroad in his or her 20s for a degree, Tan says: “They just go off the rails because, suddenly, they’re availed of so much freedom and possibility. They’re free from their parents and this surveillance state and social mores.

“I know people who snapped when they were confronted by how much catching up they had to do.”

Book It/The Serangoon Gardens Techno Party Of 1993 (R18)

Where: The Ngee Ann Kongsi Theatre, Wild Rice @ Funan, 107 North Bridge Road
When: Oct 17 to Nov 1, Tuesdays to Fridays, 7.30pm; Saturdays, 2.30 and 7.30pm; Sundays, 2.30pm
Admission: From $35
Info:

str.sg/EMYq