Singaporean director Ong Keng Sen’s Trojan Women on main stage at Edinburgh International Festival

SINGAPORE – Singaporean director Ong Keng Sen’s Trojan Women takes centre stage at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2023.

First created for the National Theater of Korea in Seoul in 2016, the production will be on at the Festival Theatre, one of the prestigious arts festival’s main venues, from Aug 9 to 11. 

Over a Zoom call while in transit from Berlin to Italy, Ong, 59, says the invitation came as a surprise: “We didn’t approach them. It’s such a big show, we had to prioritise and see when the company could do it.” 

He explains that the National Changgeuk Company, the opera arm of the National Theater, has only one team which performs both at home and overseas. 

Trojan Women reworks French author Jean-Paul Sartre’s take on the ancient Greek story about the women who are taken as war booty in the aftermath of a 10-year war. Ong’s version, staged at the Singapore International Festival of Arts in 2017, employs two traditional Korean music forms – changgeuk (Korean opera) and pansori, in which a solo singer is accompanied by just one or two instruments. 

The Straits Times’ arts reviewer Akshita Nanda called the show “mesmerising, haunting and unforgettable”, and it has since played to positive receptions in cities including Vienna and Paris and, most recently, at New York’s famed Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in November 2022. 

This is Ong’s third outing at Edinburgh. His first was in 1992, when TheatreWorks was invited to stage Madam Mao’s Memories, which looked at the life of Mao Zedong’s fourth wife, starring Claire Wong.

“There were four of us crammed into one hotel room,” he recalls. 

In 2009, Diaspora – which explored issues such as memory, migration and assimilation through music, video and story-telling – was staged as part of the main Edinburgh International Festival. It was savaged by The Guardian’s critic Lyn Gardner, who called it an “excruciatingly turgid 100 minutes that feels like a cross between a travelogue and a very earnest educational video”. 

Ong shrugs it off, saying: “You can’t kill yourself over one opinion. I’ve come to accept that there are many opinions out there.” 

Trojan Women is one of three Singapore-led shows in Edinburgh in 2023. The other two are smaller productions in the Fringe festival. Gangguan Theatre’s Do Rhinos Feel Their Horns? is a spin on Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, while London-based Singaporeans Faizal Abdullah and Khai Ramli are staging the lecture-performance Siapa Yang Bawa Melayu Aku Pergi? (Who Took My Malay Away?).

Despite the vibrancy of Singapore’s theatre scene, home-grown productions rarely appear at Edinburgh, one of the grand dames of the international festival circuit. 

Ong observes: “When we performed in Paris with Lear Dreaming, the artistic director of the Theatre de la Ville said to me: ‘Nobody knows what’s Singapore theatre. When we programme a Japanese show, people have an idea of butoh, kabuki, kimonos. When we programme a Singapore production, it is very hard to sell because people don’t know what a Singapore production is.’”

He adds that Singapore lacks a strong cultural image that would induce festival directors to programme Singapore productions. The economics of festival funding also work against Singapore productions. Trojan Women entails a 40-strong entourage, but the National Theater of Korea bears a substantial chunk of the travelling costs, paying for airfare when the show went to BAM, and absorbing the cost of the salaried performers. 

He muses: “Should we have a National Theatre of Singapore? It’s the next stage of national imaging. Otherwise, we will always be small indie companies floating around the international scene.”