The Look Back In Wonder Award goes to Singapore theatre’s history plays

SINGAPORE – Has SG60 thrown up some of the most iconic contemporary Singapore history plays? This was the question posed by The Straits Times when

previewing a slate of 25 must-watch plays in 2025

.

After all, anniversaries often trigger a look back into the past – be it a kitschy and sentimental callback to familiar narratives, an upending of historical cliches or the unearthing of buried stories. That Singapore theatre has staged a bumper crop of history plays in the year of SG60 is no coincidence, as the scene has often positioned itself as a corrective to the narrative certainties of The Singapore Story.

Theatre companies have mostly stuck to the winning formula from the nation’s last jubilee SG50. The re-staging of sold-out classics not only brings in new and younger audiences, but also offers familiar audiences a chance to re-evaluate the work for its currency or for playwrights to offer a timely update.

It was with much fanfare that

Wild Rice’s five-hour marathon play Hotel

, written by Alfian Sa’at and Marcia Vanderstraaten, received its third re-run. Tickets to the decade-by-decade complication of Singapore history sold out swiftly once again –

scalpers targeted the 2023 run

– and standing tickets were offered.

Commissioned by the Esplanade, Teater Ekamatra pulled out

a 2015 favourite, Yusof: Portrait Of A President

, written by Zizi Majid. Four extra shows were added to meet overflowing demand.

Playwright Johnny Jon Jon’s update of National Memory Project

, first staged in 2012, started as a critique of the Singapore Memory Project for SG50 and the new version has now worked in the omnipresent artificial intelligence anxieties of the new decade.

Singapore Repertory Theatre did not reprise The LKY Musical, which attracted 50,000 theatregoers in its first run in 2015, but the figure of the late founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew was bound to be invoked. Toy Factory Productions went for

a xinyao love story between Lee and his late wife Kwa Geok Choo in Moonlit City

, which was reviewed in ST as

“a pale, synthetic, new moon”

.

A more successful rework of an old formula was

Wild Rice’s Tunggu Sekejap

, another music history lecture performance by musician Julian Wong. This time, Wong focused on the musical legend P. Ramlee. There is a third musician, one suspects, to add to a triptych of musical histories.

Of the new plays,

The Necessary Stage’s triptych of history plays in SG Insecure

offered some interesting lesser-told narratives that could well become full-length productions. Playwright A Yagnya’s Bleeding Trees connected migrant labour on an early 20th-century rubber plantation to the living conditions of contemporary migrant workers, while playwright Sindhura Kalidas’ New Dawn layered the history of the 1954 Fajar trial against students with student activism today.

The Japanese Occupation also loomed large in 2025 – as countries worldwide celebrated the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II – to mixed effect.

Checkpoint Theatre’s Escape To Batam

conjugated pandemic and war histories,

Agam Theatre Lab’s Mission Malligapoo

about a multi-ethnic group of misfits is “amiably overstuffed”, while

A Thousand Stitches at the Singapore International Festival of Arts

presented a rather rote retelling of this history.

There is no new blockbuster that might be pulled out again for a future anniversary, it seems, although 2025’s bumper crop has promising green shoots. Seen in its totality, the theatre scene looked back in wonder – and anger, love and curiosity – and its grove of stories reminds audiences that Singapore, well into its middle age, can only grow more complex with time.