King

T:>Works
72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road
Thursday, 8pm

It may be a sign of the times that two excellent one-woman plays are being staged in Singapore.

Wild Rice’s ongoing Psychob***h has struck a chord and extended its runtime by popular demand.

King by T:>Works runs for just four days, but also deserves attention. Its script is one of the most sophisticated to have been written in Singapore’s maturing theatre scene.

Directed by Irfan Kasban and starring Jo Tan, who plays eight characters, King is wonderfully weird and schizophrenic, inducting audiences into the marginalised universe of drag.

That its main character Geok Yen represents such an archetypal, non-woke Singaporean public relations executive makes her reconciliation with her new-found drag-king persona a story all the more worth telling.

No-holds-barred insults fly – the kind that would instantly get one cancelled if voiced openly today, but is still used by many in private or when push comes to shove.

It is all phenomenally real, done without sanitising the characters or resorting to the typical screaming climax to make a point.

The prickly identity questions would have even those who are fluent in the contemporary vocabulary of gender and sex taking pause. Identity as a spectrum is, after all, not so easy for one to wrap his or her head around.

Tan wrote this play after showing up at a character workshop wearing her husband’s clothes and felt the heady freedom that came with performing at a drag revue, so this is in part autobiographical.

Broadcast as a live stream during the pandemic in 2020, King had five nominations at The Straits Times Life Theatre Awards in 2022 and won for Best Actress and Best Original Script.

Now, Tan gets to showcase the work to a live audience on a spare set marked only with vinyl tape and two boxes.

It takes a while to warm to the socially awkward, repressed persona Geok Yen, who has reduced her name to just Yen for convenience – the first sign of the kind of self-effacement that she instinctively adopts in her interactions with her colleagues, boss and boyfriend.

At a company party, though, she wears her husband’s clothes partly on a whim and partly in defiance, and starts speaking in the most cringy accent cosplaying as playboy Stirling da Silva.

To her shock, invisible Geok Yen as Stirling becomes the centre of attention, her promotion prospects suddenly looking a lot better now that her Australian boss finds her resembling his boyfriend.

Part of the success of Tan’s script – and acting – is how fully fleshed out the other characters are, overcoming a pitfall for many other one-woman plays which reduce those around the protagonist to cardboard prompts.

The Australian boss, Ethan, is also a drag queen – a conceit that is, refreshingly, not at all played for laughs.

There are interesting and combative scenes in which the drag queens in the cabaret Geok Yen joins make clear the privilege she enjoys: She can slip in and out of her demure-girl-next-door identity and dates a well-meaning but conservative boyfriend interested in marriage.

Brian Gothong Tan’s multimedia gives the play some wonderfully campy moments, and Mitch Leow’s choreography makes this whirlwind experiment natural and fluid.

But it is Tan’s effervescent presence – switching perspectives mid-sob to play the consoler before crying again – that makes this work flourish.

Suddenly, it becomes clear beyond doubt that a one-woman play is the perfect medium through which to explore the issues of fractured, multifaceted identity and all its controversies.

King

Where: T:>Works, 72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road
When: Till Sunday, 8pm; Saturday and Sunday; 3pm
Admission: From $28
Info: tworksasia.org/king