The Necessary Stage’s SG Insecure offers a quiet history of surveillance in three plays

SG Insecure

The Necessary Stage
Practice Space
Oct 29, 8pm

The Necessary Stage’s SG Insecure offers a quiet corrective to a year of fanfare over SG60 and the penchant to instrumentalise history for celebratory narratives.

Its mixed bag of plays – directed by Haresh Sharma – raids history archives not to construct a triumphalist or regressive narrative of nation-building, but to demonstrate that the flow of history can be cyclical. The glut of modern surveillance technologies is not new, the show seems to say, but merely old systems in new forms.

This is most evident in playwright A Yagnya’s dream-within-a-dream opening play Bleeding Trees, in which two characters named Veerappan form a connective thread across the history of migrant Singapore.

The first is a South Indian man who comes to Singapore in the early 20th century to work in a rubber estate. The second is a migrant worker who witnesses the 2013 Little India riot. Both characters seem to be versions of each other and are played by Vishnucharan Naidu, who lends a sweet tenderness to his performance.

It is the strongest of the three plays, provocative in its overlapping of histories. It aptly opens the show by offering the thesis that Singapore’s surveillance of migrant bodies has a “pre-history” – in the form of the kangani system, where the kangani (Tamil for “the one who oversees”) serves as a supervisor intermediary between plantation owners and workers.

In a similar fashion, playwright Sindhura Kalidas’ New Dawn layers the history of the 1954 Fajar trial – in which left-leaning editors of the university magazine were arrested for an allegedly seditious article – with a story of contemporary student activists hit by a Pofma (Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act) correction directive.

The students’ communication devices get taken away by the police in the play, but the story is not just about a tussle between state and citizen. Within the student group, Mayank (Shrey Bhargava) – who comes from a more privileged background – feels less risk-averse about skirting surveillance systems than his peers.

Less successful is playwright Deonn Yang’s (dis)tributary, in which a campy Munah Bagharib plays a Merlion who wants a day off. The Merlion believes she should be recognised with a gold medal for her role in cleaning up the Singapore River by spitting in it.

The Merlion is being watched by CCTV (closed-circuit television) cameras – but she still manages to go on a shopping spree while two of her friends, Aileen (Jodi Chan) and Azizah (Moli Mohter), search various water bodies for her gold medal.

It is unclear what the play is trying to say about surveillance – it feels like the odd one out – as it meanders into its own muddied tributaries.

The show presents itself as a parody, but there is nothing raucously hilarious about it. Paragraphs of academic texts that are woven into the plays bog down the pace.

Moments of tenderness and serious reflection are more dominant, even as the three plays are framed by a more light-hearted caricature of bureaucratese in the form of the orange-jacketed SG Insecure task force.

It is an interesting way to weave the three otherwise disparate plays together – as it gives the show a meta-textual layer, reflecting on how surveillance, censorship and licensing also shape the artistic process.

Book It/SG Insecure

Where: Practice Space, 54 Waterloo Street
When: Till Nov 8; Tuesdays to Fridays, 8pm; Saturdays, 4.30 and 8pm; Sundays, 3pm
Admission: $38, eligible for SG Culture Pass
Info: str.sg/nqNi