Toy Factory Productions’ Goh Boon Teck builds on family legacy in theatre

SINGAPORE – Theatre company Toy Factory Productions was founded by Goh Boon Teck and 13 others in 1990. As the 3½ decades elapsed, people switched careers or started their own artistic initiatives, but Goh has kept stolidly on.

“I am the silly one,” the 54-year-old immediately counters when this reporter remarks on his persistence. “When I do something, I want to do it consistently and religiously. I’m still learning how to do theatre.”

The powers that be have evidently decided that he has earned his laurels. At the Istana on Nov 27, the veteran creator of showpieces like Titoudao (1994), inspired by his opera actress mother Oon Ah Chiam, and The Crab Flower Club (2009) was conferred the highest cultural honour in the land, the Cultural Medallion. He is one of two honourees in 2025.

Speaking to The Straits Times a few weeks before the ceremony, he has already digested the results and is looking to the next thing. The welcome testimony to his hard work now also signals “a huge responsibility”.

“Are you going to have extra artistic burden in doing the next thing?” and that Singaporean concern: “Is there any change to your creative freedom?”

“It’s a very complicated kind of feeling beyond happiness and gratification.”

Performing arts was an unexpected path which also seemed a birthright for Goh. Though he wanted to be a painter when studying fine arts at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, one of his earliest memories was touring Malaysia and Singapore with his mother’s Chinese street opera troupe.

He was on stage even in his mother’s womb. She once lost her footing – “I didn’t die” – and he later volunteered to play minor roles, as a little helper or a eunuch.

But this early immunisation against stage fright had a more lasting impact beyond exposure and aesthetics. Goh, who was doted on by troupe and audience members, fell in love with the creative bonhomie and off-stage camaraderie that have sustained so many theatremakers.

“They took me out to makan (eat) or sightsee, then my mum couldn’t find me, so that was a very colourful chore,” he recalls, adding reverentially of this early context: “I always believe that there’s a larger being guiding us, and that performance has to be associated with the support of the audience and interactivity.”

Still, this passion was momentarily forgotten when he became a “normal” child in Singapore, aspiring to hone his skills as an oil artist painting abstract figurative works. “I’m never naturalistic.”

Until the sprite of theatre once more beckoned through Kuo Pao Kun’s Mama Looking For Her Cat in 1988, widely recognised as Singapore’s first multilingual play.

And here, his sense of wonder returns anew: “I mean, what was that all about? It was visual art in movement, emotion, the use of human beings as the communicative tool in art creation. I fell in love.”

Later, he would come to see theatre as a more collaborative – read: complicated – way of painting. “I use colour and composition, light and shadow. It’s just a different canvas, but now I have to work with drama kings and queens.”

By 1990, he and 13 others who performed in Kuo’s Lao Jiu, staged at that year’s Singapore Arts Festival, struck out to create their own company with no expectations.

Five sold-out shows at The Substation of the no-dialogue RedEar gave him the confidence to dive headlong into his new field, serving as artistic director but in practice also writer, designer, administrator and accountant.

Goh also has the distinction of being the pioneer recipient of a scholarship given by credit card company Visa, the Visa Arts Scholarship, which took him to Britain with its established theatre pedigree in 1996.

The National Theatre is his favourite company, which he says got him to view the art form as a tradition, with British audience – and here the wayang language again – like “devotees to a temple”.

This same fervent faith, he says, is not the case in Singapore, but taking his

The Crab Flower Club

– inspired by Chinese classic Dream Of The Red Chamber – to China came close.

“Their style is very dramatic, but ours is not so. It’s different and, structure-wise, we have an open ending. So, they came to share their thoughts and watched in great detail. I loved the audience. Whenever we have the opportunity, we’ll take our shows there.”

This banner production, as well as

Titoudao

, drawn from his mother’s traditional arts heritage, has given Toy Factory Productions a double-edged reputation for mother-tongue theatre, or at least theatre built on traditional material.

More recently, it has staged such shows as

Quest – The White Hare

(2023), about a company trying to pay off renovation debts by staging Hokkien opera The White Hare;

Ignite The Sun

(2023), which digs into xinyao’s roots in then-Nanyang University; and

Moonlit City

(2025), a xinyao twist on the romance between Singapore’s first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and wife Kwa Geok Choo.

But Goh insists on his company’s shape-shifting credentials. “We want to keep evolving. We are interested in creating original works from Singapore and South-east Asia. We are completely open to bilingual and English theatre as long as we are talking about Singapore stories – past, present or future.”

A lack of a clearly defined niche may be a problem for the audience, but “we don’t see that as a problem”, he asserts, nonetheless adding he is not throwing in the towel with Chinese theatre – yet. “The fewer people at the theatre, the more creative we have to be. I have to contribute more.”

The Cultural Medallion comes with an $80,000 grant to support the recipient’s pursuits, which Goh wants to use to grow the awareness of Singapore theatre overseas and to reach out to tourists, as well as help the next generation of arts practitioners, who will always need support measures like scholarships and awards.

Far from his harshest critic, his mother remains his most loving supporter, and a model for lifelong craft, with a new show at Kreta Ayer People’s Theatre on the cards.

She has inundated him with unmitigated praise – with the exception of one show, Titoudao, which depicted her milieu.

“She and her friends found it too contemporary, and once in a while, they ask: ‘Why so monotone?’”