What is The Death of Singapore Theatre as Scripted by the Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore about?
The Death of Singapore Theatre is a one-woman show that’s written as a direct address to Singapore’s censors. If you look at the poster for the show, there’s a little bit of an Easter egg there. Pay attention to the letters that are in different colours, which are, incidentally, the colours of IMDA’s logo… 👀
In the show, the text is written a letter addressed to the IMDA, so you could say it’s a bit of a love letter, but an anguished love letter. The play almost takes on the arc of a spurned lover – it’s written from the point of view of someone in a non-reciprocal relationship, where the other partner is not really responding to or stonewalling you, while they actually hold all the cards in the relationship. There’s a lot of angst that comes with that kind of one-sided dynamic. Maybe the title might give the impression that this is quite an intellectual, even cerebral, work. But I think it’s a deeply emotional one as well.
The work also traces the history of theatre regulation in Singapore. It goes all the way from the good old colonial days, right up to the present moment, and we see how all the different kinds of influences – from culture wars to moral panic and all that – have shaped censorship policy in Singapore.
Why did you decide to write this show?
I’ve always been intrigued by the exercise of censorship in Singapore, where scripts need to be vetted by the IMDA before they are given a license to be performed. There’s no way you can stage anything without first applying for an arts entertainment license. And I wonder why that is, because this is not something that happens in many other societies, where you can just go ahead and put up a show without submitting a script beforehand. So I think, as an artist in Singapore, I’ve always felt that I had to question these rather extraordinary circumstances that govern art-making here.
But I also have personal reasons for doing this. In my time, my work has received some puzzling ratings, which makes me want to question the way scripts are interpreted and the kinds of ratings that are given to them.
It’s very hard for my plays, other than the pantomimes mostly pitched at kids, to get ratings other than ‘Advisory 16’ or ‘Restricted 18’. That’s why you might think – “Wah, this Alfian, what does he write? Pornographic stuff? Violent stuff? Really controversial stuff?” But the only thing is that my plays are, well, political.
Let me give you an example. Merdeka (2019) was rated ‘Advisory 16’, with the consumer advice ‘Some Mature Content’ as the play includes “some racial stereotyping and references to violence and coarse language”. There was one Malay character who says that he accepted the narrative of how the Sultan and the Temenggong supposedly sold off the island of Singapore, because he had internalised racist self-loathing – in this case, the notion that Malay people are only concerned about short-term gains, and don’t think about the future. He is critiquing the way he has internalised racism, which makes the play anti-racist. So to get a rating that flags racial stereotyping, as if there’s something in the work that is racist, is problematic.
Here’s another example, which I think is even more nonsense. In 2022, my play, Pulau Ujong [which looks at climate change and how our actions affect the natural world], received an ‘Advisory 16’ classification with the consumer advice, ‘Some Mature Content’, as it explores “the impact and cost of development on the environment”. [Alfian takes a long beat in silence] That’s it.
Ratings like these make you wonder: what are they thinking? And if they’re not giving many clues to you as to what they’re thinking, then you start to speculate about what they’re thinking. This then leads you to wonder: how did we arrive at this point when people are making quite subjective and arbitrary decisions about how art is perceived and interpreted in Singapore?
Do you feel there is a place for ratings for theatre in Singapore?
Ratings are fundamentally about restricting access to certain works, which I think goes to the heart of what freedom of expression is about. There’s this assumption that freedom of expression is about the rights of the artists to express themselves. But free expression is also about the rights of the audience to receive information, as stated in Article 19 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.
So, when we have a classification system in Singapore, they are trying to restrict what classes of people – in this case, by age groups – can watch certain works. I do think there is some merit to doing so for children and younger people when the works involved contain, let’s say, extreme violence or graphic sexual depictions.
But, when it comes to political content, it’s very simple for me. If you’re not going to put ratings on, say, political election rallies, if you don’t gatekeep those events by implying that children aren’t mature enough to attend them, why are you trying to gatekeep plays?
There’s also a ‘chicken and egg’ element to this concept of political maturity because you’re telling a younger person, on one hand, that they’re not politically mature enough to watch something… but they would also never become politically mature unless they were exposed to that something in the first place! You’ll never mature if you don’t encounter something that allows you to critically question and examine your own political beliefs.
It’s unfortunate to me that there’s this arbitrary marker – being 16, or 18, years old – at which point you supposedly have the mental faculties to process political concepts. But I think we are surrounded by politics, and actually having political literacy as young as possible is important. When you start reading newspapers, like when you’re in primary school, it would be good for you to understand certain things like: What is the angle of this article? What is the media bias? What position is the reporter taking?
The show brings us through quite the history of censorship in Singapore — can you tell us more about what your research process was like?
I did quite a bit of research for this show. There were a few academics and scholars who have been very helpful to my work – people like Terence Chong, Tan Tarn How and Cherian George, who’ve written a lot about cultural policy and censorship by the state in Singapore.
I also looked through newspaper archives, and I was actually quite surprised to learn about how Singapore’s early censorship policy mostly dealt with public nuisance, such as street wayang – the aim, back then, was to control public performances to maintain order and minimise public disruption.
But then, along the way, you had the Malayan Emergency from 1948 to 1960, when the Communist ideology became viewed by the colonial authorities as a threat. So, in addition to controlling for noise, they also wanted to surveil and control the content of any art being made – to ensure that you won’t be able to stage pro-Communist, pro-leftist agitprop theatre, for example, if that’s what you wanted to do.
It was really interesting to see how a law that first arose because people wanted to get some sleep, evolved over time into this tool in the arsenal of the colonial authorities, when they were losing sleep over the Communist threat.
As a veteran theatre-maker in Singapore, what are some of your more memorable encounters with the IMDA when it comes to censorship of your shows?
I experienced a baptism by fire when it comes to censorship, because, at the tender age of 22, I co-wrote a play called sex.violence.blood.gore with Chong Tze Chien, which was produced by The Necessary Stage and directed by Jeff Chen. We got our license really late – one or two days before the show was set to open – and we were told to remove three scenes from the show. And so we were suddenly faced with this dilemma: should we go ahead with the show, or should we just cancel the whole run?
Ultimately, we made the decision to go ahead with the show. What we did was have certain ‘placeholders’ to signal to the audience that the three scenes in question had been tampered with. For example, the actors would still do the scene, but they were moving at high speed and you couldn’t hear what they were saying. We would also play the song I Am What I Am by Gloria Gaynor so that every time this song came on, the audience would be cued to realise that, ‘Okay, this part is censored.’
The other thing we did was print out the censored scenes and distribute copies to the audience. After all, there was nothing in the licensing conditions that said we couldn’t publish, print and disseminate these scenes – we just couldn’t perform them.
What was interesting for me about this experience was that, not only did I learn about how censorship operates in Singapore, from licenses that come in at the last minute on opening day, to all the conditions you have to fulfil before you can even perform, I also learned about strategies of resistance. It was so important for me to know that you don’t just bow down and roll over. There are ways to fight back. What we did was make the censorship visible. Because most of the time, when censorship happens, it’s very invisible. In a film, for instance, there’s suddenly a jump-cut, which makes the audience wonder if something is amiss but they can’t really pinpoint it. I always believe that censored films should add blank screens with the words ‘Scene cut by IMDA’ for as long as a censored scene lasts.
So… how did you get this play past the censors?
We submitted the script, as required, which has to be done at least two months before the actual production.
To be honest, my initial idea for this show was that I would send IMDA a script, and they would come back to me with a set of questions. I would respond to those questions, and this email correspondence would become part of this script. So, in a way, they would be my co-writers for this show.
Unfortunately, maybe they sensed that this is what I was going to do. So they did not bite. Usually, if you don’t give them enough stage directions, they would ask questions like “What is the duration of this kiss?” Like that makes a difference to anything! But, this time, we didn’t hear from them for a while. And then we finally received an email and it was just one question: “What is the purpose of this play?”
That was so interesting because there was only one question asked, and so it suddenly became such a loaded question. So I got together with the team, which at that point was The Substation, to strategise how to answer this question. We were wondering things like – Why this question? Is it a trap? Would our answer implicate us or jeopardise the production in any way?
So what we decided to do was throw the synopsis back at them, which answers the question: the purpose of the play is to examine the history of theatre regulation in Singapore. We never did receive a response from them, but I heard that the script was sent to an internal arts consultative committee for them to decide whether or not to pass it, and it was eventually passed with Advisory 16.
I do think the play’s title does put them in a bit of a bind. With the word ‘IMDA’ in there, it would not look like a very objective decision If they decided not to give it a license – it wouldn’t look good in the press. But passing the play wouldn’t look good on them either. So I think it was a bit of a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation.
What do you hope audiences will take away from this show? / Why should other people watch this show?
So I hope audiences who come to watch the show will go away thinking more about how we make theatre in Singapore, because it’s not just a creative process, it’s a whole political and bureaucratic process that’s involved, you know?
If you’re a theatre lover, I think it’s important to understand the struggle that goes into making work in Singapore. I hope audiences go away with a better understanding of how difficult it is to actually stage a work in Singapore, and hopefully they will support us in advocating for change, because, as people who watch theatre and who support it, I do believe that they are very, very important stakeholders in the conversation. It is my hope that it is not just artists who advocate for change in the future, but members of the public as well – who believe that their own freedom of expression, their ability to receive artworks in their original, authentic, unmolested form, is being impinged upon.
Interview By: Shawne Wang
