Alfian: Can you just start with a brief introduction of who you are in your practice?

Thomas: I’m Thomas Lim. I mainly write and direct in the theatre. I also work with a lot of young people in a theatre education setting and a theatre making setting, mostly with young people between 13 to 18.

Alfian: Can we start with your own personal experience with censorship? Have you had any of those over the years?

Thomas: I suppose, no matter what, as a writer, you have to submit your work to the authorities for some kind of inspection and classification. And that has been my main form of contact. Although most of the time I’ve been quite removed from it. So I write something, I submit it and then later I see what kind of rating they’ll give me. The only time I really met them face-to-face was the one where we went to IMDA together.

Alfian: Yes, we’ll chat about that later.

Thomas: Most of the other times, it’s always through emails. And sometimes they have very interesting questions about stage directions and things like that. So that’s my main sort of interaction with them.

Alfian: Let’s pursue some of these tracks. Could you tell us about some of those email exchanges if you can remember any kind of examples that you can think of their questions?

Thomas: So the most recent one I can remember was for Straight Acting. This was a play about a gay couple and a lesbian couple who concocted a plan to start their own families and have children. And so there was one particular scene where they were trying to get pregnant. And I wrote quite detailed stage directions on how that was going to happen.

Alfian: Right.

Thomas: Partly it was for the actors to know the process of it. There is an at home insemination kit, which actually is just a syringe. I can’t remember exactly what the stage directions were, but it was basically based on my research online. The lesbian couple would take the syringe of semen from the men, and then they would have to inseminate themselves. To me that scene was quite funny, so I tried to lean into the more physical aspects of comedy there. So I had a quite detailed set of stage directions there. One of it, if I’m remembering correctly, involved a particular practice that will increase the chances of successful insemination. And that is, the lesbian couple will have to raise their legs and hold it there for around 30 minutes so that the sperm can travel by gravity to the egg and hopefully fertilise it.

And I got an email back from IMDA. They were very interested to know how that was going to be done on stage. There were multiple doors on stage, and they were opening and closing, like what happens in a farce. I wrote that one of the women had their legs up while the other one was going in and out and so there was a slight exposure. The gay characters would enter and start screaming, that sort of thing. So I remember having to think, how do I describe this to them? You never think you would talk about these kinds of things with an IMDA Officer.

Alfian: So how did you describe it to them?

Thomas: By the time they were asking those questions, we were already in rehearsals and because I was directing the work, I knew that that was not something that we were going to do on stage. Simply because of the set. So I took some time to kind of get back to them and I said, “Actually we’re not doing this part and actually it’s just a matter of opening and closing doors.”

Alfian: So directorially, you just decided you’re not going do it? It wasn’t because of the IMDA.

Thomas: No, by the time they asked the question, we were at the point of rehearsal where the set didn’t allow for that to happen anyway.

Alfian: So what do you think IMDA’s concern was?

Thomas: I think it was nudity. Because I had written that legs were going to be up in the air. So I think they were concerned with the image. But before we even started, we knew this was going to be a R18 play anyway. Because of the queer characters.

Alfian: So, were your actors going to be nude in that particular sequence of raising their legs?

Thomas: Definitely not. You’ll need to formalise something like that in the actor’s contract. So I was also very aware and careful. As a director, you don’t want to expose your actors in ways that they don’t want to be exposed on stage. But the assumption from IMDA is always like, “Oh, that’s going to happen.” They forget that when we build the work, we also build it with a certain attitude of care for the people that we’re working with as well.

Alfian: So I want to move now to talking about Grandmother Tongue, which was given an Advisory 16 rating. Basically, it was given that rating in 2016. And then when Wild Rice wanted to restage it in 2017, we decided to appeal the rating down to just Advisory.

Thomas: There was strong interest from schools to come. And an Advisory 16 is often a deterrent. Even though it’s not an enforceable rating, the schools might get questions from parents. It doesn’t help that the public confuses the Advisory 16 rating in theatre [where it is recommended for those 16 years and above] with the NC16 rating in cinema [where no children under 16 are allowed admission]. We went to see IMDA to also find out the reason why we were given an Advisory 16.

Alfian: Is it true that it’s more difficult for schools to apply for arts enrichment subsidies if the play is rated Advisory 16?

Thomas: That was the case in 2016. They recently changed it, but during that time, I remember you needed a letter of eligibility. I believe that’s what it was called, to get the Tote Board subsidy. It’s not that you couldn’t bring someone who’s below 16 to an Advisory 16 show, but there were extra steps involved. More paperwork.

Alfian: Right. I guess it’s one way to make teachers take responsibility for their students encountering “mature” stuff. So, in that IMDA meeting it was basically you, the playwright; I was there as Resident Playwright of Wild Rice and then there was Koh Bee Bee, our producer. We submitted a request to reconsider their rating because we argued that the use of the expletives had to be seen in context.

Thomas: It was interesting that there is a classification for the different kinds of expletives used.

Alfian: Oh yes, absolutely.

Thomas: Like, if you say “fuck”, it’s like, I think one of the lowest ratings. And then when you go into the vernaculars, like Teochew and Hokkien expletives, suddenly instantly it becomes Advisory 16. And some of the expletives that were used in Grandmother Tongue were just references to body parts.

Alfian: Can you describe the scenes in which these expletives were used, and in what context?

Thomas: So I was playing with the audience in this particular scene. A lot of the play is performed in Teochew and there are English and Mandarin surtitles. There was this particular scene where the character of the grandmother requested for those subtitles to be turned off. If you were not familiar with Teochew, you wouldn’t know what the grandmother was talking about. So in this particular segment, the grandson and the grandmother were discussing how the younger generations, do not speak the languages of Teochew, Hokkien, Hakka, and they can’t really communicate with their grandparents. So the grandson replied, “They do know some expletives.” And so the grandmother wanted to try out to see if she will get a response from the audience. And so she tried a few.

Alfian: What were the expletives, by the way?

Thomas: The biggest one was “chee bye” of course, which is understood in both Hokkien and Teochew.

Alfian: That’s a reference to female genitalia, right?

Thomas: Yeah, but the context in which she was saying it was, she was not cursing at someone else. She was simply testing the idea that most people now, especially the younger generation, only know the coarse parts of her language. She said it with no malice, you know?

Alfian: I think the very fact that the audience was responding with that laughter of recognition also means that you’re not teaching them a new word.

Thomas: Yeah. I wasn’t translating it for them.

Alfian: I think fundamentally, when dealing with minors, you don’t want expletives to be glamorised. Right? You don’t want them to be normalised. You don’t want to have characters where after every two words, they use a bad word, and another character is just lapping it up. In your scene, the character is basically testing the linguistic competency of the audience. And her grandson scolds her for using the word, so that’s reinforcing social disapproval. And she replies, “If you shower, don’t you wash your chee bye?” Which made me wonder—maybe she doesn’t have a whole array of words to describe that part of the anatomy. She doesn’t have access to a word that’s more scientific, or euphemistic.

Thomas: Yeah.

Alfian: Do you remember at one point during the meeting, we were asked if we wanted the rating lowered so that we could sell more tickets? That was strange. Because if it was about selling tickets, then we could have just removed the expletives.

Thomas: For me, the concern wasn’t about ticket sales. The play was sold out in 2016, and again in the 2017 restaging. The play was very near and dear to my heart because it was semi-autobiographical, so it felt like my story was being rated. Which was like being told, “Your story isn’t suitable to be shared with everyone.”

Alfian: I think for me it was also to argue for a more nuanced application of the rating. You don’t just spot three expletives, then you refer to your rubric, and then you slap on an Advisory 16.

Thomas: Yeah.

Alfian: So anyway, for me it seemed like the contention was about these expletives. Then at some point they suddenly let slip that, “Oh it’s also the religious thing.”

Thomas: Yeah. I had my suspicion going in that religion was going to be one of the key things. There was that scene in the play, right?

Alfian: Yes, can you describe it a little bit?

Thomas: In the play, the grandmother’s son is a Christian. And it’s a reimagining of an aunty that I have, who is Christian. Towards the later part of the grandmother’s life, the son comes in to try to convert the grandmother to Christianity. Even though throughout her entire life, she’s been a Taoist. So it was quite a heated scene, Christianity versus Taoism. In the meeting with IMDA, they mentioned something like having to be accountable for complaints that they will receive about scenes like that.

Alfian: Do you think that there was just cause for their concern? Do you think they get complaints like that?

Thomas: I remember the first staging back in 2016. My technical manager had a student who came to watch the show. And they threw the technical manager a question for me about that scene. They asked, “Why is the Christian character portrayed like that?”

Alfian: Oh, that’s a very interesting question.

Thomas: Yeah. So my response to that was, “My intention was not to portray every single Christian out there.”

Alfian: Yes.

Thomas: I feel like in Singapore, there’s this idea that anything you put on stage represents the entire community. I think that kind of thinking is limiting as well as damaging to the artist.

Alfian: Right.

Thomas: We live in such a diverse country and community, and we know that there are so many different views and so many different types of people.

Alfian: No, absolutely. Like you said, this character is an individual, first and foremost. He’s not out there to be an ambassador of Christianity. Maybe if he was a priest, then you can say he might represent Christianity, but even then, priests are individuals too. They have public and private selves. When you mentioned “Christianity versus Taoism” just now, I was wondering whether you were appropriating the language of people who see the scene as a contest between religions. For me, it’s this son whose character was quite paternalistic. And the desire for conversion isn’t just about, “Oh, I want to force you to do something”, right? It often comes from a well-meaning place.

Thomas: Yeah.

Alfian: It often comes from, “According to my beliefs, this is the only way you’ll be saved.”

Thomas: And not just that. “It’s the only way I will meet you again in the afterlife.”

Alfian: Yeah, it’s not out of pure malice or hatred for his mother. In fact it’s the opposite. At the end of the day, it’s about audience literacy, right?

Thomas: But I think it’s also productive for those questions to come in. Like that question of, “Eh, why do you write the Christian to be like that?” I think that’s part of the education and building your literacy. How do we encounter the work? How do we receive it? How does the work interact with our own set of beliefs and our experience of the world?

Alfian: I think this question of representation is just so crucial to our understanding of why people take offence. After a performance of Hotel, a lady, maybe in her 50’s, came up to me. While I was signing books, she suddenly leaned over the cordon and with her voice shaking, said, “I think you should do more research about nurses. They don’t just clean up patients.” A nurse character in the play had made a joke about cleaning bedsheets.  I told her that she meant it as a joke and that she was a private nurse, but she said, “No, even private nurses have to be registered.” I gathered she was a nurse herself and she felt this was a misrepresentation of nurses.

Thomas: But it’s just that one nurse.

Alfian: What is our obligation as artists? Do we create characters who are all good or who don’t make fun of themselves? The best plays have flawed characters; we’re not putting saints on stage. I believe we should be accountable for what we write. But…

Thomas: But are we also accountable for how audiences choose to read what we write?

Alfian: I have to admit that I got a little bit upset by that encounter with the lady. It was totally unexpected. I felt I had been misread. I don’t want to be glib and say that you can’t please everyone. But I think  it’s futile to pre-empt reactions. Because you really can’t predict how your words will be received.

Thomas: But that’s kind of the beauty of it?

Alfian: We see beauty, but the censors see liability. Going back to that meeting, in the end they didn’t accept our appeal and Grandmother Tongue was still Advisory 16. But I want to show you this. In 2016, this was the classification information. It said, “for its exploration of socio-political issues and the use of expletives”. And in 2017, after our meeting with them, it was changed.

Thomas: It was?

Alfian: The rating was the same of course. But the new classification said, “due to the religious references and infrequent use of expletives.” So this is my theory. What they were unhappy about, from the beginning, was that the play was critical of language policies in Singapore. The banning of the Southern Chinese languages, the promotion of Mandarin, such that generations of Chinese became estranged from each other. They don’t want young people to reflect on their inability to communicate with their grandparents and realise that part of the reason is due to government policy. So there’s this intention to maintain an image of the Singapore government as one that doesn’t make mistakes with all these social costs and repercussions.

Thomas: Possibly.  

Alfian: So my sense is that, sometimes their concern is with the politics of the play. Unfortunately, their guidelines do not explicitly cover the political; it’s more focussed on nudity and sex and violence. Except some broad category of “national security”. So they latch on things “expletives” and “religious sensitivities”, but actually the real target is the political.

Thomas: I do wonder if the change in classification information between the first and second staging was also because of some responses that they got from the first staging. Maybe someone wrote in or something to ask, “Why is the Christian character like that?” But that also kind of makes them look a bit shaky, right? Like you’re so reactionary, responding to that kind of letter. Like your only principles are self-preservation and reputation-management. But we don’t know what’s really going on.

Alfian: Yeah, we don’t know what their internal processes are like. I’m curious about what’s your general attitude towards theatre censorship.

Thomas: I think we’ve got to consider how a theatregoer goes to the theatre, right? Before you make the decision to watch show, you would see the title, the key visual and the marketing images, and you would read the synopsis. And then of course, you would check the ticket price, which is usually not cheap in Singapore. It’s not something where you can walk into the cinema after dinner and you decide, “Let’s buy a ticket and watch a movie.” I go through those decisions myself when I choose what I want to watch. And honestly, if it’s not something that I feel I would enjoy, then I won’t buy the ticket. But to insist that something must be banned because it’s not my cup of tea is to deprive others of their experience, and possibly their enjoyment or edification. It means that I don’t believe in respecting difference and diversity.

Alfian: You’ve worked a lot with young people. What’s your sense of their encounters with censorship?

Thomas: I think the very first censor that they encounter is their own educational institution.

Alfian: Right.

Thomas: When I work with them, sometimes I discover that censorship is very internalised as well. That’s something I’m also trying to navigate in my practice. Those OB markers [out of bound markers] in your head, right? It’s just there from very early on. In my own writing as well, sometimes I stumble upon it and I ask, “Hey, why am I thinking this way?” Or “Why am I feeling this way about crossing this line?”

Alfian: And of course, you have had direct encounters with educational institutions, because you were doing stuff with schools. Have you ever had to change anything in your writing because a school said “no”?

Thomas: I think a lot of it comes when you have very centralised things like the SYF [Singapore Youth Festival]. Like IMDA, you have to send your script two or three months before the show. I wrote a 15-minute play once that was based on rental discrimination. Housing ads would state, “no PRCs [mainland Chinese]” or “no Indians”. And that was quite a heated conversation in the country at that time. I was working in a school where some of the students were the children of these immigrants who had come to Singapore to work. These kids were between 13 to 16 years old. They shared some material for the play. So I put it into words. I wrote it. I submitted it. And then basically SYF came back to us to say that it was not approved.

Alfian: Oh my god, why?

Thomas: I don’t really know. Maybe because it was a very heated issue at the time. And I think they didn’t want young minds to think about it.

Alfian: Wow. So it wasn’t just about changing a few lines, whatever. The whole script…

Thomas: It was like, “You can’t talk about this.”

Alfian: This is really extreme.

Thomas: I don’t know why it’s policed at that level, because they have no information on the ground on what’s happening. You don’t know the process that we go through, so you just look at the script and you say yes, or no. You say, “You are not mature enough to talk about this.” But many of the kids who were in that drama club were children of these immigrants and migrant workers, you know.

Alfian: Right.

Thomas: They have more insight into that experience than any of the SYF people. And yeah, it always feels like that. A judgement comes from the top, without an understanding of the care and the process. It’s not just the instructors, but also the teachers-in-charge of the drama club; all of us take time to unpack some of these issues, to talk to the kids. But the response is just this axe that comes down with a hard “no”.

Alfian: So what happened after that script was rejected?

Thomas: I remember having to scramble to rewrite the whole thing and then resubmit that. So it became something about an old person. Because we had some elements of the set already. We had to keep it within a domestic setting. I can’t remember the exact details of that play, but it shifted the issue completely from race and nationality into something to do with age.

Alfian: So it seems like the people running SYF are not in favour of socially conscious theatre at all.

Thomas: My sense is that they tend to favour plays that are usually some kind of a classic. Or if not, just something less “controversial”.

Alfian: So that’s the SYF.  But within educational institutions, have you had interactions with teachers, or principals, who tell you what to do?

Thomas: I think you’ll be surprised to know that most of the teachers I’ve worked with, especially those in charge of the English drama clubs and CCAs, are actually very supportive. Those are the ones who also take the time to join in the rehearsal process and they will also share their experiences. They see it as an opportunity for education. So they don’t say, “No, you cannot talk about it.”. Instead, I often hear them say, “Sure let’s talk about it. And let’s explore what these issues mean to you when you grow up next time.” But when the  axe comes down, that’s it lah.

Alfian: And what was the students’ response when they found out that they couldn’t do this play that they had worked on with you?

Thomas: I can’t recall the students’ response. But I remember the teacher-in-charge was in some sort of panic. And understandably so ,because there was paperwork that she then had to. I suppose to answer to her superiors, like, “Hey, how come we got rejected? How come this was allowed through?”

Alfian: Oh my gosh.

Thomas: I remember a phone call that I had with her. And she was kind of frazzled because that’s not a nice experience to go through. And she was on the receiving end of it.

Alfian: I mean, this is the way in which you keep people in line. I can imagine that she’s supportive, she believes in the project, but then the cost of it at the end of the day is so high. As you mentioned, “How did this get through?”. I find that’s such a pernicious question. There’s this assumption that, “Okay, we give you this power, we give you this position, but in return, we also expect you to police.”

Thomas: Yeah.

Alfian: If you fail to police, then that means you are not performing your function properly. And I think that just gets drummed into people—that dreaded question, “How did this get through?” You can totally imagine that’s a question that’s permeated the bureaucracy and really leads to risk-averse and approval-seeking behaviour.

Thomas: Yeah.

Alfian: Let’s talk about some of the young people that you worked with. You mentioned that you’ve observed how some features of censorship have been internalised. What are some examples of this?

Thomas: So I run the Singapore Youth Theatre programme under Wild Rice that I have. This is the fourth batch that we’re working with. They spend a year with us, and they learn different parts of the theatre. At the end of that one year, they would devise something of their own creation and then perform that. So a lot of it comes from their own personal experiences and stories they want to tell. I remember our very first batch. It was interesting because there were no precedents, that was the very first batch of the Singapore Youth Theatre. We were in the devising phase, and they were testing the waters. Because I think in school, they are so used to not being able to go into certain areas and subject matters.

Alfian: That’s what schools do; they repress.

Thomas: Yeah. So they would devise a scene, and then they would realise that Ezzat and I, who were running the program at the time, wouldn’t comment on the content of it. We wouldn’t be policing the content. And then week by week, they started to get a little bolder. They were pushing their own invisible boundaries in their heads.

Alfian: What are some examples?

Thomas: So they started with things that were very far from us. Like Trump, because the year was 2020. So there were a lot of Trump impersonations. And then they started to look a little closer to home. One of it was, in 2020, there was the incident in NUS. About the student who filmed another student while she was in the shower.

Alfian: Okay, right. The perp was the NUS student Nicholas Lim, right?  

Thomas: Correct. Some of the participants at that time felt like it wasn’t dealt with properly and justice wasn’t fully served. Because the issue was so heated at the time, I don’t imagine that’s something you can talk about or put into a performance in school.

Alfian: That’s great. I love that they were becoming more and more grounded.

Thomas: They came in with the assumption that, “Oh, we can’t do certain things.” But our stand always is that at the end of the day, the script is going to be submitted to IMDA. We are not going to be the ones to rate you or censor you. You do what you want to do. Then we will let IMDA do their job. We’re not going to do their job for them.

Alfian: Yes, of course.

Thomas: I’ve learned a few interesting things across the years. In the first batch, we had a participant who had very supportive parents. He had his own drag persona, and he was kind of exploring that phase of his life. We thought that was a very interesting story and we worked with him to put that story on stage. But we were later approached by another participant from that batch. They were brought up in a Christian household. And there was some subject matter explored by the rest of the group that they weren’t particularly comfortable with. They didn’t want to say that the whole group couldn’t go into those areas, and so we asked, “Okay, what can we do for you?” And they said, “Would it be okay if I’m not in those scenes?” And I said, “Yeah, sure, it’s completely fine. It’s part of your journey at this current moment.”

Alfian: That’s very important for them to know that their stand would be respected.

Thomas: I’m not sure where they stand now. They weren’t particularly committed to any particular stand. It was just at that point, they felt not very comfortable being in those scenes. It was a really nice conversation. It was very mature for them to come up and say that to us. But it was in that spirit of not cutting things out and allowing for space and co-existing.

Alfian: Yes, and not coercing or forcing people to do things that they’re not comfortable with, right? And to allow them to define their own boundaries. So what are these scenes that they were guarded about? Is it queer stuff?

Thomas: Anything to do with sex or the LGBTQ community and anything in those regions, yeah.

Alfian: Right. I just find that this is such an important counter to the perception that when we are in an artistic space, then we’re going to exploit that space to deviously influence young minds. There’s this anxiety that if you’re in this space with liberal ideas, then, as a young person, you’ll adopt those ideas because you don’t want to seem old-fashioned or uncool. But from your example, it does seem like young people already have a sense of what their values and boundaries are, and given a space of freedom, will readily articulate and assert those.

Thomas: Yeah, we don’t give young people enough credit. As educators, sometimes it’s important that we don’t close the doors in their faces. We have to trust them. We trust them to do the right thing, but we also trust them to make mistakes. In a safe setting. That’s how they grow.

(Uploaded: 14 March 2024)