Heartbreaking look at the struggles of artists
The March theatre season begins again, with three strong plays kicking it off.
MANIFESTO is maddening, exasperating, energy-sapping and heartbreaking. But you have to see it. The play tries to encapsulate many of the struggles that artists in Singapore have faced in the past 70 or so years - from being labelled Communists and Marxists to general accusations of being arrogant, self-indulgent wastrels. Yet they persevere because, as they rightly put it, there aren't many other professions in this country that consistently question why society has to be the way it is.
The people behind the play know all about the struggle. Playwright Haresh Sharma and directors Alvin Tan and Kok Heng Leun have been through the worst of it: In 1994, Sharma and Tan were placed under suspicion by the authorities for allegedly practising a Marxist brand of political theatre. Kok was then working for their theatre company The Necessary Stage. Those accusations were later dropped - but not after a nightmarish period of interrogation.
Here, they have shaped a story that spans nearly a century. It begins when two women start a theatre company in 1963, the year when Chinese middle school riots broke out. It then moves to 2016 where a group of artists are trying to present art without state intervention. It then jumps backwards to 1986 where a few theatre practitioners are undergoing training overseas when they're accused of harbouring political motives - a scene similar to what actually happened to Sharma and Tan.
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