Mining a dark past for a new play

IN 1994, theatre practitioners Alvin Tan and Haresh Sharma ran into trouble with the authorities for allegedly practising a Marxist brand of political theatre. A newspaper reporter pointedly asked if The Necessary Stage (TNS) members were "using theatre for a political end". The theatre company categorically denied it.

The year before, their play Off Centre about mental patients lost its funding from the commissioning body Ministry of Health because it "presented a prejudiced view of mental disorder, its treatability and the therapists, besides ridiculing God, religion and national service", the ministry said. The company went ahead and staged the play without the funding.

Fast-forward to 2014 and 2015 where Tan and Sharma, respectively, were feted at the Istana for receiving the Cultural Medallion, Singapore's highest cultural honour for artists. Not only that, Off Centre is an "O" and "N" Level text studied by tens of thousands of students. It had also just been restaged to glowing reviews for SG50 at the country's premier performing arts centre, the Esplanade.