The NS play you didn't expect

LUCAS Ho's new play about National Service (NS) turns the genre on its head. Whereas plays and films like Army Daze and Ah Boys To Men depict the experience of conscription humorously, Ho does something else with the genre - he depicts it as a kind of limbo outside of real life, a forced hiatus from the relationships, jobs and family life the men face daily.

Titled FRAGO, the drama also differs from other NS fiction in that it focuses on older men on the cusp of turning 30 doing their reservist training, rather than young men in their late teens during their two-year full-time service. FRAGO (short for "Fragmentary Order", a military term for a new operational order that supersedes an earlier one) tells not the typical fish-out-of-water tale, but one about not-so-young men grappling with the realities of adulthood, and what it means to be a good, conscientious man today.

Ho, 33, bases most of the story from his first-hand experiences. The school teacher-turned-playwright explains: "It's different when you're turning 30 and doing the war game exercises. Your body isn't what it was when you were 19 or 20. You're going into the forest with your rifle and other battle gear, sleeping on the ground, eating combat rations ... and you feel a kind of fatigue you didn't experience 10 years ago. There's physical weariness and also a kind of resentment.