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-wa…