Landlords hog centre stage

DOES everyone hate lanlords? Despite there being good ones, it is the terrible ones that people remember and bring up in conversations. They make for funnier stories, after all.

The new Mandarin play, Citizen Pig, tells the stories of the absolute worst landlords theatre directors Liu Xiaoyi and Oliver Chong have ever encountered - from the landlord who tried to pack more people in his apartment than was legally allowed, to the landlord who rented out a space that didn't even belong to him.

Liu insists these are true stories. As a new citizen from China, he's lived in the past 10 years in 10 different HDB flats, from Bedok to Geylang to Yishun, and catalogued every type of horror a tenant could experience. He says: "Land is expensive in Singapore and rents are high. Yet stories of landlords and tenants are not told on stage often enough. We're showing only a small slice of the situation in our play."