Power Plays

THE THING ABOUT the arts is this: it's not easy, even for the seasoned eye, to predict whether an artwork will stand the test of time. There are, of course, benchmarks of excellence, but these don't guarantee whether, in the case of a play, it will be restaged again, attract serious academic scrutiny, be fussed and fawned over for posterity, and become part of the canon.

There are times when this reviewer thinks that a play is terrific and generations of theatregoers would admire its story, characters, themes and structure - only to find the play slipping into dramatic oblivion. And then there are plays this reviewer considers maudlin, kitschy, over-calculated and obvious, only to find them being revived time and again to the point they're billed unabashedly as "classics".

Watching the three opening plays of the sixth Singapore Theatre Festival, one wonders if any of these plays will be reworked, revived and tailored for a future audience, allowing them to inch closer towards that elusive "classic" status. But looking at them through the lens of July 2018 alone, there's no doubt that they're among the most socially and politically relevant plays about Singapore you could find today. Hopefully, they're talked about enough to prompt at least university students someday to look for their scripts.