Singapore's Discomfort Zone

Wong: I wouldn't exaggerate how many people. It was magnetic precisely because people had not seen such things happening before. In those days you would write a play and practice for months and then it would run for two afternoons in the Shell Theater to 200 people.

What subjects were permissible in the 1980s?
Wong: In the very first short-play competition there were entries like mine, which made fun of a certain political party that was always dressed in white. People were writing about anything that interested them, about the Singapore identity and all those questions we asked growing up as a nation.

When did the " out-of-bounds markers " become visible?

Alfian Sa ' at: There was a theater company called the Third Stage, and for them the idea was that theater in Singapore would go through different stages. First you have a lot of British plays. Then you have actors trying local adaptations. In the third stage you have indigenous theater. They did works like "Esperanza," which dealt with the issue of foreign workers-specifically maids-in Singapore. [In 1987], two of them were rounded up as part of a so-called Marxist conspiracy and under the Internal Security Act accused of all these wild things …

Wong: No, no, no. The irony is that what they were accused of was not at all wild. Even if they had done what the government said, it seemed to me there was nothing at all wrong about it.

Sa ' at: That was quite disturbing, and if I'm not wrong, [then prime minister] Lee Kuan Yew said something along the lines that he considered the so-called conspirators dangerous because he couldn't understand why some of them, who were lawyers, would give up good jobs to earn $400 to $500 a month, in social work, for example. For him, the only kind of people who would do these things were conspirators, communists and dissidents, people who were willing to sacrifice very pragmatic concerns for their ideals.