Singapore's Discomfort Zone

Explain that in the context of your play " JBJ. "
Wong: AT one level, JBJ are the initials of J. B. Jeyaretnam, the first opposition leader after the ruling PAP had established its dominance and run Singapore essentially without any opposition in Parliament. JBJ came along and won one seat and was, I suppose, a thorn in the side of the government. He was eventually removed by investigations into his party, its financing, etc. So the title of the play is "The Campaign to Confer the Public Service Star"—which is one of the highest public-service awards one can give in Singapore—"on JBJ." The play is a bit of a satire. The real JBJ does not actually figure in it, but what I wanted to look at was the phenomenon of a JBJ. The sense of apprehension that came across almost everyone when I mentioned the title was fun. And the fact that there were cabs going around Singapore with "I Love JBJ" posters on the sides of them also just made me happy.

Heng: Two hundred taxis!

Were there things in the play that you were surprised that no one said anything about?
Wong: Even the title. We were not sure that having even the initials JBJ in the title wouldn't scuttle the play before anyone had a chance to see it. In fairness to everyone in officialdom, the play was submitted for vetting and came back uncut. My sense is that there has been some movement.

Kwek: I actually almost take it as a mark of how well we're doing when [a script] comes back with questions, because that means we're doing our jobs. If it comes back totally uncut it means we're not pushing hard enough.

Wong: All of us have been in situations where there have been cuts before. So the question is, have we changed our behavior very much? And honestly, I don't think so …

Your unhappiness would only be justified if you truly felt that some of us had stopped trying to explore where those lines were.
Kwek: Cherian George uses this wonderful phrase "calibrated coercion," and I think it more or less sums up the government's approach, which is "you never fire the gun, but it is good to have it." Party politics with a big P is dangerous ground. And I don't think it's particularly interesting, either. It is more interesting to see how the country is engaging with sensitive issues that aren't a capital P. The death penalty. Immigration. Freedom of the press, which is an issue because there's huge discord between our level of economic well-being and the space for robust discussion in the mainstream media. Playwrights are trained to straddle that divide.