One of Asia’s premiere festivals dedicated to promoting the work of new playwrights returns as the line-up for this year’s Singapore Theatre Festival is announced, combining acclaimed productions with little-seen recent works.The month-long event, now in its fifth year, will showcase eight plays at the Lasalle College of the Arts. Among these are three plays written by first-time playwrights. In a slightly ironic note, two of these plays by young directors focus around elderly characters, with “My Mother Buys Condoms,” by Helmi Yusof, focusing on a burgeoning relationship between a retired teacher and a repairman who she teaches how to read, and writer-director Thomas Lim’s “Grandmother Tongue” which tells the story of the various failures to communicate between a young man and his Teochew-speaking grandmother.In contrast, Nessa Anwar presents “Riders Know When It’s Gonna Rain,” the coming of age story of four members of a motorcycling gang, which will be getting its first full staging following a premiere at the 2015 Singapore Writers Festival.Alongside the playwriting debuts, the festival will feature two plays announced in March 2016 as leading the nominations for the Straits Times’ Life! Theatre Awards. These include the 5-hour “HOTEL,” which recounts the history of a hotel, and by extension of Singapore, over a century. The play will be presented in two parts as a wide cast of characters weather the transition of the country from British to Malaysian territory, and finally to independence. At the Life! awards ceremony, held April 25, the play is in the running for seven awards, including production of the year.Another play from the festival also in the running for awards is Alfian Sa’at’s “Geng Rebut Cabinet,” with three nominations for its writing and acting, which explores the role of minorities in elections in a satirical farce of demographic-based politics.The festival line up is completed by “Geylang,” a love letter-of-sorts to the district of the same name, “Hawa,” a three character exploration of love, faith, and sex, and “Let’s Get Back Together,” an exploration of the LGBT community often suppressed by officials in Singapore.The 2016 Singapore Theatre Festival Runs June 30-July 24 at Lasalle College of the Arts.
↧