THE
WRITERS' LAB
24-Hour Playwriting Competition - 2008
Judges’ Comments from Dr KK Seet
Perhaps it had to do with the precinct of Joo Chiat , for we were inundated with a glut of plays about the Peranakan heritage. What captivated us, consequently, were plays that deviated from this formula and proffered an original premise while integrating the stimuli in an organic, unobtrusive way. The incorporation of the stimuli proved to be the major stumbling block this year, in particular the final stimulus involving the taxi, which in many cases, made the aspiring dramatists suddenly lose sight of a carefully constructed mise-en-scene with impossible cinematic scenarios involving taxis speeding through Joo Chiat or in a few instances, Beijing. Once again, the plays that appealed to us were subtle meditations on, or interrogations of distinctive facets of Singaporean culture and sensibility while simultaneously carrying universal resonance and applicability.
There were two significant departures from the norm this year. Firstly, the women did a better job than the men, with all winners in the Youth Section being female, as well as another lady garnering the top prize in the Open category. Secondly, the usual suspects -and I’m referring to past winners who are regular participants - didn’t even come close. Our conjecture is that they have become too calculated and contrived in their approach, lacking the spontaneity of instinctive response to the stimuli. The sense of a predetermined literary agenda loomed large, as if the dramatic template or its rudiments, has been forged in advance and the stimuli were merely grafted accordingly. We hope the ostensible number of new faces among the winners this year will encourage more aspiring playwrights, as quite clearly, anyone has an equally good stab at winning.
The other gratifying note is the diversity among the prizewinning submissions, with equal variety of theme and treatment in both categories. This is unlike the metadramas and reality game show formats of previous years. As a result of this diversity, we could not isolate common features to talk about, and will, at the expense of announcing the winners beforehand, offer observations on each winning entry.
In the Youth Category, we had a deserving third prize in Taming of the Shoe. The title is already a giveaway where the clever use of paronomasia is concerned. Puns, ingenious equivocations and linguistic quibbles predominate in this piece about man-woman relationships. It was very entertaining within its scope, although the scope bears some extension or it would seem like a rather superficial gloss on feminism.
The second prize, a play entitled A Chinese Warrior In A Yellow Taxi Cab, is distinguished by a provocative juxtaposition of physical and metaphorical masks. The narrator Chase is a fascinating character. Bisexual and abused by a man she believes is protecting her, she dreams of being a Chinese warrior trying to rescue the woman she loves. But even in her dreams she fails.
The first prize in the Youth category is Untitled. It’s a very clever piece on the dangers of over-sanitization, over-planning, something symptomatic of the Singaporean ethos. It dramatizes through the domestic scene of a disillusioned woman and her maid, how people too focused on automatic clean-ups end up not feeling, not leaving any impact, and not knowing what they truly want. There was convincing use of the contrast between natural Singlish and a fake Standard English to bring out the motley personae people adopt. Particularly effective was the use of multimedia, which worked not only as ‘stage effects’, but as examples of how the appearance of reality can be altered, and also as externalizations of interior states.
The winning entries of the Open Category were similarly varied. We gave a merit award to a piece about the trials of family obligations during the Chinese New Year. Beneath its token melodrama, there was rich and realistic understanding of domestic squabbles, sibling rivalry and family dynamics. Although astute in its observation of Chinese New Year customs, like the unspoken rules of giving ang-pows, where the driving need to match the amount given to your own children to save face sits uneasily with the resentment that the other party has more children, the denouement is not well anticipated and strikes one as a trifle artificial. It’s certainly a play worth developing further.
We want to extol the writer of the third prize entry, Just Trash, for his compassion and humanity. When we discovered that he is an NS man and barely 21, our faith in the kindness and sensitivity of the younger generation is revived. This is a very moving piece about the flotsam and jetsam of society: the old ladies who pick up cardboard boxes for a living, the rag-and-bone man and the Bangladeshi garbage collectors. We are impressed by the fact that a young member of our community has addressed the dilemmas of a voiceless, invisible minority. Our main objection here is that Ah Ma the trash collector speaks such good English. Aside from that flaw in execution, this is a probing play that could have ranked much higher.
The second prize, Enter the (Little Lady) Dragon (of Chiat Joo ) is a tremendously fun piece. Our sole reservation is that it may work better as a short film or graphic novel, given the use of graphics even on the page. But while the character descriptions are detailed, their characteristics are less evident within the actual piece. One would prefer to learn from the action or dialogue that a character is “rather distasteful” or “alluringly multi-talented”, rather than be informed of this in an expositional way.
Finally, the most original play in this year’s competition has to be the unlikely yoking together of a ghost story and a political diatribe, with interjections of IM chat using multimedia thrown into the heady mixture for good measure. The title is a mere sequence of numbers, sufficiently intriguing yet captures the gist of the work. There were some incisively naughty political observations couched in lines like “Nobody likes a prophet”. But the subversively clever pun at end of the play really sealed it for us judges. The play was meticulously thought out, engrossing, yet highly topical. It boldly reconciled seeming contradictions in genre while not challenging credibility with its strange bedfellows. And its context was irrevocably and recognizably Singaporean!
May we take this opportunity to congratulate each and every one of the winners. Though we may have given the game away with this spiel, we are still keen, like all of you here, to put a face to each winner, and this will only be made evident in the prize presentation ceremony to follow.