SINGAPORE – Wild Rice’s satire of middle-class prudery G*d Is A Woman was the big winner at The Straits Times Life Theatre Awards 2024, taking home Production of the Year and a first win for playwright Joel Tan for Best Original Script.
The ensemble play impressed the judges with its ambition and sophisticated use of comedy in satirising liberal angst and bourgeois hypocrisy.
Its premise had caused some concern with the Infocomm Media Development Authority, which oversees arts licensing, and required several sit-downs with the authorities to clear.
In the play, artists frustrated with censorship start a fake petition calling on the authorities to stop American pop star Ariana Grande from performing, only for their manufactured concerns to be taken seriously, igniting a very Singaporean culture war.
Tan, a fourth-time nominee, had not written a comedy in a long time. He said it was nerve-racking to put this script, which he had been gestating since two M1 Fringe Fest shows were cancelled in 2017, in front of audiences. “Nothing is more excruciating than an unfunny comedy. I’m glad it landed and no one was hurt in the process,” he added.
He was also nominated in the category for his libretto for Butterfly Lovers, a collaboration between Wild Rice and Melbourne-based Victorian Opera on an English version of the classic Jin Dynasty love story between Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai.
Wild Rice founding artistic director Ivan Heng, who directed G*d Is A Woman, said: “When it comes to new plays, we invest everything we have. This commitment to nurturing creativity ensures that each play is a labour of love, with the potential to leave a lasting impact on audiences, and a legacy of artistic excellence for future generations.”
The Best Actress award went to Sharda Harrison for her dynamic portrayal of a drug addict in Pangdemonium’s People, Places & Things, an adaptation of English playwright Duncan Macmillan’s 2015 work that documents the circular process of addiction recovery.
Her imperious performance held the three-hour wringer together. Harrison took leave from television for the role, which Pangdemonium directors Adrian and Tracie Pang had talked to her about playing since 2020.
She said: “It is probably the most intense role I have ever portrayed. I have no regrets. I plunged to the depths of this character and it was a scary experience.”
Her former partner was an alcoholic, so she could relate to the role. She added that she was in danger of losing herself during rehearsals and lost a lot of weight.
Her then boyfriend and now husband picked her up every day and frequently cooked supper for her, supporting her through the arduous journey without demanding she leave the character at the door.
Harrison, whose TV credits include Mediacorp drama Sunny Side Up (2022 to present), added: “I still make a stand that addiction is a disease and, as a society, we could support one another more rather than stigmatise addicts.”
Singapore Theatre Company’s $2 million A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which marked the comeback of its popular Shakespeare in the Park programme at Fort Canning, earned three wins. Veteran actor Ghafir Akbar, who played the dual roles of Theseus and fairy king Oberon, won Best Actor for his energetic performance, while the production’s impressive set and costume designs beat strong competition to the finish.
Ghafir said the setting at Fort Canning Park put a physical strain on actors. He enjoys playing characters with circumstances that are very different from his own.
“It forces me to do the extra work to find empathy and understanding in worlds I may have little understanding of,” he said. “Even for characters like Oberon, which might seem frivolous, he made me understand how much more humility one needs as one gets older, richer, or gets a promotion.”
Singapore-based Briton Richard Kent designed the winning set and costumes.
The 13m-tall industrial set, inspired by oil refineries, created an alternate, post-apocalyptic version of a world normally presented as a forested idyll. With its towers and flooding pool, it offered eye-catching visuals and presented actors with a playground for the outdoor production.
“We imagined our fairy world not as one in a forest, but one which is like a mirror universe,” Kent said. “Coupling those motifs with Titania’s observations of the disturbed weather in the human world led to the idea of flooding the space, posing the question of what is left after industry stops and the elements retake the environment.”
The fairy suits were made to look patched together from scavenged industrial clothing and found items. Costume aide Tan Jia Hui led a wardrobe team that deconstructed boiler suits and added colourful webbing and nets to reflect the sort of plastic materials that could survive in the creatures’ flooded landscape.
Kent said: “I imagined them to have only a faint knowledge of the world of the humans that had come before. It gave me freedom to play with forms and shapes, and give them a handcrafted feeling. Each fairy was at once individual, but also a part of a community and collective.
The Theatre Practice’s artistic director Kuo Jian Hong won her second Best Director award.
Her restaging of the sprawling promenade theatre piece was particularly fraught due to a fire that happened on the premises just 10 days before the show’s opening.
Beyond that, Kuo said the history play was one of the most challenging productions she has worked on, unique in how the scenes were set in multiple locations.
Each 10- to 20-minute scene had to be very compact, setting historical context, and creating a dynamic story arc and meaningful character journeys.
She said: “One of the most important things is to work with the actors, to shape each scene with depth and breadth, and to make sure that they have such a strong grasp of the work to repeat it multiple times a night, with great precision.
Best Sound went to Mervin Wong for his work on immersive murder mystery Crack The Case: Mindhunter, while the cast of Agam Theatre Lab’s uproarious Twin Murder In The Green Mansion, staged during the Esplanade’s Kalaa Utsavam – Indian Festival of Arts, triumphed in the Best Ensemble category.
The cast members were co-director Karthikeyan Somasundaram, Udaya Soundari, Prasakthi Allagoo, Nallu Dhinakharan, Shaikh Yasin, Mano, Ponkumaran and Indu Elangovan.
They dedicated themselves to five months of intense rehearsals – longer than the usual rehearsal period for Agam productions – to ensure strict adherence to cues. Comic timing was especially important in a play that incorporated a failed and crumbling set as the “ninth actor”.
Directors Karthikeyan and Subramanian Ganesh said in a statement: “The actors had to envision the non-existent set and match the energy accordingly. We had to bring in a stunt master to make sure the slapstick movements were done in a believable manner.”
The effort was evident in the final production, of which ST writer Shawn Hoo wrote in his review: “Agam Theatre Lab has put on a play that goes wrong at every step of the way – and it makes it look so easy.”
Brian Gothong Tan’s expansive work in Singapore International Festival of Arts (Sifa) production Angel Island won for Best Multimedia.
The veteran has been a regular fixture in this category since earning an honourable mention in the inaugural multimedia category in 2005. He has earned seven nominations and won twice – in 2008 for Cake Theatrical’s Nothing and in 2016 for Sifa production The Incredible Adventures Of Border Crossers.
The non-narrative Angel Island, co-directed by Tan and New York-based Chinese composer Huang Ruo, created a “total theatre” experience of astounding beauty, capturing the painful experience of Chinese immigrants detained in a United States immigration facility between 1910 and 1940.
There were live cinema elements, an unfurling of a lit screen that created an illusionary extension of space in the dark Singtel Waterfront Theatre, and a scrolling text interspersed with historical images, playing out behind a string quartet and a watery stage.
Tan said: “Angel Island was a production that pushed me out of my comfort zone, challenging me artistically and creatively both in form and content, dealing with contemporary choral music and the issue of Asian diaspora that has affected my life but that I’ve never really examined.”
He said the huge LED screen that floated above a body of water looked deceptively simple, but was very challenging technically. He also travelled to the San Francisco Bay Area to film on site and found many archival images in a bookshop there.
“It was quite fun working with live cameras with the dancers to create real-time effects that blended in with the archival and filmed elements to create a painterly effect,” he added.
The ST Life Theatre Awards is an annual recognition of the best in theatre by ST, which has organised it every year since 2001, bar the pandemic year of 2021.
The judging panel for the 23rd edition of the awards is the ST arts team, comprising arts editor Ong Sor Fern, correspondent Clement Yong, and journalists Hoo and Charmaine Lim.
Full list of winners:
Production of the Year: G*d Is A Woman, Wild Rice
Best Actor: Ghafir Akbar, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Best Actress: Sharda Harrison, People, Places & Things
Best Director: Kuo Jian Hong, Four Horse Road
Best Costume: Richard Kent, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Best Sound: Mervin Wong, Crack The Case: Mindhunter
Best Set: Richard Kent, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Best Ensemble: Twin Murder In The Green Mansion, Agam Theatre Lab
Best Original Script: Joel Tan, G*d Is A Woman
Best Multimedia: Brian Gothong Tan, Angel Island
Correction note: A previous version of the story misspelled the name of Twin Murder In The Green Mansion cast member Indu Elangovan. This has been corrected. We are sorry for the error.
