Land where censorship rules the state of play

By GILBERT WONG

The detention of playwrights. Scripts submitted to the police for a licence to perform. The banning of plays. On the face of it, theatre in Singapore suffers from enough authoritarian shackles to stymie creative freedom.

But paradoxically, the city continues to support what, by the standards of any New Zealand city, would be vibrant theatre with a determined focus on local playwrights and actors.

During Singapore's International Arts Festival last month a story behind the festival was a theatre group's attempt to perform The Vagina Monologues. The work of playwright and performer Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues proved a major off-Broadway hit in New York last year.

It features monologues with titles such as, If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear? and The woman who loved to make vaginas happy.

Actors as renowned as Winona Ryder, Rhea Perlman, Ricki Lake, Marisa Tomei and Camryn Manheim have lined up to perform.

But Singaporeans did not see The Vagina Monologues - the actors were denied a licence to perform the play in the city.

Choo Thiam Siew, executive director of the National Arts Council - Singapore's equivalent to Creative New Zealand - nods when asked the question about the inevitable tension between creativity and censorship.

NAC is part of the chain. Any public performance in Singapore requires a licence from the Home Affairs Ministry, though it is the police who administer the system. When it comes to cultural events, the NAC is consulted.

In the case of The Vagina Monologues, the actors submitted the script, including stage directions. Part of the performance involved briefly projecting a picture of a vagina as a backdrop.

Choo says the performance could have proceeded without the image but the theatre group refused a change. They were denied a licence and will probably lose any government funding.

It could be argued that this carries less potential for debate than the exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of gay sex acts.

But Singapore is a far cry from New Zealand, Choo says. "If it initiates racial disharmony or if it might upset social order then it will not get a licence to perform."

Social order can mean many things and Choo cites homosexuality as one issue.

"Government policy aims to discourage homosexuality," he says. "It is not illegal and we accept that it exists, but it must be practised in private."

Because of that policy the NAC would not fund productions with homosexual themes.

The rationale stems from the multi-racial nature of Singapore. "We have significant racial minorities, including Muslim people, plus we live next door to a neighbour [Malaysia] which is a major Muslim nation. We have to respect the religious beliefs and customs of each of our minorities with equal weight."

Choo says the concept of multi-racialism is built into government policy.

TheatreWorks, a company based in historic buildings in Fort Canning, is dedicated to avant-garde work under artistic director Ong Ken Seng.

The company performed their latest work, Desdemona, at the Adelaide and Singapore International Arts Festivals this year.

Asked if censorship affected his work, Choo says: "Personally not, because I work in allegories."

Ong talks of a play he directed, Descendant of the Eunuch Admiral, which he described as a play about political castration.

He refers to the practice of Chinese nannies of massaging the testicles of their charges to keep them pacified. "To me, that is the most effective castration. Even though it is pleasurable, in the end you are destroyed the same way."

That play had no problems gaining government support, including funds for a tour to Berlin and Egypt.

Nor, he says, are Singaporean standards cast in stone.

In 1993 the company wanted to produce a political satire called The Lady of the Soul. When first submitted it came back with hundreds of references deleted.

That same month a censorship report approved the concept of artistic exploration and integrity and the play was passed uncut.

"I know you can say, 'How is it artistic when it is passed by the censors?' " Ong says. "It was passed without cuts and we performed it.

"You might ask, 'How do we live with this? How do we continue to make art?'

"I don't want to be an artist in exile. Very often I think I am in exile in my own country, but surely it is as important for artists to engage their systems?"

Artistic director Alvin Tan and playwright Haresh Sharma are the founders of the Necessary Stage, a theatre based in the city's suburbs with direct roots in the communities in which it performs.

The company occupies space beneath the Cairnhill shopping and community centre.

The pair have faced the issue of censorship directly when - inspired by workshops in New York - they brought to the city a form of improvisational theatre called Device Theatre.

Because it was unscripted, performances did not face the censor. But after newspaper stories claimed the works promulgated Marxism, performances had to stop.

Sharma says the performances were misunderstood. However, the experience did lead to meetings with government officials.

One result is the acceptance of the need for the company to produce work from local playwrights which has mature themes and strong language. In return, the company accepts the official rider that the plays have a rating, akin to films, of R18, or the equivalent of a PG rating where those under 14 cannot attend without their parents.

"The reality is how you negotiate it," Tan says. "We think about the audience. A lot of our financial survival depends on ticket sales. In this way some of the constraints have led to developments that are not bad, because we need to have financial independence."

Ong adds that it's naive to think that censorship does not exist where it is not overt. Since most arts bodies rely on some form of public funding, the process of submitting works for approval is part of the process of theatre in Western countries.

"It's naive to say that there isn't censorship," Ong says. "The National Endowment for the Arts in America suffered exactly the same because politicians did not like what it was funding."