Checkpoint Theatre's Huzir Sulaiman and Claire Wong. Photo courtesy of Jason Ho.

Yes, we know. There's more to Checkpoint Theatre than Atomic Jaya. Kidding. Of course there is! Anyways, our story's out in the papers and here's the transcript of our long chat with husband-and-wife team Huzir Sulaiman and Claire Wong. Word. Lots of word.

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2002 was quite an eventful year. The Esplanade opened, Kuo Pao Kun passed away. And then somewhere in there, Checkpoint Theatre said hello. Can you share what it was like back then? HUZIR SULAIMAN: There was a lot of energy, a lot of optimism in the air. It was clear that the scene was really kind of taking off. It was a very exciting time for us to come together. We were, in a sense, already relatively established artists. So for Claire, myself and at that time Casey (Lim) to form it was quite interesting. We came off the back of the play Occupation at the National Museum. That was a Singapore Arts Festival commission. It was a very enjoyable experience in terms of the working collaboration, we had great reviews, a wonderful response, and all the planets seemed to be aligned. Ffter formally incorporating Checkpoint Theatre, we did a showcase of my plays at NUS, which in a sense anticipated many years later the work we would be doing at NUS. CLAIRE WONG: It was a wonderful two evenings of readings and we called it chamber readings, a recital, Up North Down South. We had a live pianist, a performance on stage. Notes on Life and Love and Painting, Those Four Sisters Fernandez, Atomic Jaya… HUZIR: W!ld Rice was started to get going; of course TW and TNS had been there for a while. I think (Goh) Ching Lee was hitting her stride as festival director. And I remember the arts festival at that time was really exciting. It was a thing that not just people in the arts community but your everyday person would look forward to because there were a lot of stuff coming in and we were not so saturated in terms of cultural activities and festivals. Individual things stood out more and you really felt you could make a difference. CLAIRE: At that time the spaces were more varied, the small spaces, medium-size spaces. With the Esplanade, of course, the production values have gone up. They built up a certain infrastructure. But Huzir’s right, at that time, getting an arts festival commission was very meaningful to mark a certain level of work at a certain platform. With Esplanade you’ve got many more festivals and with the way the casinos are coming in, it’s interesting how you can trace the development of the real estate. (Laughs) It has impacted the variety of works. What was the vision for Checkpoint back then? CLAIRE: All of us came with a very long history of being in theatre. (Huzir) had his own theatre company in KL at that time, Straits Theatre Company. I was working with several different companies but primarily, my relationship was strongest with TheatreWorks. I think when we came together, we wanted to (just) make work and less “Let’s have a season”. We wanted to try and avoid having to churn out work because we have to match overheads. It was really on a project-to-project basis. We wanted to be very responsible, financially, as well. The fourth co-founder was Chiu Chien Seen, our general manager. Can you share a bit about your pre-Checkpoint days? HUZIR: I had spent a year with the Instant Café Theatre Company then I started Straits Theatre Company in `96. I started writing my own work through `97. Before that it was acting and occasional directing. I wrote a lot of sketches for Instant Café, which I’m told they’re still using, which is very cool. My first full-length play was Atomic Jaya in `98, which I directed. What happened is by the time we got to 2000-2001, I started working with Krishen Jit, who was a friend and mentor. He directed the last play (of mine) staged in KL, Those Four Sisters Fernandez. Then in 2001, he put together the show, which Five Arts Centre and Straits Theatre Company brought down to The Substation. It was a showcase of three plays, two of which were mine. I was acting in The Smell Of Language, which was a 20-minute long monologue. And he had cast Claire in Atomic Jaya. I didn’t know who Claire was at that time. I was always quite protective of my plays and I was like “Who’s Claire Wong?” And Krishen Jit said, “No you must come for rehearsals.” And at the first rehearsal (in KL) I came to, I was like, “Oh she can really act.” And Krishen—I don’t know if it was calculated or it was really part of his artistic process—he said “I think the actress and the playwright must go out to dinner.” (Both laugh) So we went to the sadly-now defunct kind of Greco-Italian restaurant in KL and had a very lovely dinner. CLAIRE: He started Straits Theatre Company in `96 and `96/`97 was when I went off to New York to do my Masters in Fine Arts in Columbia University. So from the first half of the `90s, I was  a practicing lawyer and travelling regionally for my work. But I was still involved in theatre. Actually I started the whole workshop for Lear in Tokyo (for TheatreWorks). I played the Loyal Attendant and basically created the blueprint for the character. Unfortunately I had been accepted to Columbia so I had to step out of the production when it premiered in Singapore and (went on) the Asian tour. But subsequently, when Lear went to Europe, I joined them from New York. When I came back, Krishen asked me to perform in Atomic Jaya. It was the first time that I was doing Huzir’s play and the first in a long time that I was working with Krishen again. HUZIR: She’d been in Three Children (the 1988 TheatreWorks production of Leow Puay Tin’s play co-directed by Ong Keng Sen and Krishen Jit). I’m discovering that a lot of the “old warhorses” of Singapore theatre trace their collaborations back to Three Children and that period (in the `80s). CLAIRE: It’s the first time Five Arts Centre collaborated with TheatreWorks and the first time that Keng Sen and Krishen worked together. I started working with Keng Sen from law school (in NUS). Keng Sen, Ivan (Heng) and I were all classmates. Matthew Ngui as well. My class was the best! (Laughs) We were already doing work already in law school, then Keng Sen joined TheatreWorks and the first production that I performed professionally in was Beauty World. Shortly after that, we went to work on Three Children. That was the time when the actors would train in taichi, Chinese opera… Keng Sen and Krishen had a clear vision of working with the body. That period was a wonderful phase of theatremaking in Singapore. We were making our work and drawing upon these sorts of traditional arts. Three Children was a seminal piece both in Malaysia and Singapore. And coming back to Atomic Jaya… CLAIRE: And to come back to Atomic Jaya was fantastic for me because I was all trained from my time in New York! (Laughs) To dive into something as complex, it was really difficult for an actor.

This is 2003 staging of Atomic Jaya. Photo courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre.

What did you think of the play? CLAIRE: The interesting thing is, just before I that, my sister brought me to see this play by this wonderful playwright. Those Four Sisters Fernandez. I hadn’t met him yet but I knew Krishen. I was very taken by the specificity of the characters (in Atomic Jaya). There are like 16 characters and it was one of the hardest scripts I had to learn. Each person spoke differently. This one was really tricky. I always say that Atomic Jaya for an actor is the most wonderful opportunity—but it’s also very challenging. Were you also a lawyer, Huzir? HUZIR: No. I studied literature. My degree’s in English, so I came back from Princeton in `93 and did freelance writing, magazine writing. I obviously did theatre. I was running a critically-acclaimed morning drive time radio show. I’ve done a bunch of arts-related things. My parents are lawyers and I married a lawyer. (Laughs) So what was your Singapore connection back then? HUZIR: Well, I grew up, first in London, when I was like 3 to 7, and then in KL. My father’s from Penang and my mother’s from Singapore. So each of us have one Singapore-born parent. CLAIRE: I was born in Penang and grew up in Petaling Jaya. My father was also Singaporean. So we’re both half-Singaporean. (Huzir’s) grandmother lives here, aunts, uncles. Can we say that you were an outsider looking in at the Singapore theatre, Huzir? HUZIR: The connection with Singapore theatre was, at that point, what I had seen. Ivan (Heng) had brought (his autobiographical solo piece) Journey West to KL. I think it was a show that he created in England. I’d come down to see a few things. I had seen Lear in `98. And I had seen Singapore Arts Festival things –Steven Berkoff, Athol Fugard. Both in Jubilee Hall. Did you sense a different dynamic between the two theatre scenes? HUZIR: It was clear in those days that definitely, in terms of production values, Singapore was more—and continues to be—better equipped. There is more attention paid to things like sets and lights and sound, and certainly venues were more aptly equipped in Singapore. At that time, you saw very little political content in Singapore theatre. So the way I looked at it was: Singapore: Sex: Yes, Politics: No. But in Malaysia, Sex: No, Politics: Yes. Each country had its own sensitivities and areas where you could push the boundaries. CLAIRE: (The Krishen Jit connection) would have been my personal experience and in fact, for several of us  “veterans”, those early days in the late `80s was Krishen and Keng Sen’s collaborations. But it never felt “Us vs Them”. I felt quite a lot of closeness and collaboration, and a recognition that we are so similar and yet there is that nice difference. And I have to say, the `80s versus now, the two countries are so different. But at that time, economically we were much more similar. In the last 10-15 years, the economic infratrsuture, the general wealth of the countries are quite stark in contrast. Let’s go back once more to that first date of yours— HUZIR: It wasn’t a date date. It was actually a wide-ranging and lovely conversation. We came down to do the show at The Substation and that’s when I realised I sort of really liked this girl. And I remember waiting nobly-slash-fearfully until the end of the run to ask her out. I didn’t want to ask her out during the run in case she said “no, go away”. (Laughs) CLAIRE: The warm ups in the bowels of the Substation— HUZIR: We were brushing our teeth in the same sink before the show. (Claire’s laughing hard. He looks at her.) Why? People like this stuff! CLAIRE: So after the first date, he went back to KL. We had a long distance relationship. It was fun. HUZIR: We had long phone calls. It was a telephonically built courtship. So you got together before Checkpoint—did you get married before Checkpoint? HUZIR: We were married in `04. CLAIRE: The other seminal production was Occupation. Because in Atomic Jaya, we were both just performers. HUZIR: But just to be clear, there were two performances of Atomic Jaya (in Singapore). The first one was in Substation in 2001 and then in 2003, Claire and I played almost all the parts and minor roles taken by Gani Abdul Karim.

The 2002 staging of Occupation features Claire Wong. The 2012 restaging features Jo Kukathas. Photo courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre.

So Occupation was technically the first Checkpoint show. HUZIR: We count it as the first, because it was the first time Claire, Casey and I collaborated together. But technically speaking, it was a personal commission by Huzir Sulaiman to the Singapore Arts Festival. But it lead so directly to the founding of Checkpoint. And eventually, you decided to move to Singapore. HUZIR: Once it was clear that I was moving down to Singapore, I had closed (Straits Theatre Company). What happened was, we had already been going out for a year and a half and I think after Occupation, I remember talking to the people at NAC who said they’ve got this Foreign Artistic Talent Scheme, which is an immigration scheme to get permanent residents. And they said they’d support me. So immediately after Occupation, I decided to take the plunge and move down. It was the following year, 2003, that it came through. CLAIRE: Before that, he acted in (Eleanor Wong’s) Invitation To Treat (in 2003), which I directed for W!ld Rice. HUZIR: I also had a play (Whatever That Is) in Squeeze And Squeezability, which was the short play thing that Action Theatre did (in 2002), which Krishen directed. Claire was acting in it. Actually that was quite dramatic `cos Krishen was hospitalised during rehearsals. So basically, Krishen asked me to take over directing until he got better. It was very strange—it was my first and hopefully last ever production meeting in intensive care unit. I’m not joking. We were sitting there, talking about the set and Krishen’s there with his heart monitor… Why was the stage manager and director in the ICU? Highly irregular. (Laughs) So when everything was settled, Checkpoint became the focal point. HUZIR: Although we always gave ourselves the flexibility to work (elsewhere). In the early years, Checkpoint only did one, two or sometimes zero shows a year. The rule that we had was we’re only going to make work when we have something to say. We didn’t have an office, we didn’t have fulltime staff. We were very lean. Was it an ad hoc theatre company? HUZIR: I wouldn’t call it ad hoc. We were very clear about wanting to make work of a certain type, that was very contemporary but grounded in the foundations of good theatre—good writing, good acting, and sensitive, intelligent or specific directing. And that hasn’t changed. But we explicitly didn’t want to go down the route of having to make work just to pay salaries. It was a very pure way of looking at things, which actually still persists. Why things have changed now is we’re working with many more people who have things to say. The voices that deserve to be heard have increased. So now it makes sense to have a larger team (that now includes GM Koh Bee Bee, associate producers Lucas Ho and Laremy Lee, and associate marketing executive Christine Yeo). Was there ever the possibility of Checkpoint being set up in Malaysia instead? HUZIR: Well, Casey and Claire were already here and it was a time when I was personally ready for a change. But in a sense, Singapore has always felt like home to be because one parent came from here, I spent all my holidays growing up here. So it seemed very familiar. Does the Malaysia-Singapore thing play a part in the company, seeing as how it’s hinted at in the company’s name. CLAIRE: I think there were two levels of thinking about the name. The most obvious, of course, is the checkpoint between two countries. That kind of element we did see as an exchange of the two countries. (Huzir) is who he is, I’ve spent such a large portion of my life in Singapore but I also grew up in Malaysia. I feel Singaporean but I definitely still feel Malaysian. And of course, we have peers from both countries. The other level for me in calling it Checkpoint is also that space, that entry point where the audience member enters a theatre. Where you “check in” and agree to enter this world of imagination. That is the other sense of the name. Were there any other name options aside from Checkpoint? HUZIR: I remember we thought of Temasek Theatre Company briefly. But we can’t use that. (Laughs)

Ivan Heng in The Weight Of Silk On Skin. Photo courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre.

Were you conscious of the kinds of shows that this new company would be producing? HUZIR: Casey in those days, Claire now, and me occasionally, when we direct, there is a certain commonality—it is lean. But there’s a lot of attention to detail. So even if a play is an older one, like what Claire is doing now with Occupation—it’s a ten-year-old work but it’s a new version (that’s) very specific to this actress now (Jo Kukathas)— and the way Claire worked with Ivan for The Weight Of Silk On Skin. People sometimes tend to look at the writing, which we are proud of, but form me, it’s the directing that is really the exciting (part) that I kind of want people to be able to appreciate and understand. When I see plays like wo(men), which my student Faith (Ng) wrote, that was directed by Claire, I see there’s an enormous attention that she pays, diagnosing what the specific actor needs to get to that level of performance, where you don’t see the acting and it’s life as really lived. Paradoxically, you also sometimes don’t see the directing. Ivan (Heng)’s a phenomenal actor and he’s such a big personality and a celebrity. But there were many performances of The Weight Of Silk where you didn’t see Ivan. You saw the character and the text. And I think it’s really testament to her powers. Do you think the art of directing has been overlooked? HUZIR: This kind of directing has a danger of being overlooked because it doesn’t call attention to itself. It doesn’t say, “Hey, look at me”. If the production is extremely stylised, mannered, self-consciously avant garde, it calls attention to itself. Claire sees her position as the director as somewhat analogous to when I mentor writers. It’s not about me, but bringing out “them”. It would be really wonderful if people could understand this better. I mean, I’ve always enjoyed a certain measure of praise for my writing, which is great. And acting is very obvious because you see them onstage. But what the director does, in the broader Singapore context, is not something that is adequately understood. Your productions in the past few years were few and far between. Now there’s been a lot more. What accounts for this? HUZIR: Because we’re now doing both collaborations with very established artists as well as mentoring the next generation of theatre makers. We have a lot more things to say that we feel are legitimate. So it’s worked out that we’re not doing three or four things a year. From 2011 onwards we’ve been really ramping up.

Cogito in 2007. Photo courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre. And what of the “lean” years? CLAIRE: In 2007, right after Cogito, we went off to Yale for half the year because he was awarded the Yale World Fellowship, which Yale University offers to a selected number of people from around the world. HUZIR: I was the first actual practising artist that they had. Mostly they’re from civil society, from government, finance, diplomacy… it’s leadership training and public policy. CLAIRE: It’s an amazing programme. We’re basically brought to Yale for a whole semester and they have a series of seminars, leading professors form all the different faculties present papers or have a dialogue with the fellows. And the fellows themselves, because they’re acknowledged leaders in their respective countries, they also give talks to the students. And on top of that, you’re allowed to audit any course in the university. I think it’s made a very big impact on both of us. We also presented our work at Yale and in New York City. We did a reading of Cogito with New York actors at the Soho Rep. At Yale we worked with the Yale drama students. We also read Atomic Jaya there. Would you consider this a kind of turning point? CLAIRE: Yes, I think 2008 we were partly away. He was busy teaching and that year my father wasn’t well. Then 2009, we started creating again. HUZIR: Also, Casey and Chien Seen left to pursue other interests in 2009. CLAIRE: And CFA (NUS Centre For The Arts) approached us to mentor NUS Stage around 2009. So all these things sort of came together. We were beginning to put up work that we wanted to make and that coincided very nicely because he was beginning to uncover all these wonderful voices through the playwriting class. When CFA approached it, we were very clear what collaboration we wanted. Student work is not just student work. When there is good work, it deserves to be done well. We brought in professionals to work with students in a very meaningful and rigorous way. We would have key creative people coming in, directors, members of the cast, set designers and we would have specific students interning with these professionals. So many of the students, they’re just blown away. Many of them would be involved in theatre from school days but certainly the level of professionalism that was encountered when they work on a collaboration project between Checkpoint and NUS Stage demanded a lot. Those who stayed are people who are continuing to contribute to the theatre scene. What’s also lovely about it is that these are not theatre students. It’s university-wide. You’ve got engineers, economists, philosophy students, which is what lends to the richness of the work. Checkpoint wasn’t just an “in-house” theatre company. You did, for example, Chay Yew’s A Language Of Their Own. HUZIR: That was a slightly different project in that it was not new, original writing. But then again, Chay Yew’s got a Signapore connection and it’s such a wonderful play.  And it was project that was very, very personal for Casey so we were happy to do it.

Recalling Mother in 2009 was held at Valentine Willie Fine Art Singapore. Photo courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre. Is Checkpoint a chamber theatre group? HUZIR: No, I would very much object to that. I think we are a group that appreciates the value of intimacy. But our ideas our big, our themes are big, and so it works in big spaces. It’s just that we’re very rigorous about what the story requires. It’s not about putting in enormous bits of moving set that may not necessarily add something to the production. It’s not that we’re ideologically opposed to enormous bits of moving set, but you have to be extremely rigorous about when to use those. If not, should you not invest in human beings, in the work? Recalling Mother, The Power Of Notions/Notions Of Power, we did in an art gallery and NUS Museum. So they’re small, audience-wise. The Weight Of Silk On Skin you could take as an example of the aesthetic—it’s fairly bare, it’s minimal, but there’s a complexity and beauty within the minimalism. It’s not spartan or ascetic. As much as Cogito had three people on a fairly bare stage, with projections, there is a rigorous aesthetic. I like to think that that we’ve been told that the ideas are big, the themes are big. CLAIRE: I think that when you read the scripts, they feel intimate but the magic is the work should be able to draw you in. How one would describe our work is we pull the audience in as opposed to “This is the message!” “This is what the play is about!” “Feel this!” HUZIR: We have a horror of that. (Both laugh) CLAIRE: Don’t get me wrong though. There is a place for that kind of strong or presentation style of performance. I’ve done a lot of presentational, very design-heavy work. And I think that can be wonderful theatre as well. It’s just that there is sometimes a danger, which is what I’ve told NUS Stage students when they come in and say they’ve done a lot of avant garde work. And I’m just doing a script-based work, it’s just characters—and it’s completely new to them. They’ve gone through theatre experiences, all the MOE-invested theatre immersion and it’s the first time they’re working on a real script involving real characters and real dialogue. You’ve been nurturing new playwrights. How has that been? HUZIR: We have two concurrent engagements with NUS. I also teach playwriting in the English department and I’m now on my sixth cohort. And out of the 70 or so students I’ve had, by now 30 plays have been professionally produced. And I’m really proud about that. Are you surprised by the success rate? HUZIR: I’m not, because the work is so good. Joel Tan’s Family Outing was from the Introduction to Playwriting class. If they’re really good, I place them with professional theatre companies in Singapore. So I’ve sent stuff to Buds (Theatre), to Ivan. Family Outing came about because Joel had written this fantastic play about a guy who’d gotten outed after his death and then W!ld Rice had just gotten their funding cut because of their homosexual themes. So I rang up Ivan—who had come to a reading of the very first cohort that I did—and said, “Hey, Ivan, do you do gay plays?” (Everyone laughs) And he said, “No! Never! We wouldn’t dare.” (Laughs) Obviously Checkpoint does work, and we also do collaborations with NUS Stage. We’ve had three iterations and working on how to take it forward.

Faith Ng's wo(men). Photo courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre. Why not take it all under Checkpoint? HUZIR: It’s because I want to see good theatre done. And not all the things that the writers have to say would be best said by us. There are many different styles and there’s so much work. Of the 30 plays that have been produced, there’s easily another 20 or 30 that really should be produced, dating back to my first cohort. We know it’s very hard to put a play on in terms of time and increasingly, the financially risks and pressures involved. But there’s just so much good work out there. There really is a renaissance in Singapore playwriting and we need to provide platforms for them that are rigourous and of high quality. The worst thing to do for a new writer with talent is to pair them with a new director and new actors that may not have as much talent. Writing is very interesting in that you can be staggeringly good from a very young age, which is difficult to attain in other disciplines. To be a great director or actor, you need a certain measure of life experience. But the funny thing about writing, the prodigious ability happens. I remember reading this account by David Hare who was talking to another major British playwright and they worked out that the most productive period for most playwrights is between the age of 20 and 30. They have a ten year window but it starts very young. It’s not much different from models and footballers then. CLAIRE: I think the work can get better. I think it takes a lot more rigour and discipline for someone like Huzir to not give in and just keep writing Atomic Jaya even if people keep asking for it. But you see the difference in his work from Atomic Jaya to The Weight Of Silk On Skin. There’s such an amazing wealth of life that’s found in The Weight Of Silk On Skin.

Shiv Tandan's The Good, The Bad and the Sholay (2011). Photo courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre. Aside from Checkpoint, there’s also your other preoccupation, Studio Wong Huzir and the online  magazine Poskod. What’s its relationship to the theatre company? HUZIR: They’re separate entities. Studio Wong Huzir is a creative consultancy. It was formed at the end of 2010. We do executive coaching, experience design, brand communications and we do editorial services. Poskod is a publication of Studio Wong Huzir. We’ve been working with clients primarily in the banking industry where we go and spend two days with senior executives and apply some classical acting training techniques. It’s also very rewarding. These are people who are extremely confident in a banker-ly sort of way but to achieve that next level, they need to be sort of reminded of things they know already. We have people who are smart about the quantitive aspects of their jobs—but they forget to breathe during their presentations. You’re teaching CEOs to act?! CLAIRE: No, we’re reminding them to be authentic. It is in the corporate context but we are bringing the values, skills and sensitivities that we have as actors, directors and writers, and working with non-theatre people. It’s very intense, two full days non-stop. HUZIR: That’s one of the four things that we do. There’s also been quite a few high-profile experience design things that I’ve done—I’ve worked with a committee for the National Museum of Singapore redesign, we wrote a lot of the exhibits. I wrote and directed three of the films that are in there. Then I was the creative director of the Observation Deck of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, in Dubai. Then I went to research and wrote a history of Temasek Holdings for their internal use. What about Poskod? HUZIR: It’s something that we started because I really felt like I wanted to contribute to the conversation in Singapore. To look at Singapore from a thoughtful and reflective perspective. We’ve had some wonderful writing on it. And people pay a lot of attention to us because of that. We’re just about to start an engagement with the Malay Heritage Foundation where we can mentor them on bilingual Poskod-type articles on Malay heritage and culture. And we’ve also had interest from other stat boards in creating content. Poskod continues to be a source of pride.

Chay Yew's A Language Of Their Own (2006). Photo courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre. And now Checkpoint is going full circle with Occupation. HUZIR: It’s the 10th anniversary of Occupation the play, the 70th anniversary of the Fall Of Singapore so it’s a great time to revisit the play. CLAIRE: Another aspect that’s important to our work in Checkpoint is to reinterpret work that is written by Huzir and Singapore playwrights. It’s creating our own classics. One of the unfortunate things about Singapore is we have plays that we stage and then we move on. The timing is such is that the new production of Occupation also coincides with Pao Kun’s festival. And the times have changed. What I feel is much more urgent is our personal heritage or memories about the war is going to be lost with the next generation. Because I asked the younger people I’m working with at NUS what the Occupation means to them and it’s just textbook (history). They’re not inheriting the stories from their parents. And I think it’s even more urgent with the intervening ten years, a whole generation, that we’re losing that personal connection. I grew up with such strong memories `cos I heard the stories growing up from my uncle, my father, how they ran away to Batam island when it happened, and the details, how my aunts all married British soldiers… But my nephews and nieces and the young people I’m working with now… If your individual collective memory is missing, what more the national memory? So can you share the familial impetus for writing Occupation, Huzir? HUZIR: I was listening to tapes of both my late grandfather and grandmother (Mr Haji Mohamed Siraj and Mrs Mohamed Siraj, respectively) who’d had extensive interviews done—my grandfather because he was in the Indian National Army and then also `cos he was a school teacher and headmaster, and my grandmother who was a pioneering feminist in Singapore. So they had extensive interviews done with the oral history people in the National Archives. I was struck by how, whenever there was a slightly interesting, or curiously divergent, answer to the question, the interviewer would almost never ask what I would have thought would be the logical follow-up question. They would never go in that direction. It was almost as though they already had a set of answers that were already imagined. And something that fell outside those boundaries, they just ignore. It’s not `cos they’re bad people or anything. They sounded very intelligent, very kind, but there’s a sense that there was a certain national narrative that had already been scripted and they’re sort of obliged, whether consciously or unconsciously, to solicite those kinds of answers that fit in with that national narrative. So it became about the subjectivity of history and how we write history. What we choose to remember. Because it’s an atypical wartime story. It’s not about people being taken out and shot by the Japanese.  It’s being holed up in a life of relative privilege. But what I think is interesting is when you look at that kind of thing, with an awareness of all the other stuff (simultaneously going on) around it, it kind of makes you aware of our history as the totality of quite individual and divergent experiences. So what is the Checkpoint Theatre identity? HUZIR: We’re not on taxis or sides of buses, we don’t have that kind of household name and that marketing budget. But I know people are excited to work with us and always tell us they look forward to our productions. I think it’s modest, but also for certain people, the influence runs deep. CLAIRE: I think we focus on what we do best, which is the software of theatre. Which is why several of our works are commissions—the Singapore Arts Festival, the NUS Arts Festival, and we go for those because the hardware is provided. The marketplace is so crowded and saturated. How do we compete with the marketing dollar that Marina Bay Sands has? I really am curious about how much (is allotted for) marketing budget versus creative budget. Sometimes it’s so disproportionate. And I think it’s a very sad situation if that’s the case for theatre companies in Singapore who are trying to make important original work that is by the people, for the people. It’s our voices. But unfortunately, the reality of the marketplace now is such that you have to have a marketing budget that exceeds the creative budget—which is totally wrong. Why are the creative people designing the ads getting better paid than the people who’ve invested their lives, their souls into making the work live?

The Checkpoint Team (from left) associate producer Lucas Ho, general manager/producer Koh Bee Bee, joint artistic directors Huzir Sulaiman and Claire Wong, associate producer Laremy Lee and associate marketing executive Christine Yeo. Photo by Memphis West Pictures, courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre. (Their latest production, Occupation, is on this week. Details here.)