SINGAPORE — If there was one play that director-playwright Goh Boon Teck could easily imagine as Singapore’s Mandarin theatre masterpiece, it would be the late Kuo Pao Kun’s Descendants Of The Eunuch Admiral. Staged in 1995, a couple of months after its English version, it has yet to be surpassed, he reckoned.

“I hope the new generation of our Chinese theatre scene could create more productions along this line. It referenced culture, contained various world views and makes the audience ponder contemporary issues using an old subject matter,” said Goh.

His company Toy Factory will be delving into the roots of the scene with a production under its 25th anniversary season line-up titled Upstage: Contemplating 50 Years of Singapore Mandarin Theatre.

Directed by Goh and written by Cheow Boon Seng, its fact-meets-fiction behind-the-scenes premise is of a theatre company looking for a play to put up to celebrate its anniversary. Many plays will be namedropped and scenes from selected productions will also come to life, including 1966’s The Second Escape, 2000’s The vaginaLogue, and Kuo’s Descendants and Lao Jiu.

“It will be a play within a play, with a lot of historical materials on Singapore Mandarin theatre written into it,” said Goh, who added that apart from archival research, they had also interviewed people who worked behind the scenes, such as administrators and technicians, to add a more human angle to the story of Chinese theatre in Singapore.

And it’s a story that definitely needs to be told, he said. “Chinese theatre is so old here, from immigrants who brought not just opera but drama as well, from clan associations who have their drama groups and stage productions. A lot of Chinese drama was also developed in schools. We still have it but it’s not as vibrant as it was in the past.”

While Goh said the history of the Mandarin theatre scene here spans a century, the play Upstage focuses on the scene from the 1960s onwards, when it had been closely intertwined with socio-political events both in Singapore and the world at large. Goh pointed out how Chinese theatre in Singapore had once been a touchy subject, particularly in relation to the political developments taking place in China.

“There’s one part of our history when it got tricky writing a Chinese play and talking about what was happening in China. When anything to do with mainland Chinese culture was very sensitive and could have been a problem,” he said, citing the leftist purge in the mid-1970s, when people were detained without trial, including the respected Kuo himself. A poem that the theatre doyen had written during his confinement will also be featured in Upstage.

The political events that had affected the development of Mandarin theatre back then would eventually give way to other issues, such as dwindling audiences. “At one point, the audience left us in the `90s and the scene nearly died,” recalled Goh, citing factors such as the rise of English theatre and changes in the educational system.

The scene is slowly recovering, though. Goh cited the popularity of musicals such as The Theatre Practice’s If There’re Seasons and Toy Factory’s own December Rains, which have been regularly restaged and continue to draw audiences.

In the course of the research for Upstage — as well as his own experiences doing Mandarin theatre — Goh noted two recurring elements in many of the works: “There’s a wealth of Chinese history we can tap into and revisit. And also, there’s a certain moral frame in many of the works, which talk about the human spirit and the Chinese spirit,” he said.

“Mandarin theatre has faced different challenges and problems, whether it’s with the government or audiences, but what our production wants to focus on is how it has been resilient. It has survived a hundred years.”

Upstage: Contemplating 50 Years Of Singapore Mandarin Theatre runs from June 25 to 28, 8pm, at the Esplanade Theatre Studio. With 3pm weekend matinees. Tickets at S$30 from SISTIC. In Mandarin with English surtitles.