{"id":5511,"date":"2019-12-09T23:23:31","date_gmt":"2019-12-09T15:23:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tembusu.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/?p=5511"},"modified":"2025-09-25T12:41:23","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T04:41:23","slug":"off-centre-singapores-many-voices-as-heard-by-haresh-sharma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/2019\/12\/off-centre-singapores-many-voices-as-heard-by-haresh-sharma\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Off-Centre’: Singapore’s Many Voices as Heard by Haresh Sharma"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Haresh Sharma is the resident playwright and director of The Necessary Stage. He is a recipient of the Cultural Medallion and has written over 100 plays which has been staged in many countries. Lisa Chin interviews the playwright for Tembusu\u2019s Inaugural Dinner for Academic Year 2019\/2020.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What\nare you doing now? I understand that you are a playwright and the director of The\nNecessary Stage. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, I am the resident playwright of\nThe Necessary Stage and I\u2019ve been with them since 1987. My full-time job is to\nwrite plays which is a very unusual job, but I enjoy it very much. I have a lot\nof opportunities to write new types of plays for different types of audiences\nand crowds, and I enjoy writing plays especially about Singapore society and the\nissues that affect us as a society. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\nis one of the more memorable plays that you have written? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I guess I would say that Off Centre<\/em> is a better-known play. I\nhave written about 120 plays as I have been writing for about 30 years, but Off Centre<\/em> was first staged in 1993 and\nit has been re-staged several times. It\u2019s also been selected as a literature\ntext for the GCE O- and N-levels by the Ministry of Education\u2014the first\nSingapore play to do so, which is amazing. It\u2019s still on the syllabus so sometimes\nI give talks to secondary school students who study the play. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\nis one thing about playwriting that you particularly love and enjoy? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I guess it\u2019s like any other kind of\nwriting\u2014you are telling a story\u2014but the difference between playwriting and any\nother kind of writing is that you are telling stories through the voices of the\ncharacters. So not only do I think of the story, I must also think about the\ncharacters and dialogue, because that\u2019s how the characters express themselves.\nIt\u2019s challenging but also very exciting because I need to capture the different\nnuances and Singapore has a very rich literary tradition. We speak English, but\nwe also have different languages like our mother tongues and we also speak like\nthree different languages at the same time, so there\u2019s a richness about it that\nI like to picture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\nare some issues that are close to your heart? When writing plays, sometimes you\nwant to write a story\u2014a particular kind of story. So what are some issues that\nyou hope to bring up through your stories? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, because I keep writing, I tend\nto focus on different types of issues just so that I can cover different\naspects of people\u2019s lives. A play I wrote recently that was staged was called Underclass,<\/em> looking at inequality and\npoverty in Singapore, so that gave me an opportunity to research, find out what\nthe situation is like here, interview people, and so on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the moment, I am working on a new\nplay for next year\u2019s Singapore Arts Festival called The Year of No Return,<\/em> and it\u2019s about climate change. Some scientists\nbelieve that 2020 could be the point of no return, and if we don\u2019t act fast,\nall our efforts after that would be in vain. So what can we do about it? The\nSingapore Arts Festival is the most important arts festival in Singapore. My\ncompany, The Necessary Stage, thought that we would come up with a play\nfocusing on not just a local issue, but a global issue we are all affected by\u2014something\nthat we can do something about. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where\ndo you see the theatre industry in Singapore going? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s going in a very positive\ndirection. When I first started out, there wasn\u2019t even a theatre studies\nprogramme in schools, in JC, in University, and so on. You could only do\ntheatre as a hobby. The arts was not something people were generally keen about\nbecause they were forced to do science or the more technical subjects. So it\nwas a bit of an uphill task to focus on arts-related subjects like literature\nand theatre. Now we have the School of the Arts, theatre studies programmes,\nLaSalle, NAFA\u2014you have so many activities for young people to pursue theatre,\nto pursue their ambitions to learn about the different aspects of theatre from\na young age, and they have different opportunities to meet professionals, learn\nthe ropes, and have opportunities as well. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\ndo you think of the new productions in Singapore? In general, what do you think\nof the current theatre in Singapore? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think it\u2019s in a healthy state in\nthe sense that you have the theatre companies from around the 1980s, like The Necessary\nStage, but you also have established theatres like WILD RICE, which has its new\nspace. At the same time, you have new theatre companies that may not even be\ncompanies\u2014just a collective\u2014and they come together, ceate their work, and stage\ntheir work. A space like Centre 42 is very important because they give\nopportunities to these new companies to have their plays read and produced, and\nthey have platforms called late night texting, where you come and watch\nperformances at night by young, unknown, and almost emerging artistes. It is\nvery wonderful because you really build the next generation of artistes that\nway. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do\nyou have any advice for an aspiring playwright, actor, or anyone interested working\nin theatre? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think that if you are serious\nabout doing theatre, you should do it. You shouldn\u2019t think about not having the\nbudget, a theatre company that will stage your play, or opportunities or about\nrejection. It doesn\u2019t matter. Get your friends together, get like-minded people\ntogether. Especially at a young age, you have nothing to lose. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just do it and tell the story that\nyou are not seeing around you. Tell the story you want to tell whether as an\nactor, writer, or director. And the power of theatre is in its sense of society,\nthat it is a community and social activity, but at the same time you work\nreally hard, you really depend on each other, and the process is as important\nas the product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This article is part of a series of interviews of Singapore’s cultural icons who were guests for Tembusu’s Inaugural Dinner for Academic Year 2019\/2020. See the other interviews here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Header and feature images by Malcolm Fu.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About the interviewer<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Lisa Chin is not cheering at the mats outside FairPrice, you\u2019ll probably find Lisa in her room or a lounge studying\/crying in stress because c’est la vie de l’ing\u00e9nieur (it sounds more romantic in French).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lisa Chin interviews the playwright awarded the Cultural Medallion for Tembusu\u2019s Inaugural Dinner for Academic Year 2019\/2020.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121,"featured_media":5562,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","publication_type-interview","theme-arts","theme-society","scope-singapore","flavour-informative","flavour-inspiring"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/121"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5511"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5620,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5511\/revisions\/5620"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}