Who controls Singapore's national story? A play quietly asks

Business Times

2 days ago

[SINGAPORE] As Singapore celebrates 60 years of independence with a wave of nostalgia – through official events, art exhibitions and commemorative objects – it's worth asking: what exactly are we remembering?
National memory is never a neutral archive; it's a carefully curated collection of stories. So the question perhaps is not what we're being asked to remember, but whose memories are being celebrated – and whose have been quietly left out.
Teater Ekamatra tackles these issues deftly in a new production titled National Memory Project. The story is set in the near future, in which the government has launched an initiative requiring every citizen to contribute a memory to feed into a national Artificial Intelligence (AI) system.
The goal is to help the Singapore government understand its people better than even they understand themselves. If the government needs to introduce new policies, it can consult AI to have a better sense of how people might react; it can even ask AI to refine those policies to make them more palatable.
Remembering becomes an act of resistance in National Memory Project, starring Ellison Tan Yuyang and Fir Rahman. PHOTO: TEATER EKAMATRA
Judy (played by Ellison Tan Yuyang) is a civil servant assigned to obtain a memory from Ahmad (played by Fir Rahman), a convict set to be executed in two days. But what could have been a straightforward task transforms into an unlikely philosophical duel.
She believes in bureaucratic efficiency; he believes that memory is messy and unruly, and cannot be collected, flattened and stored. Judy sees memory as something useful for the state; Ahmad sees memory as something sacred and personal, that cannot be divorced from the person who lived it.
A NEWSLETTER FOR YOU
Friday, 2 pm Lifestyle
Our picks of the latest dining, travel and leisure options to treat yourself.
Sign Up
Sign Up
Gradually, the simple data-gathering exercise turns into a meditation on memory, control and the limits of technology – as Judy herself is forced to confront her own unresolved grief over the untimely death of her parents.
Written by Johnny Jon Jon and directed with taut precision by Fared Jainal, the production is at once clinical and intimate. Fared's set design comprises abstract white blocks, scrawled with drawings of cityscapes and people – a visual metaphor for Singapore itself: a city built from blueprints and bureaucratic precision, yet complicated by the messy sprawl of lived experience.
Two actors, Ellison Tan Yuyang and Fir Rahman, play half a dozen characters speaking in English, Malay, Mandarin and Hokkien in National Memory Project. PHOTO: TEATER EKAMATRA
Lighting design by Alberta Wileo gives the space a ghostly quality, at times sterile and interrogative, at others haunting and elegiac. Sound design by Tini Aliman deepens the psychic landscape of the characters, with its ambient echoes and disturbances.
Only two actors make up the cast – but they play multiple characters speaking in English, Malay, Mandarin and Hokkien. Tan plays Judy with graceful restraint, a woman clinging to structure and technology as a way to suppress her grief. Fir delivers an affecting performance as Ahmad, radiating a weariness that feels hard-earned.
(Spoilers ahead) In the play's final moments, Judy sings Di Tanjong Katong, an old Malay folk song that has now become part of the Singapore canon. Ahmad responds, not with the same song, but with P. Ramlee's Nak Dara Rindu, which has lyrics that pay tribute to that other song.
It's an 'if you know, you know' moment, a poetic and gentle defiance that reminds us that memory is not fixed – it's a song sung slightly off-key.
National Memory Project by Teater Ekamatra runs at the Drama Centre Black Box from now till Jun 29. Tickets from sg.bookmyshow.com