Sim Jiaying

Go up to any Singaporean and sing them two words from any National Day song. Go on, I dare you. “Stand up ____” “This is ____” “Count on ____” “One people, ____” Well, not every song, I suppose—but those from Singapore’s equivalent of the “Disney Renaissance”, that golden decade of patriotic earworms from the 1980s to the 1990s. Our Pavlovian instincts are strong with these ones, and writer-director Thomas Lim knows it.

One of the foundational things you learn when improvising and devising scenes in the theatre is the invitation “yes, and”. You learn that there are an infinite number of ways to say yes. Yes, and? Yes, and— Yes, and... It’s a shorthand for what improvisers call “accepting offers” that propel a scene forward, even if these ideas and interjections come from left field. It’s also a term that’s easily misunderstood.

“Is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it?”– from Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) by Cathy Caruth “The Prophet said, ‘Stay with [your mother], for Paradise is beneath her feet.’” – Sunan al-Nasa’i 3104 My mother is still haunted by my grandmother’s death 15 years ago, which was a difficult one. I once asked her how often she dreams of her own mother.