Checkpoint Theatre’s ‘Playing With Fire’ delves into Singapore’s oil and gas industry with empathy

Considering the format of the play, how much of what we’ll see on stage is fictionalised?
The characters in and of themselves are fictionalised. They are not based on any one particular person. I think in earlier drafts, they were composites of different people’s personalities, but Checkpoint Theatre has a very long development process, and through multiple reads, discussions, and feedback, the picture started getting clearer and the characters came into their own.

What was interesting about the people I interviewed was that they were of different age ranges. That was the one aspect I knew I wanted to keep. They also worked at different levels and within different hierarchies of the industry. But everything else about them, I tried to fictionalise to the point that you couldn’t recognise the person.

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Was it quite difficult to conduct research that’s specific to Singapore?
Our industrial history is very well documented. In fact, there’s an entire book on it, so it’s not like it’s hidden, and you can look up a lot of things online.

The challenge was finding specific individual perspectives. We can research policy, history, and the socio-economic impacts of the industry, but how did it affect this particular guy trying to provide for his family? We don’t have stories like that. That’s the scary part of creating Playing With Fire—it’s humanising an industry that people don’t want to humanise.

A lot of what I found online in terms of people’s thoughts and feelings towards the industry was pertaining to old American towns; oil towns that just sprang up and then died when there was no more oil. People were upset about that. While it’s interesting in that context, and definitely worth somebody over there telling that story, it’s not the reality here. I think the one thing that resonated across continents was that this is their livelihood. At the end of the day, they went out there to work and make money.

What drew you to this story? What compelled you to tell it?
When I first had the idea, it was actually late 2020. We were in lockdown and the rhetoric was that the world had shut down, we were using less energy and fossil fuels, and nature was coming back. A lot of environmental work and writing came out of that.

Oil is not our main source of energy anymore but we’re still a major exporter of it. This is still part of the economy and we cannot pretend otherwise. It’s very hard to put the blinders on in that situation.

So I started to wonder, who are these people behind the industry? How do they feel about having to go out into this pandemic world to make sure that we all have power? That’s kind of where the curiosity started.

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What was the development process like?
I had a semi-complete script. Generally, when I approach Checkpoint Theatre, I already know what I want. I’m quite a perfectionist in this sense. And we’ve worked together before, so the process is easier.

But for this one, in the early drafts, all the characters were still unnamed. They had ages and occupations but they didn’t have genders and they didn’t have ethnicities, which I had so much fun with. I wanted to keep this idea of we don’t actually know who these characters are, and the anonymous nature of the interviews.

The team tried to tell me very gently that, on stage, it wouldn’t work. There needs to be some level of recognition. And actually, things like gender and ethnicity would feed into the stories. So even though it’s been an enjoyable experience to see this very mixed bag of potential characters on stage, they deserved to get fleshed out more.

After every revision, I would have named another character, or chosen the gender, or said this person is Eurasian or Chinese. There are key things in the characters’ backstories that actually needed these details. I think it enriched the script.

How did you go about casting for the roles with only these vague characteristics in mind?
That was the other reason why we needed to flesh out the characters more—we needed to do auditions. Actually, some characters didn’t have any race attached to them even during auditions. Only after the workshops we fine-tuned it. We had over 190 people audition for this play, which is a pretty large number.

It was about what would feel more nuanced and realistic. Because we do want to humanise these characters and do it well, and we’re also thinking about, okay, what’s the dynamic? Will this person act well with this other person? If there are hierarchy or power discussions in the script, it needs to make sense in the casting too.

We were just talking about the cast before, which comprises Rebecca Ashley Dass, Cheryl Lee, Gosteloa Spancer, Nora Samosir and Rafaat Haji Hamzah—and I’m very happy. Everybody has some sort of connection to it. Even when we were auditioning, before they would go up and read, we would have a conversation, and they’d say, oh, my dad works in the industry. Or, I left my job there to try and be an actor. We heard so many different stories like that. I think it reminded all of us that it touches everybody.

How do you feel like the play fits into the wider Checkpoint Theatre repertoire for this year?
At Checkpoint Theatre, everybody says you write the play only you can write. That’s how it fits into the entire repertoire. It feels discreet and individual, and sometimes it can feel like it’s not connected, but these plays are the only plays that each playwright can write. There is no template for any of these works.

Checkpoint Theatre builds its entire repertoire on specificity. We also like to say that the more specific it is, the more universal it feels to the audience.

It’s great for the writer, it feels really free-flow. You can pick any topic—as long as it fits in and around these two criteria, they will back you.

Was it difficult at times to grapple with the subject and its nuances?
I do have strong views on the industry. There’s one scene I remember writing, in which Spancer’s character said something, and I had to stop because I absolutely hated myself for writing the words that I gave him. But I eventually kept writing because I have to be compassionate and empathetic towards my characters, otherwise it’s not going to be realistic.

The idea is to convince the audience that the characters think they know what they’re doing. They firmly believe that what they’re doing is right. Whether it’s right for them, whether it’s right for society, for their immediate family, for their career, their circumstances—it doesn’t matter.

A fear I have about watching this play is that halfway through I’ll hate what the guy is saying. Because I know he’s wrong but I was the one who wrote the words. So I don’t know how to feel about it yet.

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What do you hope people take away from the play when they watch it?
If we want to make the climate transitions—and there are so many ambitious climate goals, especially in Singapore—we need these people to do the work. These are the people that are going to get us there. If we don’t see them as people, if we don’t see them as part of the solution, then maybe they will just be unmotivated to do the work.

It’s a very large problem that has many layers, and many different parts that we need to address. Some people may not want to transition because they have a certain diploma, that’s all they know, and they don’t want to go back to school. If you transition, these people have no job. So how do we move them? How do we motivate them?

Everybody has different circumstances. I know it’s not always realistic for us to try and approach every circumstance on a case-by-case basis. But if we can just consider the multitudes, then we can offer more resources. If we can move the majority, maybe the minority will follow.

Are you hoping to reach an audience who might see themselves in the characters you disagree with?
I guess if people who do come from the industry see themselves in parts of it, that’s not what I intended, but that would be interesting.

I think the goal was just to open up a larger conversation. I’m not a person who believes that a play can change the world; if you have new ideas and new thoughts, that’s great. But this started as just a question for me because I didn’t know anything about these people, yet I condemned them.

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What’s next for you? Any exciting projects in the works?
I just came back from a residency in the Arctic so I have a lot of material I need to look through. The place I went to is part of Norway but it’s also not part of Norway. It’s visa-free, and it’s no man’s land, but the law of the land and the sea is Norwegian law.

The place is filled with coal and Norway extracts it and sells it to the world but, at the same time, they have environmental laws around the place, to keep it pristine and beautiful and to protect the bears.

Last year, apparently they changed their energy source. Now they want to be “green” so they use oil and gas to power the town instead. But they have to import said resources from the mainland to the island, so it was actually the more environmentally sustainable option to use coal because you wouldn’t need to transport it. In this context, we need to be very specific about understanding what sustainability is.

This place is also part of the Arctic Council, comprising all the countries up there in the North that take care of the Arctic. There’s a “permanent observer” list, of other countries that watch them make decisions, and Singapore is on it. I guess Singapore wants to know what people are doing with the ocean as an island.

Sea level rise is one of the reasons. The other reason is that if all the northern ice melts, China might travel above Russia to Europe, instead of coming down past Singapore, so we lose out on shipping. And apparently, the third reason is that at one point it held the world record for the highest number of oil rigs built in a year, which means they know the technology and there’s oil up in the Arctic.

It’s also interesting as a political space because it’s visa-free. Chinese researchers are working alongside Indian, British, Japanese and Korean ones … Some of these countries don’t agree with each other, but they’re all out there studying the impacts of climate change. And of course, it’s an interesting location politically because Russia is right there.

It’s a very confusing space, and I haven’t figured out what I want to do with it but I’m having a lot of fun untangling it. It might translate into my next play—we’ll see.

All of this aside, at the moment I’m just trying to remind myself I don’t need to over-hustle. Some hustle is good, but I don’t need to constantly try to push. I’m scribbling and writing in a very exploratory phase, and I cannot say that I am making this or that. I’m not there yet.

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