From musicals to climate change and teenage tales: What's in store for Checkpoint Theatre in 2024?

It is not the first time that Weish has worked with Checkpoint Theatre either. An associate artist with the company, the playwright-composer was one of Huzir’s assistant directors for the company’s first musical, City Night Songs, back when she was still an undergraduate in 2012. Now active in the electronic music scene, the application of Weish’s “edgy, layered style” to a musical has made for a creative and intriguing process.

“[You’d] think, ‘How do we marry this to storytelling in theatre?’. And what’s amazing is that Weish composes the music, she writes the lyrics, she’s written the script, and it’s very personal, alive, and muscular, but it also has a beautiful literary quality to it,” Huzir enthuses.

While the musical is somewhat different and refreshing, it stays true to Checkpoint Theatre’s character throughout. Huzir tells us of the intimacy, the nuance and the emotional depth, which meet the “galvanising music” and the contemporary movement in the musical. It also stands to be relatable, with its narrative of teachers, students and the national education system. “[Weish] was a teacher for five years, so the emotional authenticity of being a teacher, of being in a school environment, is something that she knows intimately,” Huzir explains. “The care that teachers bring to their students, and the battles that they fight in negotiating bureaucracy and paperwork, to try to uplift and champion their students—it’s something that Weish cares about very deeply. And it’s that spirit that we want to honour.”

This August, Checkpoint Theatre will stage Playing With Fire, which is written by associate artist Cheyenne Alexandria Phillips, an environmental studies graduate. Directed by Wong, the play explores Singapore’s intricate involvement with the oil and gas industry, delving into the lives of the workers, their families, and those implicated.

“The main protagonist is a writer who wants to write about the oil and gas industry. She goes about interviewing people who have worked in the industry from different generations, from a retired manager to a young engineer who’s just starting out in the industry,” Phillips shares.

“It’s a mosaic of these people and their stories and what it all means. What does technology, and what does the oil and gas industry mean to Singapore? To our own complex relationships with technology and the environment? It’s a very genuine exploration of our individual roles vis-a-vis technology and environmental challenges.”

Staging this production goes much further than just putting on a great show. The communication of climate science to the masses can prove difficult and represents a challenge close to Phillips’s heart. “It’s very tricky if you go into the technical jargon. But theatre is such a fantastic way to offer this narrative, in a way that everybody will understand and [be compelled to] feel something towards these issues,” she shares.

Huzir concurs: “It’s not about abstract science or policy. It’s about people who are earning a living within an industry and a system that we are now beginning to understand has more serious implications for the planet. But it’s inextricably entwined with Singapore’s history.”

Read more: Artists to Watch: Singapore artist Ezzam Rahman on using his dead skin as a medium for telling stories on legacy and life

Wrapping up the season in October is Hard Mode, which offers a more lighthearted yet still poignant finale. The play follows a motley crew of teenage friends as they grow up in Singapore, through national service, university, and finally entering into the working world as young adults. “It’s a piece that really captures the secret life of teenagers,” Wong tells us. “It was preceded by a lot of research. There were a lot of interviews to understand what young people are thinking about and what their concerns are.”

“[The playwright] Faith Ng really managed to capture the language, the way they communicate. It’s got that lightness and vibrancy of the young characters. But it does, like every Faith Ng world, dive deep. The kinds of issues, challenges, and questions that young people are asking and grappling with, to do with friendship, love, self-identity, and self-worth, come into play,” she expands.

“It’s again a very nuanced and very beautiful piece of work. We find ourselves laughing at one moment, then the very next moment you’re like, ‘Oh!’. Suddenly something very poignant is voiced by the characters.”

What is striking about the production is its simultaneous specificity and universality. This is a balance that characterises much of Checkpoint Theatre’s work and is a source of pride for the team. Having taught playwriting for many years, Huzir considers it an essential characteristic of good theatre.

“One of the things I’ve always said from day one is that you are only universal if you are specific,” he reiterates. “I think it’s vitally important as part of our postcolonial project to embrace the texture and the granular reality of Singapore life. Once we do that, we connect with the fundamental humanity of the characters, and then anyone can understand it.”

Surprisingly, connecting with a local audience has not always been a given, but the pandemic sparked a new-found enthusiasm for homegrown productions and publications, drawing more Singaporeans to Checkpoint Theatre’s work in the past couple of years.

“For a company like ours that has spent 22 years looking at the realities in Singapore, to have audiences realise that they want to fully inhabit, in all senses of the word, the Singapore experience—it’s a joy,” muses Huzir. “That’s our company’s mission: to capture and create a canon of rich Singapore content. Timely, relevant, urgent, and important to be told now, and which embraces and empowers the different communities that make up Singapore.”

Part of this mission involves publishing anthologies and collections of plays, in an effort to not only make these local works more widely accessible but also ensure that they will be known to future generations, whether or not they are staged. Following the journey of these books is a special source of pride for the team.

“Sometimes, if I’m having a bad day, I’ll go to the NLB (National Library Board) online catalogue and search for one of our titles, and then I’ll see that our books are checked out from Bishan Public Library, from Jurong Regional Library… And I realise that there are kids out there who are now growing up with Singapore theatre that is vibrant and alive,” Huzir shares warmly.

“Seeing that the work is getting out there and impacting people is very important. It hasn’t always been like that. I’ve been in theatre for decades and it’s taken a lot of hard work and perseverance.”

When the multi-hyphenates at Checkpoint Theatre are not reading scripts or organising rehearsals, they are pouring their hearts into initiatives to make their productions more accessible. The recently launched No Questions Asked initiative allows persons who would not otherwise be able to afford a theatre ticket to attend its shows.

Another initiative, which will be rolled out with the opening of Secondary: The Musical in April, offers a series of adaptations to ensure accessibility across the board. Developed alongside a disability consultant, these inclusive measures will be launched throughout the year, the first one being the full captioning of the upcoming musical.

“It’s important to go about it in a meaningful way. It’s not about rushing into it and saying, ‘Here, we’ve got it’,” says Wong. “It’s important to build ties with the community, to tell them that we welcome them into the space, [and to] come and watch our rehearsals. We’re planning it in small but meaningful steps towards a larger goal, to make it a very holistic and integral part of every aspect of theatre-making.”

As Wong reminds us, “Theatre is about people.” Fostering community has been at the forefront of Checkpoint Theatre’s work since day one. “Investing in people, investing in processes, building community, and creating a space that inspires, that challenges, that pushes people to do their best work.” It is this very community spirit that drives the team to craft groundbreaking productions with passion and creativity.

And it is also Huzir’s enthusiasm for his artists and their incredible work that elicits this statement encapsulating the year ahead: “I f ***ing love this season!”

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