Kua Pao Kun and Goh Lay Kuan

 

Titans of Theatre

 

Kuo Pao Kun and Goh Lay Kuan, originally from China and Indonesia respectively, met and married in Singapore. They are acknowledged as the founders of modern Singapore theatre and an inspiration to a generation of practitioners.

 

Kuo Pao Kun is Singapore’s most significant dramatist. Many of his 24 plays have been translated into numerous
languages and staged here and abroad. He wrote and directed his first full-length Chinese play, Hey, Wake Up!, in 1968. Thereafter, he wrote numerous multi-lingual plays that were characterised by their insightful commentary on social conditions. Kuo came to Singapore from China in 1949 at the age of 10. Almost a decade later, he left for Australia to work and study there and his fiancée Goh Lay Kuan, whom he had met at Rediffusion Radio, Singapore’s first cable-transmitted, commercial radio station, followed a year later. Goh's family came to Singapore when she was barely five weeks old but fled to Malacca when Japanese troops invaded the country. After losing her father when she was six, Goh left Malacca, returning to Singapore.

Since young, Goh has been an ardent dancer and even went against her mother’s wishes to learn ballet while preparing for her ‘O’ Levels. Later, she left for Australia to study at the Victorian Ballet Guild in Melbourne. Her overseas experience created an identity crisis and she has since been questing after a Singapore culture. Goh recalled in an oral history interview, “At an international gathering, they asked us Malayan students what we wanted to perform. What should we sing? Geylang Sipaku Geylang? Malay songs? The Indonesians were singing [them] too…We did not even have a simple song we could call our own. We were strongly affected by this. We felt we didn’t have our own identity and culture. We felt we should to do something.”

They established the Singapore Performing Arts School (SPAS) on returning to Singapore from Australia in 1965. The couple had difficulties obtaining performance permits and Goh had to strong-arm her way through. She recalled how the government did not reveal why permits were denied and felt that such a move was unjustified. “I overturned tables and slammed the door very loudly.” Goh was the only one who could obtain the permit for the school from the early days to the 1980s, she said.

Despite these problems, the school was popular. Students and blue-collar workers arrived from even Malaysia to watch its plays. Kuo and Goh’s performances touched on everyday problems like poverty and inequality, which these people could relate to, and were at times a means of social criticism. Goh said, “When I see some wrongdoing, I will talk about it. This is my right. This is why I became an artiste.” Goh’s sense of social responsibility, as with Kuo’s, was influenced by the political upheavals of the 1950s. Kuo’s earlier plays in the Chinese language medium depicted the exploitation of the working class (The Struggle, 1969) and tensions with capitalism (The Spark of Youth, 1971).

Goh said in a 2014 interview, “Theatre is about life. It’s about people, about how we see, how we think, how we feel. It is so simple, yet so powerful.” Thus, the couple and their group members started a “Going into Life” campaign to live alongside farmers, fishermen and construction workers, through which they gained a thorough understanding of their lives, and gleaned their hopes and aspirations. This experience furnished their performances with a more realistic and nuanced portrayal of the poor.

Goh and Kuo were detained under the Internal Security Act in 1976 for alleged communist activities. Goh was released four months later after a television confession but Kuo was detained for four and a half years.

After his release, Kuo’s criticism of the government was less strident. His first English play, The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole, was an allegory on the absurdities of Singapore’s bureaucracy. The play was written in Chinese and English, a hallmark of Kuo’s later style. The Chinese-educated felt marginalised when English was introduced as the lingua franca. Kuo used both languages to bridge English- and Chinese-educated Singaporeans. Though his plays may not have closed the gulf entirely, they became a common reference point for both groups.

Kuo also believed firmly in multiculturalism—that the various languages used here are fundamental to the fabric of society and speaking in different languages would not cause a rift. In Mama Looking for Her Cat, Kuo created history by crafting dialogue in all the functional languages of Singapore: Mandarin, English, Malay, Tamil, Hokkien and Cantonese. In one poignant scene, a Hokkien-speaking old lady and a Tamil-speaking old man converse and reach out to each other, transcending their race and language differences. “This was a really good play, and late President Ong Teng Cheong came to watch,” said Goh.

In 1983, Goh, driven by curiosity and the desire to pick up a new art form, went to New York to learn contemporary dance under the legendary Martha Graham. That experience transformed her style. It became more philosophical. Being away from home also made Goh more aware of her Chinese heritage.

As a result, Goh produced Singapore’s first full-length modern dance, Nu Wa–Mender of the Heavens, complete with an orchestral and choral cast, in 1988. It was described as Singapore’s “most significant modern dance ever produced”. In 1995, Goh was awarded the Cultural Medallion. Kuo had been awarded the Cultural Medallion in 1989. In 1990, the couple set up The Substation, a centre for local artists. The Substation broke the mould by creating an autonomous intellectual meeting space for alternative voices. Critics complained that it was too edgy at times and too conventional at other times. But Kuo felt that it was important to try new things. He said, “In the arts, a worthy failure is more important than a mediocre success.”

Kuo died in 2002, two years after he established the Theatre Training and Research Programme (TTRP) with theatre educator T. Sasitharan. Well-known Singapore theatre directors like Ong Keng Sen and Ivan Heng have attended its directing workshops. The programme has now evolved into a stand-alone theatre school known as the Intercultural Theatre Institute. SPAS went through a series of revisions to its name and has been known as The Theatre Practice (TTP) since 2010. Goh believes that Singapore can develop a unique culture by nurturing the arts. “The material for our arts must come from our daily lives—what we see, think, feel and express—that inspire us in our creative work, especially in such a rich multicultural environment which Singapore is blessed with. Only our own creative work has the ability to make our people feel more familiar and closer to one another,” she said in a 2014 interview with The Straits Times. Goh continues to teach dance and is now the artistic adviser of The Theatre Practice. Her elder daughter, Kuo Jian Hong, is its artistic director and the younger, Jing Hong, is a dancer-choreographer who was trained in theatre.

References

Audrey Wong, “The History of The Substation,” The Substation, accessed May 2015,
http://www.substation.org/about-us/history/

Goh Lay Kuan 吴丽娟, interviewed by Tan Beng Luan, August 19, 2000, accession number 002410/03, transcript, Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore.

Goh Chin Lian, “The Ballerina who Overturned Tables,” The Straits Times, May 3, 2014,
http://www.c3a.org.sg/Learning_contect.do?id=2783

T. Sasitharan, “Theatre Doyen Sells Himself to Raise Funds,” The Straits Times, May 11, 1994.

Yu Yun, “The Soil of Life and the Tree of Art: A Study of Kuo Pao Kun’s Cultural Individuality Through His Playwriting,” in Images at the Margins: A Collection of Kuo Pao Kun’s Plays,
ed. Kuo Pao Kun. (Singapore: Times Books International, 2000).

Interview with Goh Lay Kuan in May 2015.

 

 

Kuo Pao Kun
China, 1939–2002

 

 

Goh Lay Kuan
Indonesia, b.1939