The Death and Rebirth of the Playwright

The following description was extracted from the Introduction in focas Vol. 3 by Editor Lucy Davis.

The title of this forum is The Death and Rebirth of the Playwright. We came up with this title for different reasons, one being that, in the Singapore context at least, the playwriting scene is very young. There were attempts at writing plays and plays were staged in the 1960s and 1970s, but it as only in the 1980s when English language theatre started to blossom. There have been a number of playwrights from my (Haresh Sharma) generation in the 1980s but sadly there haven't been that many young playwrights who have come onto the scene. On top of this, there was a phase of very director-led theatre or post-modern theatre, where it was almost as if there wasn't a need for playwrights anymore.

The forum transcription was published in focas Vol. 3.

The video recording is available on request.