What do a Peranakan matriarch, a 14th century Chinese eunuch and an overseas Malay undergraduate have in common? They are all titular characters in the three archival recordings featured in Replay: SG Theatre Classics.

These plays from the nascent years of professional theatre in Singapore in the 1980s and ’90s were groundbreaking in their day, and have been staged multiple times since their debut. Every new restaging has introduced them to another generation of theatre-goers, and embedded them to varying degrees into a collective consciousness.

The recordings of Emily of Emerald Hill and Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral are from their restagings in The Studios 2015, Esplanade’s annual season of contemporary theatre. As part of Esplanade’s SG50 celebrations, the season showcased 50 significant Singapore English language plays from the 1960s to the 2000s. The recording of Rosnah, originally written largely in English, is from a staging and Malay translation commissioned for Pesta Raya – Malay Festival of Arts in 2016. Both The Studios and Pesta Raya are annual platforms that regularly commission new stagings of Singapore plays.

The new is a response to what came before, yet the ephemeral nature of performance has left subsequent generations with little concrete awareness of what their predecessors had to deal with. It is in this spirit of reflection and making new memories that Replay is screening the full-length archival recordings of these seminal plays over a decade after their live production runs.

Early Singapore theatre was at the forefront of experimentation and multiculturalism in the arts. These days, few would think of the plays from the’80s and ’90s as particularly experimental or groundbreaking. But our theatre practitioners were experimenting with form, structure and language to explore identity and humanity. To put Singaporean stories on stage was novel; and to hear Singaporean accents and Singlish on stage was revolutionary, even radical. Emily of Emerald Hill pioneered the one-woman play in Singapore, and featured a narrative that was unconventionally non-linear for its time. Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral uses a historical figure and events as commentary on contemporary societal conditions, and was written with 16 scenes of prose and verse with no stage directions. Rosnah is another one-woman play but one which was created collaboratively using what has become a signature devising methodology of theatre company The Necessary Stage.

These restagings were commissioned 20 to 30 years after the original productions. Some time has passed since. Even as society progresses, each new generation will grapple with the themes explored in these plays—generational trauma, power struggles, self-discovery and the search for identity. Experimentation is a legacy of early Singapore theatre, and as these recordings show, it is in this tradition that our theatremakers continue to find fresh and exciting ways of telling these stories.