SINGAPORE – News headlines are the inspiration for two original scripts by homegrown playwrights that will premiere at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2024 in January.
Playwright Raimi Safari, 36, has read reports about how Singaporeans are hosting sick and elderly family members in Johor Bahru nursing homes, including a 2015 article in The Straits Times. After that, I wrote woo woo. Half of them are in Singapore.
“It made me think about what drove that family.” Up to that particular point,” Raimi says of the script, which was first developed in 2022 as part of The Necessary Stage’s mentorship platform Playwrights’ Cove.
Woo Woo, set around the disappearance of a family bird as a way to question duty and love when caring for an elderly mother with dementia, will run at Esplanade Theater Studios from January 24 to 28. .
The tensions surrounding caregiving faced within families are not far removed from Raimi’s life. According to him, her personal introduction to screenwriting was witnessing the hardships her family experienced while caring for her intellectually disabled uncle.
Raimi’s script also resonated with director Mohd Fared Jainal, 50, who was caring for his father who died of dementia. Fared was unaware of the seriousness of his father’s illness, but his father passed away in 2019 while on vacation after attending a friend’s wedding in Malaysia.
Fared added: That’s why I think this issue is so important and we need to continue to educate the public and share stories like this. ”
This is the second time in the past year that he has directed a play on the theme of dementia. He also directed Tater Ekamatra’s production of playwright Johnny John John’s Potong as part of Pesta Raya in May 2023 – a journey he describes as a “marathon”.
Asked whether directing a play that is too close to the subject matter can be emotionally difficult, Fared acknowledges the challenge, but says, “The closer it is to your heart, the more impactful the work will be.” It becomes something,” he added.
This shared experience led to conversations between Raimi and Fared about caregiving and the script not only during rehearsals but also after Raimi dropped Fared home.
This relationship “really helped strengthen some of the writing for this piece,” Raimi says.
When asked about the significance of the koel’s cry, which inspired the play’s onomatopoeic title, the pair said they wanted to avoid spoilers and commented that the koel can appear in many different forms in the play. .
All Raimi had to say was: “It’s interesting that koel is not native to Singapore, but was first introduced in the 1980s. But somehow, over time, it has become completely synonymous with our daily life.”