Interrogator: “If invited, would you bring the play abroad?”

James: “Yes?”

Interrogator: “And this is the impression of Singapore you want foreigners to get?”

Three dead victims, one confused suspect, and one determined interrogator to make sense of it all. On the eve of Singapore’s National Day in 1988, 3 people are killed along the Pan-Island Expressway (PIE), Singapore’s oldest expressway which cuts through the heart of the country. An interrogator has 60 minutes to question James, an unsuccessful playwright whose script, PIE, foretold these 3 deaths.

Following Boom (2018) and Atomic Jaya (2019), PIE is the third Singaporean / Malaysian theatrical production in Cambridge. It has become an annual affair that is almost easy to take for granted, but the impetus behind putting up this play remains strong. Putting up these plays has always been a way for us to connect home and share a slice of it with Cambridge, but we also hope that each year’s show brings a slightly different slice of home to the table.

We want this show to be part of a project of representation that continues long after the curtain call

As compared to its predecessors, PIE is the most explicitly political and experimental piece of the lot. At the heart of PIE is a whodunnit-element that takes a turn for the unexpected, forcing the audience to question the power of myth-making and truth-making within the plot, the premise of the play itself and the broader notion of historical narratives that extends beyond the boundaries of the play. PIE makes you question where the stage ends and the performance begins; where the fiction ends and the truth begins.

Back in the 1980s where the play is set, states wielded a greater amount of control over information. But the democratisation of information that we see today doesn’t seem to have moved us any closer to untangling the complicated relationship between truth and power. If there used to be suspicion over state narratives, the suspicion is now easily multiplied over a multitude of different narratives, any of which could be labelled as ‘fake news’. PIE presents the audience with many possible variations of what could have happened on a single night on the expressway, but how do you figure out what really happened?

The play exploits the visceral medium of theatre to explore these questions. PIE is discordant, named after an expressway but, in the words of director Saad Siddiqui, ‘about everything but expressways’. The cast is always onstage; actors play multiple characters, and in some scenes, we cycle through a quick succession of different localities without pause. The set has been designed to reflect this dissonant character of the play, with pieces of debris strewn across the Corpus space and LED lights to illuminate transitions to particular locations. Music in the show ranges from club remixes of communist anthems to 1960s Malay Pop to Wagner. The play is packed with moments so ridiculous that often you can barely believe what you are watching. But that is precisely the point. This is a play that makes its audience work to piece together discrepant elements into some semblance of order, not unlike the way that all of us are engaged in political projects of mythmaking / truth-making. For the PIE playwright Chong Tze Chien, what makes Singapore is ‘the very fact that we like to make up stories about ourselves, for better or for worse’. Although the play is set against the backdrop of the 1987 ‘Marxist Conspiracy’ in Singapore, you don’t necessarily need to know anything about it to appreciate that the entangling of truth and politics remain perennial questions in politics around the world.

But of course, an understanding of Singaporean history and politics undoubtedly helps to unpack the thick layers of context animating the play. The Cambridge University Southeast Asian Society (CUSEAS) has thus organised a speaker event on ‘The Politics of Truth in Singapore’s Past and Present’ right before our closing night. Everyone is very much welcome to attend the event, but we hope those who attend the session can leave PIE with a deeper appreciation for the stakes involved in the play and how they continue to speak to Singapore’s relationship with her past.

Towards the end of the play, the interrogator tells James that “[t]he best way to remember is by reinvention”. But what do we gain from each reinvention, and what do we lose? Who gets to do the reinvention and what is at stake? There is no question that PIE isn’t just a play. We want this show to be part of a project of representation that continues long after the curtain call, showcasing the complexities of what it means to be Singaporean. But we hope PIE can equally be a testament to the incredible power of theatre that encourages the audience to reckon with the power of narratives both within and without the space of the Corpus Playroom.

Pan-Island Expressway plays at the Corpus Playroom from 25th to 29th February