Im late to the party, but I want to wish the heartiest congratulations to Alvin Tan for his Cultural Medallion. When I was in RI, Alvin was a teacher there for a while. Our paths did not cross in school though, except for one incident—I was crouching in a corner, probably overwhelmed by something (I recall only the posture, not the emotion), and then Alvin came along to ask me, “are you all right?” He sounded kindly, someone who could have been a pastoral care officer, during a time when the very concept of pastoral care was still unknown, and where it was more likely for discipline masters to roam corridors with their booming voices to remind you to tuck in your shirt or pull up your socks. I told him I was all right, and he said to seek him out in case I needed someone to speak to. I think any actor who has worked with Alvin will attest to what a nurturing director he is. When I was in TNS as an Associate Artist, I asked him to recommend books to me. TNS had a great library, and Alvin would pass books to me: “Here’s Foucault,” he would say, “but you’ve probably read it already.” My ABC’s were Arthur Yap, Bertolt Brecht and Caryl Churchill…and each time, with a twinkle in his eye, Alvin would add: “you’ve probably read it already”. A strange thing to say to a tenderfoot (albeit voracious) teenager, but it was his way of never underestimating the intelligence of those he encountered and worked with. It is exactly this profound respect for what individuals can bring to the rehearsal room and ultimately the stage that has marked TNS’ peerless body of work when it comes to representing working-class experiences. And in English theatre, with its middle-class roots, the working class began as the outcast presence, often represented by the lumpen Singlish-spouter, played for cheap laughs. Along with his lifelong collaborator Haresh Sharma, Alvin has brought the margin into the centre, found poetry in the vernacular, the bruised hearts and the secret lands under the façade of the ‘heartland’. The shorthand manner of describing much of TNS’ work is that it is ‘social theatre’, but this assumes that the plays are merely mimetic reproductions of ‘society’ or ‘societal issues’. On the TNS stage, the ‘social’ is always forced to reckon with the existence of the ‘marginal’; society is defined not through ‘community norms’ but via its deviations. Alvin always knows that the boy, in the corner, crouching in his own lonely space of banishment, has his own story to tell.
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 09:51:20 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015