SINGAPORE: Veteran playwright and Cultural Medallion recipient Haresh Sharma’s name will take centre stage in the arts scene this year as The Necessary Stage (TNS) celebrates its 30th Anniversary.
As TNS’s resident playwright, he and founder and artistic director Alvin Tan have made their mark with socially-conscious theater. This year, many of his past plays will be re-staged and even re-interpreted.
Sharma went On the Record with Bharati Jagdish about the need for critical thinking in Singapore society, state funding and censorship.
She first asked him what being Haresh Sharma is really like.
Haresh Sharma: The act of “being” is very much in the present. If you ask me what it was like to be me when TNS started in 1987, it was a very different being than the being I am today. Of course now, I am more mellow and I am more confident. I see the fruits of my labour: the work that Alvin and I, and a bunch of other people have put into TNS over all these years; and now we have people who are very supportive. We have received awards.
This year especially is such a precious year for us being our 30th anniversary. The Esplanade curated a whole series of plays called Margins, and this is a series of plays of mine, and TNS's from the past, and they are being re-examined with new eyes, from other artists and theatre companies.
Bharati: You said that who you were when you started out, was of course quite different from who you are today. How much less mellow were you and less confident were you before?
Sharma: Because when I was younger, we used to work long hours so it's easy to get impatient with people. You can get very judgmental that they are not pulling their weight or they are not working as hard as you. When I first started with TNS, I was still at NUS so I was doing theatre and I was still doing school.
When I graduated, I was the first full-time staff. Here I was, working alone, day in and day out. I was writing the plays, I was writing the press releases. I was faxing out the press releases. That was in the early 1990s.
I was going to the design place and looking at paper, colours and all kinds of things. I would photocopy the scripts and go to Telok Ayer Performing Arts Centre. We would rehearse there and then go for supper and go home and continue to rewrite because there are things that need to be changed, and in the morning I would start the administrative process again, looking at the printing of tickets.
I was younger so I didn't have to sleep as many hours and I had coffee all the time. Because of that sometimes, you can get into a situation when you feel you are not quite positive, and then you excuse it by saying: because I am an artist, because I am doing theatre. Sometimes, looking back, I think I should have had more moments when I could just step back and let things settle before getting angry or having conflicts.
Source: Channel News Asia
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