SG Insecure offers a quiet history of surveillance

The Necessary Stage's SG Insecure offers a quiet corrective to a year of fanfare over SG60 and the penchant to instrumentalise history for celebratory narratives.

- Shawn Hoo

Its mixed bag of plays - directed by Haresh Sharma raids history archives not to construct a triumphalist or regressive narrative of nation-building, but to demonstrate that the flow of history can be cyclical. The glut of modern surveillance technologies is not new, the show seems to say, but merely old systems in new forms.

This is most evident in playwright A Yagnya's dream-within-a-dream opening play Bleeding Trees, in which two characters named Veerappan form a connective thread across the history of migrant Singapore.

The first is a South Indian man who comes to Singapore in the early 20th century to work in a rubber estate. The second is a migrant worker who witnesses the 2013 Little India riot. Both characters seem to be versions of each other and are played by Vishnucharan Naidu, who lends a sweet tenderness to his performance.