A moving dialogue between distant histories

In juxtaposing distant historical crises, the risk is that the comparison becomes too obvious, otherwise, too elliptical.

- Shawn Hoo

THEATRE ESCAPE TO BATAM Checkpoint Theatre Singtel Waterfront Theatre Aug 21

Checkpoint Theatre's Escape To Batam avoids both fates and convenes a valuable space for two disparate wounds - the Japanese Occupation and the Covid-19 pandemic - to dialogue open-endedly.

Co-written by husband-and-wife duo Huzir Sulaiman and Claire Wong, who also directs the play, Escape To Batam is a conversation between father and daughter, the dead and the unborn.

In the play, present-day Claire longs to convey her pandemic grief to her late father Wong Heck Ming, who died in 2016. Ming, on the other hand, recalls his interrupted boyhood - way before Claire was born - when his family fled to Batam island after Japanese forces occupied Singapore.

Common to both the war and pandemic is the fact that borders have become more inflexible and any crossing is fraught with danger and the impossibility of a simple return. In breaching the border between life and death, the play attempts one more border crossing that might help tether seemingly unrelated moments of grief and loss. The result is a moving conversation across generations and the borders of life.