Painting recreates rote memory of WWII

The most exciting thing to study in Singapore's history textbooks is that period of Japanese domination when the far-flung Republic was swept up in the currents of world war, so says a character.

- Clement Yong Correspondent

THEATRE A THOUSAND STITCHES Kaylene Tan and Alan Oei Drama Centre Black Box May 23

And so it is with many theatremakers, artists and writers wending their way back to this turbulent period, in attempts to deliver fresh insight.

A Thousand Stitches, co-directed by Kaylene Tan and Alan Oei, is the latest to fall in line with this by now familiar tradition. As is revisionist vogue, it seeks to humanise across enemy lines.

The Japanese were not all heartless; those in Singapore were not all saintly. It was possible for those in opposing factions to fall in love, and children were the sacrificial lambs of mass conflict.

More than 80 years after World War II, these have come to be self-evident truths, the blinkered anger and instinctive hatred of the invader having mostly been diluted.

So it is not clear what this ultimately conventional narrative, tracing the relationship between a Japanese official and a Singapore artist, has to offer.