Train To Pakistan may be 2024's most important show

Theatre entertains. Often, it makes people feel. Occasionally, it harbours an urgent message both important and timely, especially impactful when one least expects it.

- Clement Yong

This gem of a play offers one such encounter. Part of the Esplanade's Kalaa Utsavam - Indian Festival of Arts 2024, Train To Pakistan is Singapore company HuM Theatre's adaptation of Indian author Khushwant Singh's 1956 historical novel of the same name.

It is the first time the epic tale, set during the Indian Partition of 1947, has been adapted for the stage outside India, gaining the seal of approval from Singh's daughter Mala Singh.

The result is raw and earnest, unafraid to hammer its message home, broadening its lens to situate the Partition as one of many ethnic conflicts that plague humanity.

A grandmother pooh-poohs her Singaporean granddaughter's audacious suggestion that the tragedy she is narrating is not "my story, but your story".

Yet, it is "our story", in more ways than one. Gaza is explicitly mentioned in a stirring sequence, but more on that later.

In the fictional Punjab village of Mano Majra, Sikhs and Muslims live in harmony. One brews the tea, the other adds the milk.