Works by Singaporean playwrights Joel Tan and Chng Yi Kai open in April

Two Singaporean playwrights' works will debut on London stages in April.

- Srinidhi Ragavendran

Joel Tan's Scenes From A Repatriation will run at Royal Court Theatre from April 25 to May 24, while Chng Yi Kai's When The Cloud Catches Colours will be staged at the Barbican Centre as part of the Queer East Festival from April 24 to 26.

The Royal Court is a fitting venue for Tan's play, which examines the contested provenance of a 1,000-year-old Bodhisattva Guan Yin statue in the British Museum. The 155-year-old theatre is located in Sloane Square, named for Sir Hans Sloane, whose collection is the basis for the British Museum's vaunted collection.

Tan's play was inspired by a 2017 visit to the museum.

The 37-year-old recalls in an interview at Tiong Bahru Bakery at Funan mall, opposite Wild Rice Theatre where he is artist-in-residence: "I saw this massive statue of the Buddha, called the Amitabha Buddha, displayed in the middle of a winding stairwell. It was jarring. Every other time I had encountered statues of the Buddha or bodhisattvas, it was in temple settings in Thailand or Singapore. So, I resolved that I needed to find a way to write about that experience."

He wrote the piece for his master's thesis in dramatic writing at Drama Centre London and graduated in 2019.

The work earned a spot in the top five finalists of the 2019 Papatango New Writing Prize, where it caught the attention of the Royal Court's literary department. The theatre commissioned the play in 2022 and refined it over several years.