Wife #11: A Marriage in Letters

PUBLISHED February 17th, 2016 11:37 am | UPDATED June 2nd, 2020 07:27 pm

Opening at  The Arts House Play Den on 26 February 2016, World-in-Theatre is restaging local playwright Desmond Sim’s Wife #11. Spanning 16 years of marriage in post-World War II Singapore, the story is told through a series of letters written between a husband and wife.

First staged by Action Theatre (and backed by the National Heritage Board) in 2009 with Casey Lim and Tan Kheng Hua, it was directed by
Samantha Scott-Blackhall and Tan received a Life! Theatre Award nomination in 2010 for best actress.

This time around, Desmond Sim also takes up the mantle of director, while the titular role is played by Amy Cheng, whose acting credits include television series Growing Up and Jack Neo’s Just Follow Law in 2007. She stars opposite actor and Indian classical dancer Sonny Lim, who’s also a founding member of World- In-Theatre, a 14-year-old troupe founded by nine theatre practitioners deeply influenced by the late director William Teo.

Wife #11 is about a towkay (a colloquial term for a rich business man) and his newest wife – #11, a convent-educated, English-speaking woman ahead of her time – in post-war Singapore. They argue and negotiate their way through their tumultuous marriage, which is revealed to the audience via their correspondence. At the same time, Singapore is gradually becoming a modern nation that no longer tolerates polygamy. The letters are touching and humorous and will be a revelation to millennials who are used communicating via their mobile devices.

Sonny Lim Tells Us More About Wife#11:

“Amy and I did the play for an internal audience at Temasek Polytechnic in 2014, and someone proposed that World-in-Theatre take it on as a project as many people had not seen it at its first outing in 2009. Basically, it’s the same production as the one in 2014, but Desmond Sim (who was just an advisor then) wanted to be more involved. Desmond is keen that Amy and I retain the spirit of discovery while referring to the letters rather than doing a “reading”.

The audience response in 2014 really floored me. I didn’t expect them to be so ‘struck’. The dialogue session after the show revealed this – they didn’t want to go home and wanted to keep talking about it. And they were moved to tears. Desmond told us there was an emotional intensity in our 2014 version that Amy and I had communicated.
Amy and I both fell in love with our respective characters, and wouldn’t let them go even after the play’s run had ended.
My character is simply known as “Ah Huat”. The most interesting aspect of him is that every wife he married, he married in order to rescue from an adverse situation – they had been prostitutes, abandoned women, widows, etc. This fact is casually slipped into the story and the audience may or may not have heard it, but it didn’t matter; it gave me the stimulus for my performance. I still played him as he was in the script for the most part, a Male Chauvinist Pig, but this little fact infused and informed my assumption of the character.”

Wife #11 is on at the Play Den at the Arts House from 26 to 28 February 2016. Tickets cost $35, and you can get them here.