Edwards, James
(2014)
Impossible Properties: Language And
Legitimacy In Ong Keng Sen's Lear.
International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies (IJAPS), 10 (2).
pp. 14-34.
ISSN ISSN: 1823-6243
Abstract
This paper explores a landmark production in the history of Asian intercultural
theatre, Singaporean director Ong Keng Sen and Japanese playwright Kishida
Rio's Lear (1997/1999). A lavish production underwritten by the Japan
Foundation Asia Center, Lear helped establish Ong's "fiercely intercultural"
aesthetic as an internationally recognisable brand (Peterson 2003: 81). It also
drew critique as a symbolic apologia for neoliberal globalisation. The critical
literature on Lear has yielded trenchant insights into the global political
significance of intercultural performance. At the same time, however, it has
tended to overshadow questions of the work's aesthetic specificity and local
significance. This paper seeks to recuperate Lear's local meanings both as a text
and as a uniquely Singaporean political allegory. In the paper's first section, I
will outline the play and its critique as late capitalist spectacle. In the following
section, I will bracket this critique and return to the texts at hand. Finally, I will
move back outward by tracing a Brechtian tension between Kishida's text, Ong's
realisation, and the Singaporean state's "choreography" of racial, cultural and
linguistic difference.
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