THE
WRITERS' LAB
24-Hour Playwriting Competition - 2013
Notes from the Judging Panel
A very warm welcome to everyone – especially to our guest-of-honour, Dr Maliki Osman, Mayor of the South East District. Thank you, sir, for your support of this competition and also to the Team at South East CDC.
Thank you all for coming.
My name is Robin Loon and I am Game-master of this year’s 24-Hour Playwriting Competition which was held at the Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall – so a big thank you to them for housing us.
When I started the 24-Hour Playwriting competition with TheatreWorks back in 1997, I just wanted to provide everyone an opportunity to simply, write.
And not just write anything, write a play.
16 years later, I am glad to say that it’s still going strong and I hope everyone will continue to write – not just anything, write a play.
This year we’ve decided to push the competition to a new level. In previous years, we’ve harnessed many plays written from the competition. In 1998, we staged many of the works in a round-the-clock event called GTG (Got-to-Go), conceptualised by Casey Lim. This year, the competition is in negotiation to develop promising plays from this year’s entries in a continuing commitment to produce new plays for the Singapore stage. The focus will be on honing the writers’ craft and to bring the scripts to a stage-ready form. I can’t give away too much for now, only to say – keep your eyes peeled and watch this space.
We’re doing things differently this year. This year, we’re revealing a shortlist of 8 entries in each category that made it for final adjudication. Our judges this year are Mr Ng Yi-Sheng, and the competition’s chief judge from its very first outing, Dr K K Seet, who very kindly agreed to come out of retirement to judge the competition. We’re very grateful for their time. It is our hope that with this shortlist, you, the writers, can have a better gauge of where you stand with your writing. Any entry from either shortlist can be considered for further development.
Before I reveal the shortlist for the Youth Category, I’d like to give some comments on this group’s work. On the whole, the Youth Category out-performed the Open Category. Many of the entries had a strong sense of the stage, and used the idioms and conventions of theatre very well. There were fewer screenplays disguised as plays but there were many still. I urge future contestants to be more vigilant and write for the stage, not the screen. Where the Youth Category entries faltered was depth: both in subject matter and in treatment. The overriding emotion was angst and some of the plays were so overwrought, we needed to invent a new word for it. While I concede that the participants in the Youth Category lacked lived experience (which showed in their engagement of issues in their plays), I caution the young writers not to mistake angst for truth and avoid convenient clichés and easy stereotypes.
The Open Category entries had a lot of confidence and command of the written word and stage conventions. What a majority of the plays did not do well was incorporating the stimuli – many entries opted to be very cursory with the stimuli and many ignored them altogether. And as usual, many entries read more like screenplays than plays. While the entries on the whole covered a wide range of topics, there was an inexplicable fascination across the entries for the morbid and the bizarre. Some quirkiness is good; too much of a good thing is just – TOO MUCH. On the up side, many entries had the courage of their convictions and the voices were strong and loud. I commend all of you for your pluck and steadfastness.
(Prepared & Delivered by Dr Robin Loon, on behalf of the Judging Panel.)