Staging Nation: English Language Theatre in Malaysia and Singapore. By Jacqueline Lo. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004, xi, 227 pp. $49.50 (cloth).

In this challenging study, Jacqueline Lo convincingly shows the ways in which contemporary English-language theatrical texts from Malaysia and Singapore resist and are complicit with the ideologies and practices of their respective postcolonial states. Lo's main contention is that there is no “pure” oppositional position outside the state and its structures and discourses of power. Following the work of Michel Foucault, Lo argues that this is not a simple negative judgment because power is not only coercive but productive as well. Nor does she view power as “an inert and monolithic system” (p. 189); rather, she sees it as an ongoing process of competition and negotiation that must continually be reproduced and modified. In this process, state discourses of power are necessary to subject formation and, consequently, to resistance as well as compliance. Culture and theater do not escape such relations, especially in places such as Malaysia and Singapore, where the state polices culture vigorously. Theatrical performances, she asserts, may both reinforce existing power structures and use ambiguity, mimicry, irony, and satire to undermine the state's own discourses at the same time.Lo's argument is complex, but the examples she has chosen—K. S. Maniam's play about Indo-Malaysian laboring-class life, The Cord (1984); Kee Thuan Chye's parable of authoritarian oppression and rebellion, 1984 Here and Now (1985); Stella Kon's Emily of Emerald Hill (1983), which chronicles the life of a Singaporean peranakan Chinese family matriarch; and Kuo Pao Kun's The Coffin Is Too Big for the Hole (1985), a monologue on one man's struggle with the rigid Singaporean bureaucracy for the sake of family honor—are well suited to support her points. Written and performed at a crucial time in the emergence of lively English-language theater traditions in both countries, these works show the varied ways in which their writers try to negotiate dilemmas such as colonial and nationalist racial and class stereotyping (and ideas of “authenticity”), government repression, ethnic discrimination, the deforming effects of patriarchy (and colonial/national ideologies) on women and their families, and the contradictions between Confucianism (“Asian values”) and pragmatism as it is practiced in Singapore. After two initial chapters laying out her theoretical approach to analyzing the plays’ engagement with ideas of nation and the social and political conditions of production, succeeding chapters are devoted to analyses of each of the four plays. In each case, Lo anchors the theatrical text she is analyzing to its specific cultural and political context. Furthermore, she makes skilled use of the ideas of theorists such as Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Judith Butler, and Homi Bhabha to point out the subtleties of the writers' strategies, as well as the unintended ideological implications of such structures and stories. The concluding chapter discusses developments in English-language theater in both countries during the 1990s and the first years of the new millennium.Because there is little English-language academic work on the theater of either of these two countries, this volume is highly welcome and nicely complements work that already exists on the Singaporean theater boom of the 1990s. Though I find Lo's argument convincing on most counts, I do have two very minor criticisms. First, Lo draws the evidence for her arguments in large proportion from the dramatic texts, with little description of actual performance details. Given that these plays were first performed in the 1980s, this is understandable, as Lo may not have witnessed them, and digital technology likely was not yet in widespread use. Still, this leads to an odd moment in which Lo rightly stresses the importance of studying more than just the script or print text of a performance (pp. 76–77) without offering an explanation as to why she herself has not been able to pursue such an examination as fully as she might have liked.Second, given that Lo herself is averse to binary and essentialized theorizing, there are a few points at which she makes rather surprisingly broad statements. For instance, in responding to one writer's criticism of 1984 Here and Now that it does not explain (according to the critic's understanding) the “basis” of the issues it raises, Lo writes: “The function of creative work is not to solve the issue/s but to cast a different light on the known in order that we may engage with them differently” (p. 107). Although we might sympathize with the plight of an artist who is taken to task for not solving all the problems she or he has raised, does it seem likely—given that Lo has skillfully shown the complexity of social ideologies, discourses, and theatrical practices—that the function of creative work is reducible to this one thing? This is especially relevant because several traditions of Southeast Asian art do not seem to accord with Lo's definition: folk oral narratives, as well as much Javanese shadow theater, place substantial emphasis on reaffirming common myths and beliefs, and many court narrative poems were intended partly to legitimate the rule of particular sovereigns. Nonetheless, Lo's complex and analytically creative grappling with several seminal dramatic texts from Malaysia and Singapore is an exceptional contribution to Southeast Asian performance studies.

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