Michelle Tan’s new play asks how teachers should act in the face of tragedy
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Michelle Tan is the playwright of Wild Rice's upcoming play, The Radicalisation Of Mrs. Mary Lim-Rodrigues.
ST PHOTO: GIN TAY
- Michelle Tan's new play, The Radicalisation Of Mrs. Mary Lim-Rodrigues, wants people to reconsider what is radical.
- The play features a school principal who changes after a student's suicide and uses a novelistic style to reveal her inner thoughts.
- Tan highlights that change in education has no quick fixes.
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SINGAPORE – Playwright Michelle Tan wants audiences to reconsider what is radical with her new play opening at the Ngee Ann Kongsi Theatre on Sept 24.
The Radicalisation Of Mrs. Mary Lim-Rodrigues invokes one of the most difficult words in the post 9/11 context. But to those whose political radar pings from the title alone, Tan assures, mischievously: “It’s not as radical as flying kites in Marina Barrage.”
Four women were recently charged in court for organising a mass kite-flying event at Marina Barrage to raise awareness of the atrocities in Gaza in October 2024.
Tan says she wants to reclaim the word that still bears negative connotations. “I’d like to make an argument that there are certain things or values worth stretching ourselves for, or situations in which radical change is not just a good thing, but a necessary thing.”
An educator of 14 years, Tan, 39, sets her argument firmly in the education system. A school principal goes rogue after one of her students dies by suicide.
Tan says this context came later and that she started from more abstract questions: “What does it take to change a system? And before that, what does it take to change a person?”
Overtime, the play became an avenue for her to reconcile her own complicated relationship with established standard operating procedure, which are there for “the correct reasons”, she accepts.
The play “sits squarely in the realm of fiction”, but also draws from reality, and is as much about pre-emptive interventions as the aftermath.
The play has a cast of nine which includes an ensemble that articulates Mrs Lim-Rodrigues’ inner thoughts.
PHOTO: WILD RICE
“At least in the spaces that I exist in, both formal and informal, these things feel very difficult to talk about and very hard to bring up,” Tan says. “It was out of necessity for me to try to begin that conversation, if not with other people, then at least with myself.”
Asked if the main character’s spiral hints at her own emotional state, Tan says: “I should hope that I share her sense of propriety and restraint where the occasion calls for it.”
To this, she adds, also the wish that like Mrs Lim-Rodrigues, she will harbour the honest desire to do the right thing, even when it is more difficult.
Stylistically, the work will feel different from more conventional scripts. Inspired by the blockbuster The Lehman Trilogy by Italian writer Stefano Massini, Tan set out to give her script a novelistic feel and did not assign lines to characters.
She has included descriptions of Mrs Lim-Rodrigues’ interiority. “I wanted us to struggle with that tension that exists between what we think, which is usually more voluminous, and what eventually comes out.”
But this experiment also makes it an exercise in testing what audiences will accept. During a work-in-progress two-hander script reading at the Singapore International Festival of Arts in 2025, an audience member asked bluntly why they were being made to listen to an audio book for an hour.
Tan takes it with good grace. “I thought, ‘That is so succinct.’ I immediately knew what they were talking about.”
Director Edith Podesta has gamely taken on the challenge and expanded the cast to nine, including an ensemble that will articulate the inner thoughts of Mrs Lim-Rodrigues, played by Janice Koh.
Janice Koh plays a school principal that goes rogue after a student dies by suicide.
PHOTO: WILD RICE
Other non-ensemble actors are Ryan Ang, Izzul Irfan, Koh Wan Ching and Suhaili Safari. With set and dramatised movement, it should imbue the play with a different tenor.
Tan, since completing the play, has started to take a longer-term view of change as something that usually takes more than a lifetime and which comes with a cost – borne by more than one person, she says.
There can be no blueprint for fixed steps to take. “Flexibility” is an answer. So, too, are pedagogical approaches and smaller class sizes.
“If I had a quick fix,” Tan says. “I wouldn’t have had to write a play.”
Book It/The Radicalisation Of Mrs. Mary Lim-Rodrigues
Where: Wild Rice@Funan, 04-08 Funan, 107 North Bridge Road
When: Sept 24 to Oct 10, Tuesdays to Fridays, 7.30pm; Saturdays, 2.30pm and 7.30pm; Sundays, 1.30pm
Admission: From $40
Info: str.sg/yyuUe