Last year's big hit at the Singapore Theatre Festival, Grandmother Tongue was nominated for four Life! Theatre Awards this year and will return to the stage from 28 September to 21 October. It will see its original cast Jalyn Han and Rei Poh return to the stage. A special sign-language presentation will take place on 14 October (Saturday, 8pm).
In a Singapore where dialects have been losing relevance for generations, Grandmother Tongue traces a young man’s struggle to connect with his 84-year-old Teochew-speaking grandmother. He teaches her to use a mobile phone. He helps her buy her favourite brand of soya sauce. He visits her in hospital after a fall. Along the way, he begins to understand just what it means to spend decades in linguistic and cultural exile. (Excerpt quoted from press release).
Playwright Thomas Lim, Wild Rice's Artist-in-Residence, explains, 'Grandmother Tongue is a reminder of how difficult it is to reduce our complex linguistic, racial and cultural identities to the monolithic race and 'mother tongue' classifications we often use in Singapore. Such complexity and differences should be celebrated, not regulated.'
Tickets for Grandmother Tongue is available on SISTIC. Get yours via the link below!
http://www.sistic.com.sg/events/ctongue1017