Provocative shows at Singapore arts festival stretch boundaries of censorship

Inside the 19th-century splendour of Singapore’s Victoria Theatre, a middle-aged man orders an eight-year-old actress to strip on stage. Sitting in front of a video camera in just her underwear, the pretty girl hugs her knees as if she is cold, her vulnerability magnified onto a screen at the back of the stage.

She explains how it feels to be held captive by a murderous paedophile who repeatedly “entered” her, and looks disturbingly untroubled by the abhorrent scenario she vividly describes. The effect – no doubt intended – is merciless exposure to brutality.

The scene is from Five Easy Pieces, a new play by Swiss director Milo Rau, which made its Asian debut at this year’s Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA). The piece was inspired by the real-life case of Marc Dutroux, a Belgian psychopath who kidnapped, sexually abused and murdered young girls in the 1990s.

Performed in Dutch with English surtitles, the main cast, from Belgium’s Campo art centre, are aged eight to 13. It is that extraordinary combination of childhood, documentary and stagecraft that cleverly implicated the audience in one of humanity’s vilest crimes and forced them to question whether treating children with kid gloves does anything to protect them from danger.

The show is theatre at its most provocative and the Singapore crowd loved it when they saw it in August. Several curtain calls later, a few Hongkongers in the audience emerged, their minds boggled at the fact that they could watch the play in a city known for the three Cs: chewing gum ban, caning and censorship.