With homosexuality still outlawed in Singapore, an all-male production of The Importance of Being Earnest touches on taboos and becomes a paean for equality

The twist that Singaporean theatre company W!ld Rice put on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest was a simple one: employ an all-male cast to play both male and female characters.

While the theatre company are not the first to cast a male actor as the play’s lead matriarch, Lady Bracknell (Geoffrey Rush has played her in the past, and David Suchet is playing her now in London’s West End), by keeping their male actors in suits rather than dress in drag, the play was transformed into a homoromantic comedy – a love letter to same-sex marriage.

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When W!ld Rice brought the play to Brisbane festival last week for three performances, it was warmly received by local audiences, and 120 years after it was first staged, Wilde’s famous wit still sparkled like champagne.

In an audience discussion after the show’s Saturday matinee, director Glen Goei talked about the production’s genesis. In 2007, Goei and the company’s artistic director Ivan Heng (who also played Lady Bracknell) began a campaign with several friends to repeal section 377A of Singapore’s penal code, which criminalises “any act of gross indecency” between consenting adult males.

When they lost that battle, Goei was “very, very upset”. With one of the highest GDPs and millionaires per capita in the world, Singapore’s residents think of it as a global city, he says. “We like to boast that we’ve arrived and that we’re very first world.

“But actually we’re still very conservative, still very traditional and still have rather archaic laws which we have kept from the time we were a British colony,” he says.

There is something poignant and tragic about the fact section 377A is the same law under which Oscar Wilde was infamously imprisoned for two years. The Importance of Being Earnest was one of the last plays the British humorist completed before entering prison in 1897. He later died in Paris, destitute, following several years of poor health.

Goei says homosexuality remains a taboo in Singapore. “It’s very difficult for a young lesbian or homosexual teenager to come out because it’s already been institutionalised as a crime,” he says.

Teen suicide rates in the LGBT community remain high, he adds , and without proper safe sex education, so do rates of HIV infection.

“We live in Victorian times,” says Heng. “The more and more we progress the more Victorian we come. We’ve become so moralistic, so judgmental, so serious, so earnest, so boring, so hard-working.”



With nationalism at fever pitch and Singapore recently celebrating 50 years since independence, Heng compares the ruling government to the character of Napoleon in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, telling the people every year “work, you must work harder” and to “serve your country, do this for the nation”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest W!ld Rice’s all-male production of The Importance of Being Earnest has become the theatre company’s ‘paean for tolerance and inclusivity, for equality and justice’. Photograph: Brisbane festival

“As a society gets wealthier and more affluent as Singapore has over the past few years, it becomes more conservative. Everyone wants to keep and maintain whatever they have accumulated over the years,” Goei says.

When Goei reread The Importance of Being Earnest several years ago, he could hear Oscar Wilde “in every single character, every line, spoken by whichever character”. It became the inspiration behind his casting choice. Goei says he wanted to pay tribute while remaining “true to his writing, to his wit, to his language”.

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In a country which ranked 153rd on the 2015 press freedom index, lower than Russia and Turkey, “the arts community, and theatre in particular, has risen to take on the role of the the fourth estate,” Heng says. “It’s a wonderful time to be an artist in Singapore because there’s so much to do.”

When the production was first submitted to Singapore’s censorship board, the Media Development Authority, in 2009 it was issued with a parental advisory warning. The authority’s deputy director of arts and publications said they felt the play had “gay undertones” and “may be inappropriate for a young audience”.

“They would not have had a problem if I was wearing a gown,” Heng says.

Nonetheless, audiences in Singapore reacted positively to the production and to its core message that “love and marriage, the desire to have someone to love, is timeless and universal”. The play has become, he says, the company’s “paean for tolerance and inclusivity, for equality and justice”.