Conundrum Theatre, Wild Rice bag awards at Edinburgh Fringe

Competing for attention amid more than 3,700 shows from 60 countries, the unofficial Singapore 10-act contingent at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe won over audiences and critics at the world’s biggest performing arts festival between Aug 2 and 26.

At the Asian Arts Awards 2024, youth theatre company Conundrum Theatre’s 12-member ensemble of 13- to 18-year-olds in Only Human bagged the Outstanding Young Performers Award. Actress Sindhura Kalidas was highly commended in the Outstanding Female Performer category for her performance in Wild Rice’s one-woman show Psychob***h.

It was 16-year-old Singaporean actress Zo Tan’s first time at Edinburgh Fringe, and the Year 4 School of the Arts theatre student tells The Straits Times that the experience affirmed her decision to pursue theatre. She says: “After doing the fringe, I said, ‘Yes, this is what I want to do in the future.’”

Zo played the main villain robot uBot in Conundrum Theatre’s absurdist science-fiction show inspired by artificial intelligence. She flew to Scotland expecting nothing and was pleasantly surprised. “It’s such a huge event, and you don’t really expect anything if you’re a small company,” she adds.

Founder and artistic director Claire Glenn, who was born in New Zealand and based in Singapore, had prepared her group for the possibility of performing to an empty theatre at the packed festival. Her worries proved unfounded when the audience grew from a modest 17 to a sold-out final show at the 65-seater venue, as word of mouth and good reviews boosted the show’s visibility.

An eye-catching promotion strategy also helped. Conundrum Theatre’s cast and crew wore orange jumpsuits to promote their show atop Arthur’s Seat hill and at the Royal Mile, where they were featured on an Instagram post by Mr Angus Robertson, a cabinet member in the Scottish government.

Kalidas, who was nominated for best actress at the ST Life Theatre Awards 2024, was surprised at her win. She says: “I didn’t know I was in the running or that the panellist was there (in the audience). But it feels wonderful to be recognised.”

Psychob***h playwright and lawyer Amanda Chong says her first outing at Edinburgh Fringe was exhausting and invigorating.

Chong’s highlight was meeting her literary idols. “My hero Suzie Miller, the lawyer-playwright who wrote the Olivier Award-winning Prima Facie (2019), came to see Psychb***h and loved it. She even championed it on her personal social media,” she adds.

The show averaged 30 audience members a night. Among them were illustrious names such as Iranian-American writer Dina Nayeri and Booker Prize-shortlisted English novelist Fiona Mozley.

For Singaporean writer-actress and fringe first-timer Jo Tan, performing Forked – her monologue about a Singaporean student who moves to London to study drama – at an international platform has given her confidence that Singapore stories can resonate with audiences worldwide.

After playing to 40 to 50 audience members a show at the peak of Forked’s run, she says: “It has answered something that I’ve been struggling with, which is, can we just be Singaporean and what does that mean? People want to hear this voice and this voice is worthy of being heard – without being changed.”

Tamil- and English-language theatre group Avant Theatre’s five-man team brought two shows to the fringe – prison executioner dark comedy Hangman and Mahabharata-inspired monologue Bhishma The Grandsire. The cast for each show doubled as crew for the other, as founding director G. Selva says there are few full-time Tamil theatre practitioners.

He will head to the Sydney Fringe in September and Melbourne Fringe in October, and says of his international fringe tour in 2024: “We want to show that we have versatile artists in the Indian community. At some point, Tamil theatre has to take a different step to vibrate the scene.”

Also at Edinburgh Fringe was P7:1SMA co-founder Hasyimah Harith with Nak Dara, a solo performance that tackles representations of a woman’s body.