PRESS

“Tan delves fascinatingly into the murky meaning of ownership... the panorama of the story is vast and scorchingly profound”
— The Stage

“Tan has written a play that feels at once sweeping in scope and completely nuanced. Told with biting satire and extraordinary personal depth, it establishes him as one of the most daring playwrights working today”
— London Reviews

“'Ingenious and thrilling... intellectual complexity as well as dramatic intensity... This is innovative theatre, shining with intelligence, which brings richness to our cultural tussle with the problem of ancient statues and their rightful place in the world”
— The Guardian

playtext

Scenes from a Repatriation, Nick Hern Books

SYNOPSIS

‘All of human history? It’s basically people taking things from each other’

A 1000-year-old statue of the Boddhisattva Guan Yin lives in The British Museum.

When it emerges that the statue was stolen from its original home, the museum attempts to deflect both the public response and controversial repatriation claims from the Chinese government.

As statesmen scheme and grease their palms, beneath the statue witches dance, a cleaner prays, and spirits weep. Guan Yin’s gaze falls over the broken shards of human life from empires old and new.

Joel Tan’s shape-shifting play unfolds the statue’s journey from China to Britain and back again, stirring up centuries of ghosts. Directed by experimental theatre-makers emma + pj, SCENES FROM A REPATRIATION questions who can claim cultural artefacts – and why.

PRESS

”Hilariously foulmouthed… No one is safe from [Joel Tan’s] razor-sharp gaze… Marketed as a play about cancel culture, it’s really a deeper, existential dive into art, making and meaning.”
— The Straits Times

playtext

Tartuffe the Imposter & G*d is a Woman, Ethos Books

SYNOPSIS

A work of art is censored in Singapore. An irate playwright wants revenge. He writes a petition to trap the conservative lobbyists responsible by starting a suicidal campaign to cancel Ariana Grande’s upcoming concert. Because this is Singapore, everything goes tits up, and Ariana Grande may or may not be involved.

In a whirlwind of competing petitions, frantic Zoom calls between Los Angeles and Singapore, and whispered conversations at the golf course, the campaign to save the concert comes up against the most powerful people in Singapore: the easily offended.

Straddling the line between political satire and yesterday’s news, G*D IS A WOMAN is based somewhat on true events and wagers that the stupid events of this play could happen tomorrow. After all, when a country hands the reins of determining acceptable speech to a cabal of right-wing lunatics, all that remains is absurdity.

PrESS

”Heralds a fiery new talent in Joel Tan… No Particular Order reminds you how boringly safe and naturalistic most theatre remains.”
— The Evening Standard

PLAYTEXT

No Particular Order, Nick Hern Books.

SYNOPSIS

“A despot has come to power.”

The society is listless, submissive and scared.

But beneath every violation of civil autonomy, there are humans, behind every resistance to power, there are individuals. And these people are not different to us but identical, they are not heroic or remarkable, but ordinary.

This prescient portrait of global politics and rise of authoritarianism is told from an unnamed place and spans 320 years, delivering snapshots of both a recognisable world and visions of the future. Through the lives of ordinary people – ornithologists, bureaucrats, soldiers, and tour guides No Particular Order charts the fall, rise and continuation of a nation, always asking the same question “Is it empathy, or power, that endures?”

PRESS

”Tango keeps shifting the ground and in so doing, it evades the curse of the earnest, the blight of the politically correct, the tedious predictability of the social justice warrior…. Preaching to the choir is easy. Instead, Tango aims for something riskier, rarer – implicating its audience.”
— Arts Equator

“A mesmeric showcase of world-class talent... Tan balances all this drama beautifully in a pithy, pacy and elegant script... He achieves such balance by showing both sides to every predicament, tenderly stripping away layer upon layer of hypocrisy while leaving hard truths that stick in the craw.”
— The Straits Times

Playtext

Collected in British East Asian Plays, Aurora Metro Press.

SYNOPSIS

“It was a rainy day, and I’d gone home with a note stuck to my backpack which read FAT FAGGOT.”

Two gay Londoners, Kenneth and Liam, and their son, Jayden, relocate to Singapore to spend time with Kenneth’s ailing dad. It’s not a happy situation. Kenneth has a dark hate-hate relationship with Singapore, and the city’s tetchy policies around homosexuality present towering administrative hurdles. Then, a homophobic encounter with an elderly waitress launches the family into a social media war between ideological factions. Meanwhile, Poh Lin, the waitress, is caught in the same storm, and weathers it with her closeted nephew, Benmin. 

PRESS

“Over the course of an hour and forty-five minutes, I was gripping the edge of my seat, watching the actions five characters holed up in a hipster café while the world outside them goes to hell.”
— The Online Citizen 

“You wouldn't think it from the humdrum title, but Joel Tan's Café is possibly the creepiest, canniest, most cunning play of the year…. Slowly and subtly, the scares creep in. The terror builds up. When the finale arrives, it is unexpected, implosive and profound.”
— The Business Times

PLAYTEXT

Café, Math Paper Press.

synopsis

“The spam. You finished counting the spam?”

Five people, staff and customers, are stuck in one of an infinite number of hip Singapore cafés while an unexplained horror wracks the world outside. Over five short acts, a madness sets in. The cafe and all reality is eaten away by a nightmare of banality and tedium, leaving only a well of deep ennui, paralysing apathy, and horrifying cruelty familiar to anyone living in the city-state.

PRESS

“...sharply critiques our obsession with the past, revealing its hollowness and contradictions… Mosaic is beautiful, admirably complex and disturbing. It offers no solutions to its crises, leaving viewers with a knot of angst in their chests.”
— The Straits Times

PLAYTEXT

Collected in Joel Tan Plays Volume 1, Checkpoint Theatre.

synopsis

“Maybe it’s a good thing they’re tearing down this playground. I mean. The playground means shit. If you forget, you forget, right?”

The night before it’s due for demolition, an 80s-era mosaic playground in Singapore is beset with a protest event.

Misguided heritage activist Sharon has dragged her perennially-suffering boyfriend Hanis along to her sit-in and no one else on the Facebook event has turned up. Except a mysterious guy called Rong Cheng who brings with him a terrifying sob-story, and Hanis’s best friend, Wong, who picks at the last fraying threads of Sharon and Hanis’s toxic relationship.

What starts out as a night of heritage activism turns into angsty millennial drama in this play that excavates the insincere heart of Singaporean nostalgia and finds a young generation’s ambivalence about progress and the future. 

PRESS

“Joel Tan... has created here a rich portrait of the pleasures and pains of love. He shows the ability to skilfully handle nuance and write characters that feel authentic and proudly Singaporean.”
— Crystal Worlds

PLAYTEXT

Collected in Joel Tan Plays Volume 1, Checkpoint Theatre.

synopsis

“When the time has run out to make things right, god, you think, what was it all for? A little privacy? A little space? Stupid.”

Legendary principal of the Convent of Our Lady of Lourdes, Agatha Mao, has cast a long shadow. When she dies, students young and old return to pay tribute alongside the greatest loves of her life, Violet, her best friend and colleague, and Edmund, her late-life lover and greatest disappointment. There’s also Gillian, a one-time naughtiest girl of the school, and Lee, her one-time girlfriend. Together, through memory, fellowship, and grief, the ensemble enact a story of love and regret in all their forms.