Double life

One day, I suddenly thought about a play I wrote 9 years ago. In my play, a person bumps into a younger version of himself, and recoils in shock. He looks at the younger self and realises that the person is at the crossroads in his life: he could join the mafia, or he could have gone and become an artist. I suppose 30-somethings like us usually have these periods in our lives. I guess he watches in morbid fascination as the younger self fatefully goes on and makes the mistakes that the older self regrets making.

It shouldn't surprise you that the younger self is the person who was writing the play, and now I identify with the older self, and I was thinking about this play the other day, and it was like, "it's been 9 years already!"

The prospect of the younger person joining the mafia was a thinly disguised version of myself having signed away a number of years in my life serving a bond. It was this path that he chose in the end. I suppose we all had misgivings about those decisions then. Even though I portrayed this in the play as something that the person should not have done, I honestly can't really see myself pursuing an artistic career either. In the end, by a twist of fate, the older version takes the rap for the younger person having committed a smuggling operation.

It's kinda sad. But I'm glad I came up with that idea. It was a good one. In a lot of what you do, you know that there are 2 different people looking at you. One is your past self, who probably had some degree of expectation of what you would turn out to be, and one of them is your future self, who probably wish that your present self did something differently. I suppose this is universal, which is why if you were to write a play about something like this, it is not easy to go far wrong.

That was what I came up with when I joined the 24 hour playwriting competition for the first time. That was the last time I wrote a good play. It was funny but that was probably the end of my writing career, even as it was the peak of it. There was a first prize given, and that went to Ng Yi-Sheng, who's still writing and doing pretty well. There was 2 second prizes, and one of them went to Michelle Chong who is still acting. The other one went to me. Seems like all 3 of us obtained undergraduate degrees in the US. There were others who won in the student's category but they're you know kids.

Funny thing is: I was really grouchy when I packed up and it was time to leave. I think a lot of us were, after that ordeal. My disk drive broke down, and I had to go to an internet cafe to email my script to another computer that I could save the thing on. Towards the end you just have to write and write and write and too bad if your ideas are badly expressed, you just have to keep awake. But when I left, this notion popped into my head: I'm going to win this. It was a feeling, when you take a free kick, you know that the ball is going in, although 8 times out of 10 it doesn't happen. But I showed it to a friend after that, the same friend who helped me in another play 6 years earlier, and he told me he didn't see the point of it. I changed my mind, and later on when a letter came telling me to attend the prize giving ceremony I didn't bother showing up and wondered why they asked everybody to attend.

It was the most stupid decision of my life because I could have had my mugshot in the papers next to 2 people who would one day be famous. I had to go down to Theatreworks to collect my prize money.

5 years later, I entered the competition again when I shouldn't have. It was held in conjunction with "Romancing Singapore" and I ended up writing something fairly mediocre, because there were no life experiences to draw from. I suppose a Capricorn like me is always more comfortable writing about tragedy and fate. If I keep up my schedule of 1 competition every 5 years, I should be entering the one next year, but I don't really know if my mojo's gone.

The competition was held at the Singapore river, at one of those places near Robertson Quay which had just been rapidly built in a very short time. I suppose that was a nicer part of Singapore, even if people were essentially out in the open. Normally what they do is they give you 5 stimuli over the course of the 24 hours. You are to incorporate the stimuli into the play. That's not too difficult. The main trick is to put your play in the same physical setting as the place where the competition is held. So if it's being held near a river you write a play which takes place near a river. They will never show you something that doesn't belong near a river, and therefore it will not be hard to fit anything into your play.

The person who was in charge of it made a chance remark, "if we give you a stimulus, integrate it with your story. It's even better if you make it appear more than once." So that's when it hit me: write a play where everything happens twice. I called it "Double Life", because it was a little similar to a movie called "Double Life of Veronique", where 2 versions of the same person, played by the same actress, bump into each other. But then again, it's a little different in my case because there was some time travel involved.