Waiting for Audience

by Nelson Chia
Nine Years Theatre

Singapore International Festival of Arts 2025

SOTA Drama Centre, Singapore

Natalie Hennedige's final year as SIFA Festival Director has been rich in classics. Not just classics, but classics reimagined. Orwell's Animal Farm performed with life-sized puppets. A stripped-down, wordless version of Shakespeare's Lear. And now this – an original Mandarin play that cleverly riffs on Beckett's absurdist masterpiece Waiting for Godot. 

Waiting for Audience was first presented by Nine Years Theatre as part of Tomorrow and Tomorrow, a works-in-progress showcase at last year's SIFA. Earning warm reviews, it was one of the only works that was commissioned for a full-scale production at this year's festival and is currently competing for the prestigious Teresa Pomodoro International Prize in Milan. Written by Nelson Chia and starring both himself and his wife Mia Chee, it's a warm, wacky and wistful ode to theatre and the audience. 

Looking rather like Beckett's tramps Didi and Gogo, two actors, A (Chee) and O (Chia) dressed in caps and coats, enter a dilapidated theatre on the night before it is due to be demolished. It's a mess of stacked chairs, dusty lighting rigs and sound consoles. Each has booked the space for one final performance with key stakeholders. They banter and bicker only to realise that the joke is on them: the theatre has been rented to each of them by an agent who has since absconded, they have identical guest lists and to add insult to injury, each has prepared the same material, a selection of Shakespearean speeches. Faced with no other option, they grudgingly agree to share the stage by drawing a line through it with masking tape. After all, the show must go on. 

Photo Credit: Crispian Chan

There's a delicious irony in seeing two actors peering at an empty theatre which is of course packed. And apart from the two bickering thespians, we have an additional character on display: the surtitles. Here, in a joyous meta-theatrical nod, it takes on a life of its own, speaking both to us and directly to the characters, acting as the very soul of the space. It's a brilliant way to showcase a technical side of theatre-making that is often taken for granted, particularly for those who cannot access works performed in another language. The care and effort taken to render the Mandarin translations by surtitlist Tennie Su must certainly be commended and significantly add to the viewing pleasure. 

Nine Years Theatre has long had a reputation for rather serious theatre, many of which have been Mandarin versions of world classics like An Enemy of the People, The Lower Depths, and Three Sisters. It's refreshing to see the two actors simply have fun and lean into comedy. Chia, who also directs, gives us a taut yet elegiac one-hour show, buoyed by delightful lighting by Emanorwatty Saleh and sound effects by Jing Ng. Chee and Chia, who recently performed in the acclaimed two-hander See You, Anniversary, have an infectious energy and easy camaraderie. They draw from elements of physical theatre, clowning and Chinese cross-talk, skilfully blending slapstick with solemnity. The onomatopoeic qualities of the characters' names, naturally, contributes to the humour. 

Photo Credit: Crispian Chan

In a particularly entertaining sequence, the actors take turns performing Macbeth's classic "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy in a variety of different dialects and styles, ranging from melodrama to a rap that brings the house down. Of course, behind the humour there is a  bite, the speech famously lamenting death and the relentless trudge of time. Are they also lamenting the demise of a theatre that has contained so many worlds? One cannot help but reflect on the various arts spaces in this country that have been lost to us over the years. 

And, indeed, behind all the madness and mayhem of this production, a deeper question comes to the fore. What is the point of theatre itself? "We exist because they exist", Chee's character remarks when the pair realizes that no one is in fact coming to their show. Is theatre, or any other art form, created purely for an audience to consume or for its own intrinsic merit? Hope, ultimately, is what sustains them – hope for a theatre filled with appreciative crowds, hope that their work has some meaning, hope that they can simply continue to tell stories.  

With Waiting for Audience, Nine Years Theatre has crafted a piece that is both hilarious and heartfelt, a celebration of actors who work so hard to entertain and how, we, the audience, are inextricably part of that equation by receiving and responding to their work. It's a privilege to witness these two fine actors perform for us and reflect on a lifetime of shows that we have seen and will see by other actors, on other stages. Long may we dream together.  

The Crystalwords score: 4/5