We all have places that we hold dear. More than a decade later, I still don’t look at my late grandfather’s house in Serangoon whenever I drive past because the new owners have  renovated it. It is tempting to look. But to keep the memory pristine, and because memory is defining, I make it a point not to drive past. 

Oddly, when my family moved out of our Pasir Ris home of 30 years a couple of years ago, it wasn’t hard saying goodbye to it. I think by then, at 40, I had figured that it was best not to tie memories too strongly to physical places in Singapore. At least when the bulldozers of urban renewal come, the memory would be safe. 

Nonetheless, those memories resurfaced anyway as I work on directing Joel Tan’s Mosaic for the Esplanade’s The Studios. The play, written back in 2013, takes place at a dragon playground the night before it’s due to be demolished. As four 20-somethings gather around it for a protest – no, a “sit-in” – it soon becomes clear that they’re all desperately clinging onto something precious from their past. The playground is merely symbolic.

Set model of the staging of Mosaic. Set Design and picture by TK Hay

It’s a great piece of theatre that can trigger an avalanche of nostalgia. It invites us to reopen our own Pandora’s box of childhood innocence and first loves and regrets, and revisit places that meant so much to us but are just not the same anymore. At the heart of it, it poignantly captures the quintessential Singaporean Millennial experience – in a country where buildings get replaced by other buildings every day, what else do we do except sigh, shrug, make a joke, and move on? Why get so sentimental?

And yet there’s a universality about this relationship that we have with spaces, too. There’s a reason why the Greeks developed the Method of Loci as a way to remember things. Also known as memory palace, it’s a mnemonic exercise where you associate a random sequence of, say, numbers, with a journey featuring places of deep personal significance. Maybe you start at your secondary school gate, which has the first number painted on the wall, and then you take a bus whose service is the second number, and then you end up at an old mosaic-tiled dragon playground, where under the slide you see the third number written in the sand… and so on.

In a way, the larger-than-life dragon playground in Mosaic does exactly that – to serve as a palace for both the characters and the audience to project their memories, beliefs, and even identity onto. It’s an invitation for us to examine who we are based on where we find ourselves. It also presents a challenge: when push comes to shove, and truths and lies collide, and the faces and places that we’d attached so much meaning to collapse, which parts of ourselves do we embrace, and which parts must we leave behind?

And, perhaps most intriguingly, what new monuments will we dare to find ourselves standing before?

Mosaic runs from the 18-20 Aug 2023. Get tickets here.