“The 3500-year-old myth”: Wimbledon Honorary Doctor Ong Keng Sen talks Trojan Women

With decades worth of theatre making experience under his belt, acclaimed director Ong Keng Sen is at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival where he plans to take the Scottish capital by storm with his retelling of Euripides’ Greek tragedy The Trojan Women.

The director, who is renowned for his innovative approach to theatre-making by combining both Eastern and Western performance traditions, was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Wimbledon College of Arts in 2022 for outstanding contribution to the field of theatre direction. Hailing from Singapore, Keng Sen was the first artist to direct the Singapore International Festival of Arts, increasing audience numbers and participation in the festival, as well as raising awareness of Singaporean art through international partnerships.

Keng Sen’s interest in transcultural theatre making – a process he describes as bringing traditional art forms from one culture into contact with contemporary artists from another culture – is exemplified through his work on Trojan Women, which is showing at Edinburgh International Festival from 9-11 August 2023. Entering its 7th year, the Guardian previously praised the production’s “bold retelling” of a Greek classic through “queering the role of Helen of Troy”.

Founded in 1947, Edinburgh International Festival aims to “transcend political boundaries through a global celebration of performance arts”. This year’s festival (of which Scottish Violinist Nicola Benedetti is currently Festival Director) runs from 4-27 August 2023 and features contributions from over 2000 local and international artists from across 48 nations.

We spoke to Keng Sen about his interest in transcultural theatre and experience of working on Trojan Women.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your entry into theatre?

My name is Keng Sen Ong and I'm primarily a theatre and performance maker. More recently, I have become interested in pedagogy, largely as the result of my PhD.

As a theatre and performance maker, I am interested in transcultural processes. My parents came from China, and they were teenagers when they arrived in Singapore, making me first generation Singaporean. Like my parents, most of the people who live in Singapore are part of a diaspora or several diasporas. As you make theatre, you start to explore self-identities and the context of the city that you're working and living in.

My first degree was in law, but a group of us realised we made more theatre than law! We put on a lot of plays in university. Once I graduated, I became part of TheatreWorks, of which I am the Creative Director, and we started to explore what Singaporean theatre really means. Immediately, the whole idea of transcultural processes in theatre making began. Thinking through this lens transforms the work because you’re no longer taking a Caryl Churchill play, or a Tom Stoppard play and just working on it; instead, you are asking yourself, ‘what do these plays mean to me?’ and ‘how and why am I performing them rather than thinking about my histories?’ In a sense, the whole process becomes decolonial because you are involved in theatre-making with some confrontation of self and identity.

Can you describe Trojan Women and what it means to you to have worked on this production?

Trojan Women is a classic Greek tragedy that we have reimagined through pansori (Korean folk opera). The production includes 25 singers, actors and musicians from the National Changgeuk Company of Korea.

This particular Greek play is about women who have experienced great loss. They have not just lost the war; they have lost everything. They are individuals on the margins who have to accommodate the powerful in order to survive. It’s a production that we first created 7 years ago, and every time we come back to it, we ask ourselves ‘why do we still get moved by this work?’ The fact that I’m still moved by this play isn’t because I'm necessarily weeping for Cassandra or Helen but because the characters in the play are really vessels for all the emotions around loss and for all the people who have lost in life. It’s a perennial work because war is eternal and there will always be one side of a war that will lose. Its eternality means that we are thinking about a myth from almost 3500 years ago, which is epic. There is something special about Greek theatre.

The play uses Korean opera to retell the classic Greek tragedy. Can you tell us a bit about your experience of working with the 2 styles?

Greek theatre has a fairly stylised approach to shape and movement. At the same time, Korean opera is very emotional and organic. This particular opera form is changgeuk and the storytelling is pansori. Pansori is 400 years old and is a solo performer telling the stories of all the characters. Changgeuk emerged around the beginning of the 20th century, where it was decided that it is a bit boring to have a single storyteller telling the whole story for 3 hours. Instead, changgeuk gives a voice to every character but using the pansori style of singing, meaning all the rhythms come from the storytelling. For this reason, the text of The Trojan Women had to be put into these fixed patterns.

Pansori is completely different from Western opera. With western opera, you're immediately categorised into a voice type and therefore a particular role eg bass, tenor, alto, soprano, countertenor and so on. With pansori, you can sing anything and everything. Your voice is not categorised in the same way. A female singer can sing an army general’s part and a male singer can sing a queen’s part. It takes a storytelling approach that is not character specific, so you end up with something very organic. Emotion is central to Korean opera because when you hear the singer it's a visceral sound. What you hear is not so much the note, but the emotion. This can therefore become very strange because the movement is very stylised and it's a contrast for the singers who sometimes have to move in this very structured way. In a sense, the chorus is the kind of dynamic reinvention of the tradition and the classical characters are speaking in traditional 400-year-old melodies.

What’s interesting too is that I had 2 individuals come to me after 2 different performances, one in Amsterdam and one in New York. Both have never met each other, but they told me the exact same thing. After seeing the play, they said to me ‘this is how Greek theatre sounded!’ They were referring to the fact Greek theatre was often chanted. There was a musicality to it. And Korean opera lends itself to this because everything is put to a rhythm. I found it very powerful that somehow a Korean operatic style could unlock in these 2 individuals the feeling that they were listening to a traditional Greek tragedy, with the chanted musicality of Greek theatre. Suddenly, these scripts come alive through this traditional Korean form. And I must say watching what we've created, I really feel that it's alive.

What were some of the challenges you encountered with this production?

It’s a lot of work to bring together a group of collaborators to make this type of work. If I was working on a modern musical or opera, I would work with the writer and the composer, right? But here, I work with 4 people: 2 writers and 2 composers. There is the opera composer who's composing around the melody of the speeches and the composer of the changgeuk, who is also the composer for the chorus. We brought in improvisational elements through working with contemporary composer Jung Jae-il, who composed the music for the Academy Award winning film Parasite.

What would surprise somebody coming to see this?

It feels like it’s for a Korean audience because it has a Korean narrative where you have the last Trojan boy and they have to protect his life. It’s all about responsibility and duty to continue the lineage, to keep your dignity and to leave Troy a dignified individual. All these things chime with Korean values in many ways. If someone doesn't know that this was an original Greek play, they might think this is a Korean story. And then for the non-Korean audience, I think that they would be surprised that Korean performers can be so natural in it. It’s almost like Euripides wrote this for them. In a strange way, the cultural borders fade and melt away.

What advice do you have for students currently studying at Wimbledon College of Arts?

I think it's very important to keep pure to the desires of the work. Young emerging artists very often try to be trendy and go for what they think would work rather than what is the emotional truth in the work. As you're making the work, make sure that it speaks to you and that you connect with your reasons for making the work.

Find out more about Trojan Women

Find out more about Edinburgh International Festival

Find out more about Ong Keng Sen

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