SINGAPORE – News headlines are the inspiration behind two original scripts by home-grown playwrights that will premiere at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2024 in January.

Playwright Raimi Safari, 36, wrote Oo-woo after he read reports – including a 2015 story in The Straits Times – of how Singaporeans were admitting their sick and elderly family members into Johor Bahru’s nursing homes, where prices are reported to be half of those in Singapore.

“It got me thinking about what could have driven those families to that particular point,” says Raimi of his script, which was first developed as part of The Necessary Stage’s mentorship platform Playwrights’ Cove in 2022.

Oo-woo, which stages the disappearance of a family bird as a way to interrogate duty and love when caring for an elderly mother with dementia, plays at the Esplanade Theatre Studio from Jan 24 to 28.

The tensions around caregiving faced within a family are not far removed from Raimi’s life. A personal entry point into the script, he says, was witnessing the struggles his family went through while caring for an uncle with an intellectual disability.

Raimi’s script also hits close to home for director Mohd Fared Jainal, 50, who had cared for his late dementia-stricken father. Unaware of the severity of his father’s illness, Fared was on an extended holiday in 2019 after attending a friend’s wedding in Malaysia when his father died.

Fared adds: “I live with this regret that I didn’t take care of him as well as I should have. That’s why this issue is very important, and I think we need to keep on educating the public or sharing stories like these.”

It is the second time in the span of a year that he is directing a play on dementia – he directed Teater Ekamatra’s staging of playwright Johnny Jon Jon’s Potong as part of Pesta Raya in May 2023 – a journey he describes as a “marathon”.

When asked if being too close to the subject matter makes it emotionally difficult to direct the play, Fared acknowledges the challenge, but adds: “The closer it is to your heart, the more impactful the work is.”

With shared experiences, conversations between Raimi and Fared about caregiving and the script happened not just during rehearsals but also after, when Raimi drove Fared home.

This relationship, Raimi says, “really helped me in strengthening some of the writing for this piece”.

Asked about the significance of the koel’s call – which inspired the play’s onomatopoeic title – the duo keep things spoiler-free, commenting that the koel can manifest in multiple forms in the play.

Raimi would only say: “It’s kind of interesting to note that the koel is not native to Singapore. It arrived only in the 1980s. But, somehow, over time, it became quite synonymous with our daily lives.”

In contrast to Oo-woo’s local story, Motherland, by Very Shy Gurl by fendy, will provoke audiences to think globally as playwright and former Substation artistic director Noor Effendy Ibrahim, 50, tells the story of two male soldiers with opposing loyalties who fall in love in wartime.

Motherland, first presented as a work-in-progress at Sifa X in May 2023, was inspired by international headlines in 1993 when then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s chairman Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accords, a peace deal that today seems further from its goals.

It plays at the Practice Space at The Theatre Practice’s home from Jan 18 to 20.

While the topic might appear timely, given current events in Gaza, the playwright emphasises that his script was written with no single geographical setting. He had in mind several ongoing conflicts such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Rohingya crisis and the Central African Republic Civil War.

Through the play, he wants to interrogate how people today are spectators to horror in an age where violence is live-streamed. “Our sanity is really tested with all the information, images, visuals, soundbites that we get every few minutes on social media. How do we reconcile that with everyday life?”

He describes Motherland as a visceral play and seeks to place two seemingly contradictory tendencies in a single work: the violence of war and the tenderness between two men on stage.

But Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza has made the play much more complicated. “As things have evolved globally, it became a very difficult piece to create. There’s a lot of internal conflict in the sense of guilt, in the sense of, how authentic is my voice?”

Effendy also considers the question of how to be “audible” on the issue and “navigate and temper our empathy”.

There is a post-show talk on Jan 19, during which he hopes to hear from the audience.

“I look forward to seeing how people who stay for the talk will respond. That’s more important for me, not so much what I want to say.”

Asked if the play might be deemed controversial, he says: “Individuals have a right to respond and everyone has the right to be offended. But that does not necessarily make it controversial, because it’s an opinion. In Singapore, ‘controversial’ is more of a judgment.

“In Singapore, who determines what controversy is? I hope this is a safe show.”

Book It/Oo-woo

Where: Esplanade Theatre Studio, 1 Esplanade Drive
When: Jan 24 to 27, 8pm; Jan 27 and 28, 3pm
Admission: $28 (concession) and $35
Info: www.necessary.org/main-season/oo-woo

Book It/Motherland

Where: Practice Space, The Theatre Practice, 54 Waterloo Street
When: Jan 18 to 20, 8pm
Admission: $28 (concession) and $35
Info: 2024.singaporefringe.com/Motherland