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Emily of Emerald Hill
by Stella Kon
Singapore : Raffles, c2000.
(All Rights Reserved)

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I just finished reading the play Emily of Emerald Hill. I picked it up ‘cos I was intrigued by Stella Kon when I heard her speak at the Breakfast Club at NLB this past weekend — she seemed so layered and full of vigour, and I wanted to see what the play was all about.  

Emily of Emerald Hill is the most well-known of Stella’s works.  She won the National Playwriting Compeition in 1979, 1982 and 1985 (after which they promptly discontinued the competition), but ironically the play was produced in Malaysia first, leading her to make this snarky and hilarious comment when Singapore finally comissioned it to be produced the following year (1986), possibly out of sheer embarrassment:

“I am delighted that Emily of Emerald Hill has now been brought to the stage. Until it was, I could fairly well claim to be Singapore’s greatest never-produced playwright… Some years ago, I wrote The Bridge, a play with eighteen people in the cast — it had been meant for production by a drug addicts’  rehabilitation centre,  and was tailored to what they could provide.  And the producer said the cast was too big.  Then I wrote The Trial with a cast of twelve, which was well within the limits set by the Ministry of Culture, but still the producers said, “Very interesting, but cast too big.”  So I went and wrote Emily with a cast of ONE.” (Le Blond, 1986, 115).

Heh. So Emily is a monologue by a Peranakan Singaporean.  It’s her life story — a story of power and loss.  At first, I wasn’t that impressed.  It seemed like Emily was an anachronism that belonged squarely in the 80s.  She sounded like a middle-class tai tai, someone alienated from me.  Yet, as the story went on, something sad in Emily reached out to me.  Maybe I’m just a sucker for capable and lonely old women, but I felt sorry for her, especially at the end of the play.  

This play captures a specific period in Singapore’s history — a period of modernisation and rapid change.  I don’t know if younger readers will be able to relate to this period in Singapore’s history, but if it is true that this generation also feels that it is in a place of “rapid change”, then perhaps there is something in there that will make sense.

~ Contributed by Li Ern-Goh

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