Director's Address · 1 of 2
The director's letter
Foreword from the directors
Directed by Brevous Jensen
Director's Lettter
Julius Caesar is a play about people who destroy the thing they love while insisting they are saving it. That felt closer to home than togas and the Senate, so we moved it to a pasar malam. Our Rome is a night market. Our Caesar is Jalil, a stall owner who secures a prime spot and raises the rent to pay for it. His conspirators are his oldest friends, who genuinely believe the market will die if he goes on. Almost everyone here is trying to do right by the same community. That is what makes the ending hard to sit with. We wrote it in the languages our characters would actually use: Singlish, Mandarin and Malay, often in the same breath. Hawkers don't code-switch for an audience, and we didn't want ours to either. That mix is how the community sounds, and the community is what everyone in this play is fighting over. The question we want to leave you with is the one Bao never manages to answer. When tradition and progress pull in opposite directions, who gets to decide, and who ends up paying?