ABSTRACT
In the post-1965 period, English-language drama in the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong developed in radically different directions, and yet these developments were driven by two common factors which influenced drama more deeply than fiction or poetry. The first of these was language policies, which influenced the extent to which Englishlanguage texts could claim to represent a national or local culture, and indeed the composition of any prospective audience. The second, not unconnected to the first, was politics: most of the major theatre practitioners of the period felt that theatre offered a powerful means to critique both the social inequalities inherited from the colonial era and new modes of governance introduced by postcolonial nation-states. Both these factors perhaps illustrate how drama is in many ways less portable and more closely bound to its immediate context than fiction and poetry. Drama may be performed abroad – as was the case with Kee Thuan Chye’s play The Big Purge, written and performedwhile hewas at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom – but it needs a local audience if it is to grow, and it has a more immediate relationship with that audience than do the other genres.
