ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the English and Theatre Studies program at the University of Melbourne in 2014 after making, teaching and researching theatre in Singapore for many years, It added Kuo Pao Kun's 1995 play Descendents of the Eunuch Admiral, one of Singapore's best-known, to the line-up for the large-enrolling first-year course 'Modern and Contemporary Literature'. It argues that a number of contextual and aesthetic characteristics militate against overneat categorisations and require us to recognise that for now, at least, there remains a difference between "Lit" and "Leeet". Lor. Between the late 1980s and approximately 2010, the vast majority of produced Singapore plays were not published. The modern understanding of drama arises at the interface between two institutions emerging in the West in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the institution of professional theatre, which consumed writing to produce a theatrical commodity, dramatic performance.
