A meditative act on how the innocuous daily routine can be made strange and even a little disturbing.

In Singapore, life can feel like a chore. Settling into a daily routine can be comfortable, but its banality can also become utterly depressing in a city that keeps on keeping on. Meaning and connection can seem elusive, drowned out by the sameness of each night. It’s in this context that Request Programme, presented in conjunction with the final weekend of Singapore Art Museum’s Everyday Practices exhibition, feels especially resonant.

Directed by Oliver Chong and adapted by Alfian Sa’at from Franz Xaver Kroetz’s modern classic (translated by Katharina Hehn), the play is wordless and deceptively simple: a woman comes home from work, turns on the radio, and goes through her nightly routine, preparing dinner, doing her skincare, continuing her crochet, getting ready for bed. But this is no ordinary domestic drama. Instead, it’s a meditative act, one that transforms the ordinary into something strange, and even a little disturbing.

Performed by veteran actress Karen Tan, the work is staged in SAM @ Tanjong Pagar’s Engine Room, unusual for a performance, considering it’s usually a gallery space that doubles as a workshop area. Mohd Fared Jainal’s meticulous set design converts it into a compact domestic setting, rendering the stage as a lived-in shoebox apartment. The attention to detail is obsessive, and beyond having a clearly demarcated and furnished living room, kitchen/dining room and bathroom, the set is littered with uncannily familiar props all over: a reused metal mooncake tin, a fortune cat, a bottle of hand sanitizer. The more you look, the more you recognize, almost like an Easter egg hunt of the mundane, all serving to deepen the illusion.

It is this commitment to realism that is precisely what unsettles us. Theatre typically invites suspension of disbelief, but here, disbelief is suspended entirely. Karen’s actions and routine, playing out in real time, confuses us and blurs the line between her performing and being. The audience sits around the shoebox apartment in an L-shape, almost as if peering into a diorama or a human zoo. It’s impossible not to feel like voyeurs, silent witnesses intruding on private space. There’s discomfort as Karen changes out of her office clothes, strips to her underwear, sniffs stockings to see if they can be reused, urinates. These aren’t moments designed for public consumption, and yet we watch, complicit and still.

The performance raises sharp questions, and introduces the power of theatre to turn the spotlight onto the seemingly banal, creating meaning when under observation, where ‘real life’ is framed as a performance to be consumed. We become hyperaware of the passage of time, how Karen achieves so much in the span of an hour, entirely fixated on every minor movement, whether it’s washing the toilet, grabbing her crochet project and flipping the page, or cooking a makeshift stew for herself (and yes, it’s impressive how there is a working sink and a working stove).

There’s a quiet horror to it all, where it feels as if there’s an invisible glass panel between us and Karen she never breaks the fourth wall, and is focused entirely on her routine, seemingly unaware she is in a cage, on display. Or perhaps it is, and it almost feels like Karen knows something is off, furrowing her brow, restless in her movements. The performance is haunting not because of what happens, but because of what doesn’t. There is a mounting unease as we sense the woman’s growing solitude, how vulnerable she is alone in her own home. The fear that something might appear at the window, and when it does, how she cowers, afraid to be noticed or seen.

One soon becomes aware of how burdensome the banality of routine can be. All this preparing, as Karen eats and washes up, how she cleans and does her skincare, how she snaps a photo and prepares to return her package. On the radio is Gold 90 FM and it promotes the morning show to look forward to, the DJs cheery but for her (and us) a reminder of how weighty existence is, as she seems to deflate and quietly fall apart. There is the occasional laugh, not because it’s funny, but because we recognise ourselves in the futility and exhaustion of repetition.

By the time the play ends, the outcome feels inevitable. The hints were there all along: the stillness, the want to be unperceived, seemingly antithetical to the weight of being unseen. And yet the impact remains devastating, for there is no melodrama, no outburst, just the slow violence of contemporary life, meted out in real time, with devastating restraint. The final act is matter-of-fact, as if this too is part of the routine as she sips a bottle of ice cold soju. It is utterly depressing.

Request Programme blurs the lines between theatre, performance art, and a happening. It is a theatrical experiment that puts the magnifying glass on daily life and asks if this should be the norm, and of meaning, challenging not just how we watch, but what we consider worth watching. In doing so, while it may not necessarily be an enjoyable experience, it becomes something rare: a hypnotic, arresting reflection not just on isolation and fatigue, but on complicity, where the theatre becomes a dark mirror, the audience bears witness, and finds profundity in the mundane.

Request Programme played from 17th to 19th July 2025 at the SAM @ Tanjong Pagar Distripark. More information available here

Production Credits:

Playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz Translator Katharina Hehn Director Oliver Chong Dramaturg Alfian Sa’at Performer Karen Tan Set Designer Mohd Fared Jainal Assistant Set Designer Eli Ismail Production Manager Evelyn Chia Producer/Stage Manager Neo Kim Seng