Claire Wong attempts to stage her grieving process onstage, winding through knotty memory and reflection in search of meaning.

Checkpoint Theatre’s latest work began over a decade ago, when creator Claire Wong started interviewing her father, Wong Heck Ming. After his passing in 2016, the piece transformed from a portrait of his youth during World War II into something more inward-looking: a meditation on Wong’s relationship with her father, and on how “escape” and “return” can be both physical and abstract.

Presented as part of the Esplanade’s The Studios and 60 Connections programmes, Escape to Batam mirrors the messy shape of grief itself. Yet what emerges is less a clear narrative than a collage of fragments, a structure that clings to remnants of its earlier conception as if unable to move forward. Co-written with Huzir Sulaiman, with dramaturgy by Huzir and Faith Ng, the play deliberately disregards chronology and order, choosing instead a fluid, memory-driven form.

The play begins with Ming (Chaney Chia), recounting his boyhood in Batam during the Japanese Occupation. Protected from the worst of the war, his recollections are mostly light: hunting wild boar, making salt to trade for rice, stumbling upon a cache of books in the jungle. These vignettes unfold like a series of short stories, mostly innocent, even charming, but with little weight or consequence for the larger narrative. The most poignant part of this is when he returns to Singapore, and finds it irrevocably changed, perhaps never fully able to escape the cost of war.

At first, this seems to be the play’s original intent, bolstered by material adapted from The Batam Years, a self-published memoir by Wong’s uncle. But Escape to Batam quickly reveals greater ambitions. The story grows metatheatrical when Claire herself appears onstage, first embodied by Neo Swee Lin, later joined by Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai and Genevieve Tan as Claire 2 and Claire 3, versions of the same character at different ages. Ming too is doubled, as Adib Kosnan steps in alongside Chia, seemingly as an older version of Claire’s father she best recalls.

What might have been an intimate two-hander between father and daughter on paper expands into an ensemble, a choice that suggests the porous nature of memory, where conversations with the past summon younger and older selves in turn. Yet while the intention is clear, the execution falters. Costumes distinguish the three Claires, but little grounds them as one character; there is no consistent physicality or voice work to link their portrayals. Similarly, the two Mings switch between ages without leaving us with a firm impression of who Ming really is. The result is a distance from both father and daughter, with the emotional stakes never fully landing.

This lack of characterisation is compounded by the play’s restraint. Conversations often remain surface-level, focused on recounting events rather than probing emotions. The silences feel less like evocative gaps and more like barriers, as if Claire and Ming share a private language we are not permitted to access. There are glimmers of intimacy, such as Claire discovering an old letter she wrote to Ming from New York, or recalling her mother’s dementia setting in after his death—but these are fleeting. Beyond the idea of Ming as Claire’s rock in hard times, their bond never comes into sharp focus.

Structurally, the play wavers. While its fluidity may be intended to reflect the mental journey of grief, for an audience it instead leads to incoherence. At times, Escape to Batam resembles a stream-of-consciousness, poetic but indulgent, leaning heavily on narration rather than action. Wong stretches the theme of “escape” to encompass her own experience of Singapore’s COVID-19 circuit breaker, attempting to draw parallels with her father’s wartime youth. There are moments of striking imagery here, an empty CBD at dusk, Marina Bay Sands’ lightshow glittering for no one but the cast and crew, but the comparison feels forced. The two crises resist alignment, and the juxtaposition lands as two plays awkwardly stitched together.

The effect is an audience pulled in too many directions, often unsure of where to place their attention or trust. Tonally, the production never settles: grief, nostalgia, humour, and meta-theatre jostle for space, without ever coalescing. Pop tracks by Blackpink and Tones and I are deployed as transitions, but instead of inclusivity they feel like private references, jokes we are not in on. The most affecting scene is Ming’s funeral, played with gut-wrenching silence by Swee Lin. This registers as raw and real, yet is undermined by the uneven build-up before it. Recurring motifs surface, such as the Claires joining in a familiar song, but the lack of a strong throughline leaves the work still feeling fragmented.

Visually, the staging contributes to the distance. The proscenium setup at the Singtel Waterfront Theatre places a literal and figurative barrier between performers and audience. Swathes of cloth and rope hang from the ceiling, suggestive of memory’s knotty ebb and flow, but their use is clumsy, more decorative than moving, even when utilised in certain scenes. Diary excerpts projected on the backdrop, extracted from Ming’s actual writing, are illegible, another gesture that gestures toward meaning without allowing us in.

With the recent passing of Wong’s mother, incorporated into the text just weeks ago, Escape to Batam is clearly a work still in flux, shaped by ongoing loss. Yet as theatre, it struggles to translate private grief into shared experience. Admirable in ambition but elusive in effect, the play leaves us watching from behind a glass wall; moved at moments, but ultimately kept at a distance from Claire’s pain.

Photo Credit: Poh Yu Khing. Courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre

Escape To Batam plays from 21st to 24th August 2025 at the Singtel Waterfront Theatre. Tickets available here

The Studios 2025 – Sustenance runs from July to September 2025. Full programme and more information available here

Production Credits

Playwright Huzir Sulaiman, Claire Wong Director Claire Wong Cast Adib Kosnan, Chaney Chia, Genevieve Tan, Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai, Neo Swee Lin Dramaturg Huzir Sulaiman, Faith Ng Historical Music Consultant Phan Ming Yen Set Designer Petrina Dawn Tan, Doodle Productions Lighting Designer Faith Liu Yong Huay Sound Designer, Engineer & Music Arranger Shah Tahir Multimedia Designer Tan Wei Ting Costume Designer Max Tan Assistant Director Krys Yuan Set Consultant Marc Andre Therrien Make-Up Designer Bobbie Ng, The Make Up Room Hair Designer Leong