Playwright with a Plural Consciousness: Kuo Pao Kun. Images at the Margins: A Collection of Kuo Pao Kun’s Plays.

Abstract

Pao Kun’s ability to express himself creatively in two languages, or swim in two unlike streams, is what constitutes his main strength. It gives him that rare identity of a cultural individualist and pluralist at the same time and the privilege to provide the vital bridge between the indigenous Chinese and Anglophone theatres in Singapore. It empowers him to dialogue with culturally divergent groups of people, who, as he explains in an interview, ‘think differently and have different experiences’. Paradoxically however, it also brings him into a kind of marginality – a fringe kind of existence that is experienced by one whose imagination is not anchored in any one particular language or culture, and who habitually occupies a neutral ground between two seemingly incompatible worlds, acting as an arbiter of the diverse.