Playwriting

Dive

September 2024, The Studio @ Wild Rice, Singapore

February 2026, Bridewell Theatre, London

Love feels so good… until it doesn’t. But every couple has disagreements, right? You wonder if this feeling is normal — the walking on eggshells, sharpness, broken glass. Or are you being over-sensitive? And then things are good again, the world disappears and nothing else matters. There is nothing but you and me. Friends start to ask: ‘Is everything okay?’ And something inside screams at you: ‘This isn’t normal, this isn’t right. Leave, why don’t you just leave?’ But you’ve been together so long. You can’t imagine life apart. Dive follows one such relationship from giddy adolescence to old age, as love mutates into something unbearable, but is still impossible to let go of.

Home

September 2024, Scriptum: Creative Writing Research Journal

Home is constructed by weaving together fragments from my grandmother’s memoirs and my own writing (Thorp 1945, 2016). My grandmother, born and brought up in Myanmar, had never visited Britain until her family moved ‘home’ when she was sixteen, while I moved to Singapore in my thirties. As a child, my grandmother could not return home to Myanmar, while the COVID-19 pandemic meant that I was unable to leave Singapore. By comparing our experiences of being at home, and of not being able to go home, I aim tell a wider story about identity and belonging in migrant experiences that reach beyond our own intimate recollections. In Home, the page becomes a playground where I explore notions of home, identity, belonging, non-belonging, and the trickster nature of memory.

Hide and Seek

September 2023, Centre 42 (audio play)

Natalie is uneasy. Her husband Stanley is behaving strangely. Could he be cheating on her? Determined to discover what he’s hiding; Natalie searches for answers by employing a private detective and going to see an astrologer. Meanwhile, she is watched on her journey by ghostly schoolchildren who echo through time. Hide and Seek is an audio play produced by Centre 42 as part of the Waterloo Street Stories, Singapore Night Festival 2023. You can listen to it here.

Troll Factory

In progress.

At first, Nina believes her job writing internet content for a troll factory won’t do anyone any harm, but gradually she realises the impact of her work. When she gets sacked, she decides to expose the troll factory to the press and in doing so, betrays those who trusted her. Troll Factory explores the nature of truth, trust and what and who you can believe. It uncovers the ways that the internet poses a threat to democracy and how the dream of the internet has become a nightmare.

Provenance

October 2018, Drama Centre Black Box, Singapore

(Written in the form of a (play)box – a provocation for theatre-making written not only in words but also in objects).

Alice’s hoarding disorder is worsening, her home is increasingly dilapidated, and her financial difficulties are escalating. With increasing desperation, Alice’s daughter, Agatha, fails to persuade her mother to move into a care home. Amongst Alice’s chaos, Agatha discovers a potentially valuable piece of art. Selling it to Caroline could solve their problems but just might send Caroline’s own life into a tailspin. How can they all prove its provenance? Provenance explores the value we give to things and people, and the connection between art, beauty, relationships, and commerce. Should a beautiful piece of art’s worth depend on where it comes from? What happens if the balance in our relationships with people and with things tilts too far in one direction?

Hujum

August – November 2015, workshopped as part of Centre 42’s Basement Workshop.

While researching in Moscow’s archives, Leila tries to piece together the life of Manzura Mirabaeva and her work at the Uzbek socialist women’s magazine Yangi Y’ol in the early 1900s. Manzura was caught up in the hujum, a campaign by Russian soviet colonialists to educate and ‘liberate’ Uzbek women, which encouraged them to de-veil with tragic repercussions. Trapped in the archive overnight by pro-democracy demonstrations outside, together Leila and Iskra, an archivist, start to piece together what really happened to Manzura. Hujum explores democracy, the trickster nature of memory and how truth is (mis)represented, and personal agency.

The Beautiful Gene

2014, not published or performed.

Fourteen years ago, Rachel deserted her husband Leon and their severely autistic son, Tom. When Rachel returns, it becomes apparent that her motive for coming home is not as straight-forward as she initially implies. Rachel is dying and desperately needs her son to give her a bone marrow transplant. But is Tom able to knowingly give his consent for his mother to use his bone marrow to save her life?

Limbo

2013, not published or performed.

Jess and her husband Paul are in limbo, grieving for their baby son who died in an accident. When Paul, a journalist, interviews Ajok, a refugee from Sudan who is in legal limbo after her application to remain in the UK has been rejected, he invites her to live with Jess hoping to help them both. Together, Ajok and Jess begin to find a way out of limbo.

Production Details

Dive

5-22 September 2024 The Studio @ Wild Rice, Singapore

Directed by Sim Yang Ying (‘YY’), Dramaturgy by Joel Tan
Performed by Ebi Shankara, Irsyad Dawood, Ellison Tan, and Jean Ng.
Sound Designer Guo Ningru
Multimedia Designer NONFORM
Costume Designer Sim Yan Ying “YY”
Make-Up Designer Bobbie Ng
Hair Designer Ashley Lim

Clement Wong, Straits Times, ‘Smartly directed Dive plunges head-first into an abusive relationship’

‘Two characters multiplied into four voices, they give a multi-perspective depth to the couple’s interactions and conflicts. Their voices commingle: sometimes two people act out a character’s facade and subconscious at the same time, or a character’s present morose sulking and his recent stalking violence.

It sounds confusing – and in the beginning, the role-switching requires close attention. But it is a mechanism that also lends a freshness and theatricality to an ultimately linear story, the different combinations of actors helping the audience visualise love in all forms and giving their exchanges a universality’.

‘Hers is writing that is comfortable with poetic dreamscape interludes, which Sim interprets with some effective contemporary dance movements, including a loving tussle that proves just a turn away from disaster’.

Phillipe Pang. Review: Dear Dive (Dive, written by Laura Hayes, directed by Sim Yan Ying “YY”)

‘As a complex amalgamation of two lives, intertwined like fizzy, electrical currents that buzz and short-circuit whoever or whatever is in contact with it (coincidentally, also a sound effect that pervades the story), you gave me the greatest gift — but also the greatest curse — an audience member could have in watching a play: reflecting the reality of my life back at me’.

‘Language is the means by which we both reach out to others, and how we are perceived, and the emphasis of the “near” not “at” at once reveals to us the duplicitous nature of the younger lover’s diction — how they desperately try to convince themselves that, they didn’t mean it. In these small, seemingly insignificant choices of diction, Hayes’ writing shines’.

14-15 February 2026, The Bridewell, London

Directed by Sara Brodie. Performed by East 15 MFA International Acting students.
Performed by: Mia Amore, Alan Ho, Iyanu Joshuaville, Chloe-Gene Lateulere, Rohan Patil, and Lumia Tang.
Set Design: Mila Sanders
Costume Design: Elliott W Squire

Photographs by Ruey Loon

Hide and Seek

An audio play, written as part of Waterloo Street Stories and the Singapore Night Festival (2023). Produced by Centre 42 and Artwave Studio. You can listen to it here.

Director: Cherilyn Woo
Actors: Benjamin Chow, Isabella Chiam, Timothy Wan, Masturah Oli, Shanjeevi Ganesan, Cheryl Ho

Provenance

Provenance explores the value we give to things and people, and the connection between art, beauty, relationships, and commerce. Should a beautiful piece of art’s worth depend on where it comes from? What happens if the balance in our relationships with people and with things tilts too far in one direction?

Written by Laura Hayes and created by Autopoetics
Performers: Chelsea Crothers, Laura Hayes, Maiya Murphy
Stage Management: Jovetta Tan

Provenance was performed 26 – 27 October 2018 at the Drama Centre Black Box in Singapore, National Library Building, 100 Victoria St, Singapore 188064.

“What stories can an assemblage of objects tell, all these “nameless, shapeless things?” Rarely has an invisible landscape felt so visible, so tangible to me.”

“There was something so precise about the way the interlocking stories of these three women were pieced together, almost as if you were sculpting your own object, chiselling it out of the darkness and out of our collective imaginations. At first I mistook this choreographed precision for detachment, but then I realised you were excavating something incredibly fragile and tender from underneath it all, the way a surgeon might cut through a sheath of skin to get to that quivering, wet-slicked organ beneath.”

Corrie Tan, https://theintimatecritic.home.blog/2018/11/19/the-journey-begins/

“The performance itself was tightly wrought and snappily delivered right from the opening scene”.

Marc Nair, http://www.mackerel.life/from-where-we-came-a-review-of-provenance

”Well-paced, succinct and performed with strength and clarity both in body and enunciation, Provenance is a remarkable first outing for Autopoetics that hits all the right notes and marks this collective as one to continue looking out for.”

Bakchormeeboy, https://bakchormeeboy.com/2018/11/05/review-provenance-by-autopoetics/

Provenance explores the value we give to things and the connection between art, beauty, relationships, and commerce. If a piece of art is beautiful or desirable, should that change be dependent on where it comes from? How does where we come from as people shape the way we live in the world? What happens if the balance in our relationships with people and with things tilts too far in one direction?

Provenance is also an experiment in devising techniques, based the idea of a ‘playbox’, a creation born from the processes of devising. Carefully curated with pieces of original text, props, objects, prompts, and devising provocations, a playbox is literally a box of stuff – a material provocation to make a play that takes the place of a traditional script.