By Kunchur Bharat (26A01B)
Who says that plays can’t get more than one staging? Who says that stellar scripts should be barred from being refined further?
It is with these questions in mind that playwright Jo Tan birthed Rewrite My Fire and ran it at the Singapore Writers’ Festival (SWF) 2025, giving a second life to local plays after their first stagings. Raffles Press had the opportunity to cover a re-staging of Adib Kosnan’s 28.8, first staged in 2017 by Teater Kami.
The Play
The play follows the story of a young married couple, Andy (Irsyad Dawood) and Nerissa (Rusydina Afiqah), as they begin a new chapter of their lives in their new BTO HDB flat. Their relationship, though once sweet at the start, begins to sour.
Through a series of flashbacks, the audience learns of Nerissa’s mounting credit card debt that, when discovered by Andy shortly after their wedding, casts a shadow of doom over the marriage. To help with clearing Nerissa’s debt and to prepare for their baby that was on the way, Andy begins taking on more and more shifts at work, nabbing overtime whenever he can, but drifting further away from Nerissa in the process.
The final and most pivotal twist in the story, which is foreshadowed as the play shuttles between the past and present day, is that Nerissa’s baby had died in the womb. This forces Andy to reconsider his position as the provider of the family that had ultimately led to his emotional absence — and what it was all for. The pair ultimately decide to remain married until they can sell off their BTO flat, even though their feelings for each other have dissipated.
At its core, 28.8 is a story of what it means to fall in love in today’s Singapore. A BTO flat, a car — money — these are the considerations that undergird Nerissa and Andy’s relationship, and the vastly different approaches that they take to money can be traced explicitly to their family backgrounds.
From the very first scene, Andy’s strict pragmatism is revealed to the audience. While they are inspecting their BTO flat on key collection day, Nerissa remarks how Andy had done everything he had told his mother he would. He had a car, a successful job, was married, and most crucially had a home of his own — all before he was 35.
That Andy had viewed life as a long checklist of milestones to achieve — a mindset that he borrowed from his mother — reveals his meticulous and structured approach to life, and how it is only made possible by the presence of an active parental figure in his life. Andy had been free to go through his education without ever having to worry about working, as that burden was always shouldered by his mother and his two older sisters.
Nerissa, on the other hand, faces the complete opposite circumstance.
A child of divorce, her father was absent for the majority of her childhood and her mother, once considered “a benchmark for successful Malay women in the 90s”, was left permanently shattered by the divorce. Nerissa worked every year since she was 16, not only to earn some extra money, but because work provided a convenient escape from her home, which was wrought with instability.
Unlike Andy, Nerissa doesn’t speak a language of pragmatism; she speaks one of survival. She clings to the nostalgia of a road trip in her parents’ car back when they were still together, as she convinces Andy to buy a car despite his hesitance about being able to pay it off. When Andy expresses that he’s nervous about Nerissa being pregnant only 5 months after their wedding, she exclaims conclusively, “I’m not scared, I’m fricking excited!”
For Nerissa, the possibility of starting a family of her own, one in which their baby receives the love and care that she was deprived of, appears so attractive that the practicalities fade away. Yet, for Andy, the question, as it always has been, is — who’s going to foot the bill?
This is the point that Kosnan makes abundantly clear in 28.8 — that simply love a successful relationship does not make. Andy, who is far too cognisant of the practicalities, loses sight of what he’s actually working for. When questioned by Andy as to why she didn’t tell him of the death of their baby sooner, Nerissa puts it as such:
“You were at work. You were always at work… when I found out, I just moved mechanically… I just wanted my husband to be there.”
Kosnan put it well in the post-show discussion: Andy failed to recognise that Nerissa’s decisions, all the way from landing in credit card debt, to wanting to buy a car, are fueled by trauma — that it is more than just about irresponsibility. And as much as Nerissa is a character that can be easily hated, she is, above all, a victim of circumstance.
Post-Play Discussion
What strikes the audience when you enter the room is how barebones the setting is. The stage is empty, with a few boxes used as props and a projector background that flashes key dates to move the audience back and forth through time. That’s it.
Which is why the first question that I posed to Kosnan sought to unpack this staging decision and how it differed from 28.8’s original production in 2017. For Kosnan, the Play Den at the Arts House was a throwback to his blackbox theatre roots. He wanted to use the unique setting as an opportunity to tell a more “stripped down story,” one in which it’s just two actors driving the narrative forward.
Indeed, this decision led to memorable moments such as Andy chasing Nerissa but being blocked by the boxes on stage as a reflection of Nerissa shutting Andy out after he couldn’t be there to support her during her pregnancy.
Kosnan also shared on the impetus to write and stage 28.8 in the first place, which was to tell a story on how finances play a foundational role in marriages and how they are moulded by one’s life history.
Drawing from his own life experiences, he described it as the first play that he didn’t “devise” — the idea just seemed to flow into place, and it opened up a variety of future opportunities for work as a director and a playwright.
There was also one big difference between this iteration of 28.8 and the previous, which was the exclusion of monologues to the financial counsellor that Andy had hired to deal with Nerissa’s credit card debt.
Although the financial counsellor is still referenced, following Dramaturg Nabilah Said’s suggestion, the monologues were rewritten into a scene where the pair took turns asking each other marriage preparation questions from a set of cards and one where the two go shopping for Andy’s underwear together. Kosnan described this experience as getting to know the characters all over again, which is precisely the opportunity that Rewrite My Fire gives to playwrights.
The most illuminating section of the discussion was on the archetype of the Malay Man that the play contends with. Both Andy and Nerissa have absurd fathers, and Andy himself fulfils the role of the prototypical patriarch — a logical and cold provider who takes it upon himself to rescue Nerissa from her debt.
Another observation made by an audience member was that while Andy is written to be authoritative, he is also strung along by Nerissa, with the lady being cast as a bringer of doom while Andy remains helpless.
The critical question that was asked, however, was: In the 8 years that have passed since 28.8’s first showing, has the Malay Man psyche evolved? Kosnan’s response: yes, but only performatively so.
Paraphrasing Kosnan, they know what to say and in which manner. But at its core, the patriarchal structure of thought continues to persist. Kosnan noted, however, that as a society, Singapore has begun to call this behaviour out more consciously. He summed it up elegantly:
“ A bit.”
Concluding Thoughts
The brilliance of this staging is not in the play at all. It is in the space that it is created, and what SWF continues to represent for Singapore’s local literary scene.
As playwright Jo Tan joked in the promotional reel for Rewrite My Fire:
“How soon until playwrights can steal and replicate my voice?”
In a time where artificial intelligence has begun to do the impossible — to encroach on human creativity — it has become increasingly pertinent to defend our local talent. To give room for improvement — to allow creatives to take risks, fail, and try again. To be critical, not simply to complain, but for the purpose of improvement.
Whether “voice” is used literally or in reference to her artistic voice is ambiguous, but both concerns are valid, and equally so. So, if you missed out this year, let 2026 be the year in which you embrace Singapore’s literary scene, for all its imperfections.
The arts can only thrive if we let them.
