Don't Forget to Remember Me

by Haresh Sharma

Don't Forget to Remember Me is a brand new collection featuring six of these plays by award-winning playwright Haresh Sharma: Staying Alive, Future Perfect, When the Bough Breaks, Don't Know Don't Care, Don't Forget to Remember Me, and I Have a Friend. The publication also contains notes on the plays by the writer as well as an introduction by The Necessary Stage Founder and Artistic Director, Alvin Tan.

146 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2013

About the author

Haresh is Resident Playwright of The Necessary Stage and co-Artistic Director of the annual M1 Singapore Fringe Festival. To date, he has written more than 100 plays. His play, Off Centre, was selected by the Ministry of Education as a Literature text for N and O Levels, and republished by The Necessary Stage in 2006. In 2008, Ethos Books published Interlogue: Studies in Singapore Literature, Vol. 6, written by Prof David Birch and edited by A/P Kirpal Singh, which presented an extensive investigation of Haresh's work over the past 20 years. A collection of Haresh’s plays have been translated into Mandarin and published by Global Publishing with the title '哈里斯·沙玛剧作选'.

Haresh was awarded Best Original Script for Fundamentally Happy, Good People and Gemuk Girls during the 2007, 2008 and 2009 Life! Theatre Awards respectively. In 2010, the abovementioned plays have also been published by The Necessary Stage in the collection entitled Trilogy. Most recently in 2011, 2 collections of short plays by Haresh entitled Shorts 1 and Shorts 2 have been published as well. Haresh was also the first non-American to be awarded the prestigious Goldberg Master Playwright by New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 2011.

Reviews

[L · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall: old puns and jokes in Singlish served their purpose; much better than earlier work like "Off Centre"; commissioned works but still showed Haresh's talent in exploring these topics and portraying them well
* Staying Alive
- Nice use of humour even though the theme is about suicide (in a family where everyone wants to die, the mother learnt about her son's rating on who's more hopeless and asked "do you want me to have heart attack and die" and her son accused her of cheating)
- reminds me of a Chinese saying, 可憐之人必有可恨之處 (those who are seemingly pathetic must be despicable themselves) - makes me wonder whether this applies to this play
- a well-put mix of oriental view on death between lines
* Future Perfect
- thought-provoking and rather serious
- hard to imagine authorities in other countries would commission this kind of play
* When the Bough Breaks
- enable more understanding of mothers with post-natal depression
* Don't know, don't care
- a mother who pretends to be strong yet soft in her heart
- a grandpa with a clear mind despite all the sickness; really cares for his grandson (more so than his daughter/grandson's mother)
- characters well shaped; not very sure why including broken Mandarin
- love this line a lot: "a relationship shouldn't begin only when someone's dying, it should begin when they are living"
* I have a friend
- light-hearted approach with serious messages about life
- more can be explained/explored on Andy and Kum Peng (too "decent"!)
* Don't forget to remember me
- just so-so

[R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 stars*

[Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thought provoking, and sensitively produced. Although it simplifies the issues at hand, the plays address as much complexity as they can with the medium.