Desmond Sim
Mentor

Desmond Sim is guest lecturer at Temasek Design School (since July 2003) and with Lasalle College of the Arts (since 2007). He has also held the position of Associate Artistic Director of ACTION Theatre since April 2004 and was till 2010 running ACTION Theatre’s Singapore Theatre Oasis – an incubator programme for new and existing Singapore playwrights. He was, from 1991 till August 2002, an Executive Creative Director and founding partner of The Green House Group, an e-commerce design, marketing & communications firm. He has since stopped being a full time businessman to lecture, offer consultancy for corporate and brand communications, as well as to work on charity and arts projects. He has also worked as a Duty Manager in Singapore Airport Terminal Services, and as TheatreWorks very first Playwright-in-Residence, who was instrumental in launching the Writers’ Lab in 1991, which is still run by TheatreWorks today.

Desmond has held more than a dozen art exhibitions (eight of them solo), and his paintings were recently acquired by the National Museum for the Peranakan Museum opening in April 2008. In 2009, he wrote two short plays for ACTION Theatre, co-wrote THE WEDDING GAME for Scorpio Pictures and Raintree Productions. He continues to conduct playwriting courses for various theatres and educational institutions in Singapore.

Awards and Prizes

In university, Desmond won a place in Japan Airline’s summer session scholarship at Sophia University to study Japanese theatre and art history in 1985. He also won a research scholarship at NUS to do his Masters in Literature. Later, he went into full-fledged into dramatic writing after winning both first (Red Man Green Man) and second (Storyteller) prize in the NUS/Shell Short Play Competition in 1990. He has also won top prizes in national competitions for short story writing (1989 NBDC Short Story Writing Competition for the story The Nose) and poetry (1993 Singapore Literature Prize, Merit Award for the anthology Places Where I’ve Been). In 1991, he was given a 3 month scholarship on the Fulbright Professional Programme to study and participate in theatres across the USA (New York, Kentucky, Montana and Seattle). In 2002, Desmond’s play Autumn Tomyum swept three prizes in the Life! Theatre Awards – Best Play, Best Original Script and Best Supporting Actress.

Theatre & Dramatic Practice

In all, Desmond has written more than two dozen theatre pieces, more than 20 of which have been produced over a period of two decades. In 1990, Desmond was invited by Ong Keng Sen to work for a year as Singapore’s first full-time, paid, Playwright-in-Residence at TheatreWorks. He helped to start up the Writers Laboratory, which is now in its 15th year of existence. His earlier works which were picked up for production by TheatreWorks include Blood And Snow and Sammy Won't Go To School.

He won the first prize in Action Theatre’s very first Hewlett-Packard/Action Theatre 10-Minute Play Competition in 1993. Subsequently, three of his 10-minute plays were staged in December 1993: Elizabeth By Night by Actors Theatre of Louisville in the US, and DRUNKEN PRAWNS and The Drowning Place by Action Theatre. Drunken Prawns And Other Edible Delights was produced by Action Theatre in July 1994.

Kampong Amber (a 1993 musical by Music & Movement, directed by Glen Goei) was Desmond’s first commission to dramaturg for a musical, while A Singapore Carol (a 1994 premier produced with Singapore Repertory Theatre) was his first full-length localised adaptation of a story to theatre. In mid-1995, Desmond wrote the script for Corporate Animals, an Action Theatre collaboration with Ekachai (director) and Ken Low (music and songs). In November of the same year, his monologue Teochew Porridge double-billed with Ovidia Yu’s Hokkien Mee in an Action Theatre production. In 1996, he worked with theatre director William Teo on the Apsara Project, writing a piece about the Cambodian tragedy – performed at the Substation. In that year, his whodunit piece WHO’S AFRAID OF CHOW YUEN FATT? was produced by WOW International for the Singapore Festival of Arts, as the festival closer.

Desmond’s earlier plays have been reprised over the last few years. Drunken Prawns was reprised by Action Theatre in late 1997; Red Man, Green Man by Tampines Junior College (July 1999); Drunken Prawns by National Junior College (July 1999), Blood And Snow by Singapore Polytechnic (2000); and SAMMY Won’t Go To School by TheatreWorks (2001).

His works include DRIFT by TheatreWorks (1998), Shrimps In Space by Empire M+C (July 1999); and The Swimming Instructor by Action Theatre (two versions – in 1999 and 2000). In 2002, his Play AUTUMN TOMYUM with Action Theatre won Play of the Year in the Life! Theatre Awards, as well as the awards for Best Original Script and Best Supporting Actress.

In 2002/2003, he co-wrote screenplay for the movie Beautiful Boxer with GMM Grammy of Thailand. The movie was released in Bangkok in December 2003, has won awards in several film festivals in Europe and Asia, and has been signed for release in more than 17 countries. In August 2003, Desmond was commissioned by The President’s (of Singapore) Office to write a commemorative poem for the grand launch of the President’s Challenge, a charity event which raised 9 million dollars for 45 charitable institutions. The President and various VIPs and selected representatives from charitable homes, as well as volunteers performed the poem at Jubilee Hall, Raffles Hotel. his play Hubbies4Hire was produced by ACTION Theatre, and directed by Darren Yap, a director for Cameron Mackintosh’s musical, “Mama Mia!”.

Desmond has also contributed three short plays to ACTION Theatre’s 2006 production of “Confessions of 300 Unmarried Men”. He wrote the script for “A Nation In Concert”, a charity concert that was held on 13 August 2005. It was reprised in September 2006 at The Esplanade’s 1,600-seater Concert Hall. Proceeds are to help charity groups in Singapore who were left high and dry in the wake of the tsunami tragedy.

December 2006 saw the launch of Desmond’s successful production of his first pantomime JACK AND THE BEANSPROUT with Wild Rice Theatre. Desmond is, currently, associate artistic director running the playwriting programme at ACTION Theatre’s Singapore Theatre Oasis – which he helped launch in October 2005. His earlier play, The Swimming Instructor was recently re-worked as a film-cum-theatre play, which opened on 9 March 2007 and had an encore performance in May 2007. Desmond’s most recent play was Postcards From Rosa, which was produced by Action Theatre in November 2007.

In 2009, Desmond co-wrote the screenplay for The Wedding Game, starring leading TV actors Fann Wong and Christopher Lee. He also wrote the two plays AKAN DATANG and WIFE #11 for the ACTION Theatre and National Museum project called Singapore Love Letters. In September 2009, Desmond’s work called Manhood opened in ACTION Theatre. Also in that same year, his piece The Swimming Instructor was produced by the KL Performing Arts Centre (KLPAC). This year 2010, KLPAC produced a Singapore-KL collaboration with Desmond and KL’s Mark de Silva writing Past Perfect, Future Tense. In 2011, KLPAC worked with Desmond again for the Causeway Exchange project where two of his short plays (and three short plays by a Malaysian playwright) were produced for KL and Singapore in a production called Food, Sex & Death.

In 2012, Food Sex & Death opens at the Penang Performing Arts Centre. Desmond was also asked to contribute a piece for The Perfection Of 10, a commissioned piece commemorating Esplanade Theatre’s 10th anniversary. Desmond’s earlier play The Chair will be featured at a public reading for the Singapore Writer’s Festival in November 2012, and will be produced in 2013. THE CHAIR is also pegged to open in 2013 in KLPAC.

In 2013, Desmond published two anthologies of plays with Epigram Books – Six Plays, as well as Student Plays.

Desmond is currently working on five other plays: Pintu Pagar, Evil Under The Zhang, Fairy Godfather, Wife #11 (the full version) and Spaghetti & Sarsi. Three of these have been earmarked for productions in 2014 – 2015.