“Tender Submission” by Checkpoint Theatre
reflecting on a personal journey of lapsed faith through Lucas Ho’s quietly engrossing play about a marriage and a religion taken for granted
I. “Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart”
“I have a question,” my theatregoing companion asked as we were making our way down the escalators from the National Library’s Drama Centre Black Box. They paused. “What was the play about?” I looked at them, my head swimming from being resubmerged in a very specific vernacular of conservative Christianity and church politics that I thought I’d left behind decades ago. My friend continued: “I was thinking about it as maybe some kind of allegory for voting and the current political situation in Singapore [with the upcoming Presidential Election], but that didn’t quite fit consistently throughout.” I was slowly beginning to realise the opacity of this work to a broader demographic, and its transparency to lapsed Christians who had taken a particular journey of faith such as myself: who had grown up in a zealous mega-church, switched denominations as a teenager to a less in-your-face mode of practising Christianity, then left organised religion altogether.
Tender Submission hinges on a granular, almost ethnographic study of Cat and David, a middle-aged couple in a mid-sized church in Singapore. To a Christian public, it’s a portrait of a marriage knitted together by a faith that has started to fray at the edges. To other kinds of publics, it’s an insight into the parochialism of a particular upper-class majoritarian Chinese Anglophone community that assumes itself the centre of a universe—and the norms they conform unquestioningly to across gender, racial and political lines. The marriage unravels in real-time as our protagonists wait for the result of a crucial vote at their church’s extraordinary general meeting or EGM that will dictate the institution’s immediate socio-spiritual future. Cat is determined to win a tender for a public site that will support the growth of a welfare-based ministry she has poured her heart into; David and his men’s group have other outreach plans for the Lord’s work.
Cat and David’s rift is a fundamental one. Do they pursue a devotion to their faith shaped by service? This is Cat’s choice, one hewing much more closely to the lineage of the liberation theology that animated left-wing Catholicism in Singapore before it was systematically dismantled and purged by the powers-that-be. Or do they pursue devotion through conversion? David is squarely in this camp, where expansionist evangelisation—risky but satisfyingly visible—is the Lord’s mandate. Neither partner desires to submit to the other, and the prayers that they offer to and for each other, as well as the way in which they cast their vote, are no longer about a shared interpretation of faith but shaped by personal visions of what can and should be.
There’s a deeply gendered dimension to these choices. Cat (Neo Swee Lin) is threadbare from performing her dutiful role as wife, mother and second fiddle, the way her neon pink cardigan hangs together over her slumped shoulders by a single button. She knows the “cry room” or nursery room of the church’s chapel intimately, as do I: it’s a maternal space, one my sisters and I grew up in, where mothers, their infants and toddlers not old enough for Sunday School are cloistered away behind soundproofed windows and walls so they won’t disrupt the sermon. Cat knows its heated walls, its shoeless floors, where every toy is stored in every corner and cubbyhole. Then there’s her gregarious, blustery husband David (Lim Kay Siu), who renovated this very room but does not know it at all, hasn’t nursed fussy children or scraped projectile vomit off the linoleum.
Care work is Cat’s domain: she remembers the names of every brood of children passing through the church’s doors and carefully mists the cry room with antibacterial spray. Like almost all forms of reproductive labour, this work is often categorised as “naturally feminine” and therefore not even recognised as labour; in the church it often becomes a woman’s duty, carried out without remuneration or reward (Gotby 2023). The glamour of David’s “missions work” then takes on a masculinist, colonialist hue, carrying traces of the initial “civilising” impulses of the missionaries who arrived in Asia and South America and forcibly converted large swathes of the local population to Christianity and Catholicism. Cat and David’s church consists of 3,000 people—not a mega-church by any means, but not a tiny family church either, with their smaller, more municipal concerns. This in-betweenness is crucial: the church comes with disproportionate socioeconomic and political heft—Cat reels off a list of political figures and prominent businessmen in their congregation—but also a lot of inertia. Faith may be personal, but religion is inextricable from the sociopolitical, and it is these tangled relationships in Tender Submission that both force me to confront the complicated relationship I have with Christianity, but also the ways in which my life has been so marked by it, and the profound memories I associate with every scene.
II. “May I reach heaven’s joys, O bright heaven’s sun”
Each of us sculpts the world towards our own set of ethics and views, but what struck me the most in Tender Submission are the ways in which a particular community of Christians might bend every sign and symbol they perceive as proof that God is on their side in a kind of spiritual confirmation bias, from actual scripture to amateur numerology. This plays a huge role in decision-making; when I was three, my father relocated my entire family to Sweden for a year so that he and my mother could enrol in a seminary there, at an enormous financial cost. While fretting over the decision to stay or to go, my father, lost in prayer, drove past the now-defunct SOGO Japanese departmental store at Raffles City. SO GO, he read. He was certain this was God’s will, in all caps. So go we did.
These impulses might sound absolutely reckless, almost ridiculous, but it comes from a fixation with interpretation or what we call hermeneutics in literary theory, a broader interpretive approach to text that has its origins in the interpretation of scripture. My parents regularly pore through the bible for revelatory insight into their spiritual lives. It would be unimaginable for a devout married couple to not share these epiphanies or seemingly “prophetic” readings of scripture with each other. Cat and David find each other at odds over interpretations of God’s will that they have, wilfully or otherwise, kept from each other—feeding a growing sense of betrayal and doubt as their conversation unfolds. To those viewing the politics of the church from outside its fishbowl, Cat’s woundedness may feel incommensurate with David omitting a brief flash of insight about the “word of God”. But these literary intimacies, so fundamental to their faith, are a way of making sense of the complications and chaos of the world, and the abstractions and ambiguities of the biblical text. I think about how set and lighting designer Petrina Dawn Tan has the couple hedged into the cry room space with large window frames, putting them behind bars. Cat and David are trapped by their own frame of reference, and they can only make sense of their lives within the parameters of what they have always known.
The church space also gives both Cat and David, but especially David, tacit permission to indulge in spiritually-sanctioned strong emotion, emotion that reshapes or dominates the physiological landscape of the body that may manifest in tears, full-body shaking, or deep diaphragmatic laughter. All you have to do is interpret this affective landscape as “feeling the presence of God”. This allows David to build deeply intimate relationships with his men’s group, more so than in other circumstances. It also allows him to tell his wife how much he loves her and their daughter: I saw you and Debbie in the cry room, and I felt the presence of God. As a child and teen I remember constantly being confused by the distinction the church and my parents emphasised between the emotions produced in sacred spaces (“of the spirit”)—and the deep emotion I would feel when engaging with art, or listening to music (“of the soul”). Now I realise there is no difference; they’re simply renamed in ways that are palatable to spiritual contexts where stoic, buttoned-down communities have no other outlet for the kind of wild abandon and communitas that emotion can produce. This kind of “soul”-related emotion was so disparaged by the church communities I moved through as a younger person (what Lucas Ho observes about teens “fasting and praying” before they started dating each other, or receiving permission from church elders: cultish but true)—I often felt gaslit when I was told I was not feeling what I should be feeling, or to curate my emotions in a certain way.
There’s a beautiful episode in HBO’s adapted miniseries Station Eleven where the protagonist, having been through a massive and scarring global pandemic as a child, revisits her most traumatic memories as an adult, now equipped with the emotional toolkit to process everything she had blamed herself for or struggled with as an eight-year-old. The filmic gaze widens and lengthens to incorporate her adult understanding of the world, shading in scenes we’ve watched before with additional information that only emotional maturity can bring. My encounter with Tender Submission felt the same, as if I was accompanying my teenage self in an exploration of my parents’ relationship with each other and with their church. I was curious about playwright Lucas Ho’s own inspiration for the piece, and how much someone steeped in a particular faith would recognise about how they are apprehended by others. I suppose this “review” is, in a way, my own set of hermeneutics—my exegesis for both a play and a religion I once knew.
III. “Heart of my own heart, whatever befall”
Neo and Lim are one of Singapore theatre’s most recognisable couples, and their 31-year marriage offstage has, no doubt, sculpted their onstage characters’ easy chemistry and helped build an entire inventory of tiny gestures that allow us little glimpses of the broader scope of Cat and David’s shared life and how they move through the world. Checkpoint Theatre has presented several nuanced portraits of heterosexual relationships, intricate two-handers that explore how people make room for each other and then become part of each other—and what happens when these processes rupture, whether that happens earlier on in life, like in Jo Tan’s Session Zero (2021; being restaged this October), or later on, as in Faith Ng’s For Better or For Worse (2013).
It strikes me that there’s a third person in Tender Submission’s two-person tango—God himself (or god themself, if you’ll allow some spiritual liberties). The command to “submit to God” or “submit to each other” within the context of a marriage makes it difficult to predict who might wrest control of this very deliberate ménage à trois. God clearly takes precedence, but whose interpretation of God comes first? Will self-interest in a marriage always split the vote? That’s one thing Tender Submission’s real-time approach can’t reveal to us—what happens, longer-term, when marriages arrive at an impasse. How do we recount the compromises and sacrifices of a shared life, when these decisions were made collectively in the first place? Cat and David’s designated roles feel like an all-too-convenient (but also effective!) dichotomy for the central conceit of the play: husband versus wife, masculine versus feminine, conversion versus care. Yet each of their chosen affinities are really intimately connected; in any kind of movement there will be a branch dedicated to conversion and expansion, and another to care and service, whether in terms of the emotional, material or spiritual needs of devotees. The former allows the latter to grow, and the latter offers support, succour, and the stability of a nourishing base for the former. Cat and David’s ambitions are in fact bound up with each other, far more than is apparent to the characters themselves—particularly as two people who have gone down such well-worn paths with each other that they can’t even see what the other is doing. The capitalist system often compels us to work alongside each other in mundane, repetitive roles so shorn of any mutual appreciation, such that even a devoted couple can be vulnerable to a lack of empathy for each other. I think of Cat lying awake in bed next to David, so close yet so far apart, wondering if she might miss him if he dies before her.
For some couples (and I suspect Cat and David might be one of them), the trappings of religious and social propriety may glue their cracks over a little while longer. Submission requires trust—or faith, in Christian parlance—in another, a kind of unwavering confidence without requiring conventional proof. More than faith in God, it amazes me to witness the kinds of faith we attempt to invest in each other, day after day. We stick around to make things work with one another, we commit to flawed institutions and infrastructures in the hopes that we’ll get one of these iterations right. There’s both a clarity and a blindness to these various degrees of submission, and it’s what the play concludes with. Submitting to our versions and interpretations of God is the easy part. Putting our trust in each other? I suppose true faith is that we are still determined to figure that out.
A big thank-you to Nabilah Said and Sudhir Vadaketh for our long conversations about this work.
All the headers are lines from one of my favourite hymns, Be Thou My Vision, also cited in the play. I used to play this on the keyboard as part of the church band.
I watched Tender Submission on August 24 (Thursday, 8pm show). It was co-directed by Huzir Sulaiman and Chen Yingxuan. Full programme here.