Adeeb Fazah: Young and Independent Theatre-making

Did you know that The Second Breakfast Company was officially incorporated in a Starbucks? Theatre director and drama educator Adeeb Fazah, Artistic Director of The Second Breakfast Company (2BCo), is telling me about the company’s origins.

2BCo was formed by Adeeb, Mark Benedict Cheong, Denise Dolendo, Kristine Ng and Chen Rui Yu, former members of community theatre group Yellow Chair Productions, after Yellow Chair closed down. In 2016, when they decided to stage their first full production, they registered 2BCo as a legal entity. “It was so crazy thinking about it. We were still students and we just said, hey, let's register. We literally sat at a Starbucks on someone's laptop and Googled ACRA and registered.” Registering with ACRA represented the team’s long-term commitment to the company, while also making their operations official.

2BCo made a big splash with their first full production, Family by Leow Puay Tin, on the play’s 20th anniversary of being staged in Singapore. 

Directed by Adeeb and produced in Centre 42's Black Box on a shoestring budget, they nevertheless gained attention from established members of the arts community like Alvin Tan (Artistic Director of The Necessary Stage), Tay Tong (producer of the original Singapore production) and Lim Yu Beng (one of the original cast members), who not only wanted to see a new generation’s take on the play, but also wanted to connect with the 2BCo team. “That was really the show that helped seal the deal for us,” Adeeb says.

2BCo’s next production was Lemmings & The Wedding Pig, a double bill of new plays by young playwrights Myle Yan Tay and Chelsea Cheo, also directed by Adeeb and performed at Centre 42's Black Box.

“That was a very important show because we were thinking about how to platform writers. Instead of us coming up with the whole thing and then hiring people, we were thinking, how can we work with people who have their own scripts? So we did an open call; it was so wild that we received so many plays, considering that was our second production ever.” 

The double bill also solidified 2BCo's position as a stepping stone of opportunity for people entering the theatre scene — the auditions yielded a cast who were fresh graduates from the same LASALLE cohort. Adeeb recalls, “We [the 2BCo team] were very young, 25 or 26 years old at the time, working mostly with people our age or younger. When we were doing the double bill, I was the oldest person in the room.”

As well as telling young people’s stories, 2BCo continued their work in producing young people’s interpretations of older Singaporean plays. Their 2018 season epitomised both sides of their goals: 2BCo presented 1960s drama The Moon is Less Bright by local literary pioneer Goh Poh Seng; Love Bites, dramatised readings of old and new local plays for Centre 42’s Late-Night Texting; and The Old Woman and the Ox, a new work by then-20-year-old Isaiah Christopher Lee.

Adeeb recalls that The Moon is Less Bright was “a really fun project because there was so much to unearth from the story. So many themes from the play about inequality and social class, and all the discussions that were ongoing in the zeitgeist that year, like Teo You Yenn’s book [This Is What Inequality Looks Like] just came out and people were talking about inequality in Parliament and in classrooms.”

But even after co-founding 2BCo, Adeeb’s path towards a full-time career in theatre wasn’t certain yet. With his degree in communications, the logical post-graduation path seemed like a job in the same field, but he found himself spending months waiting for responses to his job applications. A few months after graduation, still in job limbo, he headed to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2017 as the director of Bhumi Collective's Last of Their Generation, a solo show by Mohamad Shaifulbahri.

“Edinburgh was very transformative,” says Adeeb. “I was very inspired by all the different things that I saw from all over the world, all the same struggles that people had. It really said to me that actually, this is what you want to do.” 

Adeeb returned to Singapore knowing he needed to make a decision about his career. While he still was not receiving responses to his job applications, he gradually began to be offered drama teaching opportunities in schools, which have since become his day to day job.

Edinburgh’s impact on Adeeb continued: he and Shai set up their partnership, simply named Adeeb and Shai, as a platform for plays they had seen in Edinburgh. With Adeeb directing and Shai producing, they presented the Singapore premieres of British plays Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons by Sam Steiner and Heather by Thomas Eccleshare (the latter as part of Adeeb’s residency at Gateway Theatre). In between, they also collaborated on Bhumi Collective’s dead was the body till i taught it how to move.

While Adeeb works mainly as a director and an educator, he has also taken on other roles, such as producer of the various versions of Miriam Cheong's autobiographical work The Chronicles of Xiao Ming, which was incubated and presented in 2019 under Centre 42’s Guest Room programme (now known as the New Scripts Garage). 

Adeeb has also done more playwriting in recent years, including The Lobby, and returned to acting, in Boom and Secondary. 2022 was a big writing year for him: he participated in The Necessary Stage’s Playwrights Cove programme under Haresh Sharma's mentorship while concurrently undergoing the steep learning curve of writing the book for 2BCo’s new musical The Paiseh Pieces. 

“I've definitely benefited from my year with Haresh and from that process of writing the musical. Having Nabilah [Said] as the dramaturg [for The Paiseh Pieces] was very important because the things she was saying were also things I was learning with Haresh. She would say, in this scene, what do these characters want? And I was like, you are so right, Nabilah. What do they want?” 

Looking back at The Paiseh Pieces, Adeeb says, “I was very proud of the work that we were doing, very proud of where Second Breakfast has come.” 

Looking to the future, Adeeb says, “I would love to keep investigating what theatre can do in all of its different ways, whether with no frills or with all the frills. I'm interested in exploring and unearthing more original Singaporean stories and collaborating with more people who are willing to put themselves out there in biographical works. 

I hope to write more in order to appeal to a broader Singaporean millennial and Gen Z audience, because they are the future. And to be able to legitimise even further the Singaporean narrative, Singaporean theatre in the mind of the future Singapore audience.”

When I ask Adeeb about his birthday wishes for Centre 42’s 10th birthday, his first reaction is surprise that Centre 42 is “only” 10 years old. “Feels like it’s been longer,” he remarks. “Well, that’s testament to the institution that Centre 42 has been for the scene. Happy 10 years of being the place to be for Singapore theatre. Thanks for being there for so many of us who had nowhere else to go. For people who were interested in meeting other people, who needed shelter, space, time, visibility to get their careers started. I wish more people will support Centre 42's work. And I wish all the things that Centre 42 wants to be and more.”

Published: 30 July 2024 

Centre 42 celebrates our 10th Anniversary in 2024, marking ten years of supporting the theatre community around us. As part of our anniversary celebrations, we chart the growth of 10 noteworthy practitioners who have worked with us in the past decade, through a series of editorials that trace their personal and artistic development and Centre 42's role in their journeys so far. 

Read the other articles in this series: