From Page to Stage: Seeing Humanity Through Theatre

At Hwa Chong, Sabbatical Week gives students opportunities to pursue learning in ways that go beyond regular classroom lessons. For Humanities Programme students, the annual Page-to-Stage Drama Sabbatical offers a chance to experience literature not only as text to be studied, but also as performance to be interpreted, shaped and brought to life. In this reflection, Ayden shares how the sabbatical deepened his appreciation of theatre, literature and the human stories that connect us. 

Written by: Low Wen Yang Ayden (4i4, 2026)

I think theatre can help us see humanity more clearly. It lets us explore deeply human characters in scenarios that stem from both human experience and the human imagination. That is why I thought it was a great choice for the Humanities Programme’s (HP) annual sabbatical.

Every year, in preparation for the programme’s significant event, Humanities in Celebration, HP students participate in the Page-to-Stage Drama Sabbatical. The sabbatical is conducted by our highly experienced and talented trainer from InwardBOUND, Mr Isaiah. In 2026, the sabbatical focused exactly on what its name suggests: bringing plays from page to stage. Participants worked on transforming scripts into performances, learning how written words could come alive through staging.

For us, as HP literature students who have studied, or will study, more than one play in our upper secondary years, I think this is particularly fruitful. Why?

Because it is easy to look at plays and read the words written on our test papers, to flip through pages and pages of dialogue, and to look at basic stage directions just long enough to briefly imagine them for the sake of having content to write in an essay. However, I think plays are written to be performed. This sabbatical showed me that theatre, when performed, can bring a character on a page to life as someone we can see, sympathise with, and understand as an example of our shared human experience in its various forms.

More importantly for us, the sabbatical participants, theatre is something we can interpret and shape to express the ideas we want to convey. It gives not only the writer, but also the director and actor, the chance to collectively create something beautiful.

The HP sabbatical gave us, a group of busy students who mostly lack deep exposure to drama, a small taste of these things in their rawest form: the transition from page to stage. With our trainer’s guidance, we learnt to interpret and imagine characters. We created their biographies and learnt to portray them fully, while making use of the unique environment of the stage to present them as richly and interestingly as we could. We also delved deeply into the themes and atmosphere of our assigned play scripts, and tried our hand at bringing them onto the stage.

At the end of the week, none of us were professional directors or actors. Nor could any of us claim that our productions were particularly outstanding. What we could say, however, was that we were able to experience the processes of theatre for ourselves in relative depth, and ultimately create three productions of our own to be showcased in October.

Some plays reflected on our transactional world, while others brought attention to the people and stories that exist on the margins of society, too quickly forgotten by many. Indeed, this was a HP sabbatical, because these experiences brought us deeper in our thinking and appreciation of humanity.

Of course, how deeply this was felt would vary from person to person. Ultimately, however, we all had fun with the various amusing drama games and exercises, and put our time to good use preparing for Humanities in Celebration. After this sabbatical, I am confident that the event will be a very enjoyable night for us all!