SINGAPORE – Playwright Ants Chua, 28, has been co-renting an apartment for six years. Though their new play tells of two flatmates, they offer a cheeky caveat about it: “Characters in this play are entirely fiction. Any resemblance to persons living out there is purely coincidental.”

The work is Chua’s first in-person play with Checkpoint Theatre and comes after the company’s 2020 video monologue series, Two Songs And A Story, which featured contributions by Inch Chua, Jo Tan, Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai and weish.

Chua’s then monologue, at least I have words now, was a meditation on friendships as “fundamentally transformative forces in our lives”. Prose interweaves with song, with Chua delving into old journal entries each time they were stuck in the writing process.

Common Room, to be held from July 16 to Aug 2, persists in the theme of close platonic relationships, except that this is now situated in the close confines of a rental home. The two young adults, played by Genevieve Tan and Siti Sara Hamid, are emphatically neither romantically nor sexually involved.

Chua says: “Living with someone is such an intimate thing. You get to know all these things about them that their partners and parents may not know, just by virtue of spending so much ambient time with them. The domestic frictions that come up are usually also because something is pressing on a sore spot that predates your housemate relationship.”

For Chua, the biggest red flag in a housemate is not the delay in doing the dishes or the blaring of loud music at night, but something more insidious – a person’s inability to communicate what he or she needs.

Despite waxing eloquent about “the impossibilities and failures of language” – a major theme of Common Room – Chua insists on talking, saying: “I’m someone who’s very happy to accommodate and negotiate, but if someone’s not willing to tell me the information that we need to have a conversation, that makes it very difficult.”

Few productions in Singapore foreground friendshi...