Malaysia and Singapore

This is the second year that the Malaysian and Singaporean literary scenes were affected by the pandemic. Drama performances, which had been severely impacted in 2020, however, showed signs of recovering. While restrictions were still in place, live performances became more common from October onwards and increasingly more people were permitted to attend them. There was a concomitant relative decline in digitisation, which was an emergency reaction towards the inability to stage live performances in 2020 and the first nine months of 2021. However, despite its relative decline, digitisation is unlikely to be done away with completely in future years but will continue as a reinforcement or enhancement of live performance, if not its substitute. For some theatre companies, the transformative effects of the pandemic were more substantial, as in the transformation of Checkpoint Theatre into a multimedia company. This began before the pandemic and was reported in the Introduction to the previous bibliography. The transformation was accelerated by the sense of urgency during the pandemic. The company now sees itself more as a collective of multi-disciplinary storytellers across different media than a clear-cut theatre company, and it has expanded, for example, into the publication of comics. Diversification, which has been hastened if not triggered by the pandemic, may very well be one of the strategies for survival for theatre companies in the region in the 21st century. While the pandemic dealt a brutal blow to live performances, which satisfactorily recovered only in the last quarter of 2021, there was no effect on the reading and writing of fiction and poetry. The boredom of being quarantined resulted not only in an increase in television watching but, as noted by the writer Josephine Chia in Channel News Asia, in reading as well. While Chia was referring to reading in general, it is certain that more local works were also read during the pandemic when compared to the time before it began. As for writing, the effect of the pandemic was obviously not as negative as the effect on drama performance. Isolation might have helped to light a creative spark, and more importantly, if it was prolonged, it might sustain it. Kyla Zhao, for example, claimed that 1126226 JCL0010.1177/00219894221126226The Journal of Commonwealth LiteratureTalib research-article2022