Before New York, there was Singapore. That’s where Niraj Nair started, and the work he did there with Singapore Repertory Theatre laid the foundation for everything that followed. Not as a stepping stone. As a genuine education in what it means to hold an audience’s attention when there’s nowhere to hide.
SRT is not a small operation. The company has won The Straits Times Life Theatre Award, the Charity Council Transparency Award, and earned international nominations across its history. When Nair joined their productions under director Daniel Jenkins, associate artistic director of Pangdemonium and a nominee for Best Director at The Straits Times Life Theatre Awards, he wasn’t doing fringe work in a black box. He was performing at KC Arts Center, SRT’s main venue, under a director with one of the more demanding reputations in Singapore theater.
Ghost Light is the production that most clearly shaped how he thinks about space. Conceived as an immersive promenade experience, the production moved audiences through multiple spaces within the theater itself, dissolving the boundary between spectator and performer and turning the building into both setting and subject. The play drew on theatrical beliefs, rituals, and superstitions, examining the darker undercurrents of life in the theater: paranormal anxieties, whispered taboos, the unspoken codes that govern backstage culture. Everyday conversations took on sinister undertones. The theater became a haunted space, not just by ghosts but by accumulated memories and the pressure to perform.
For an actor, that format is a specific and unforgiving challenge. When the audience surrounds you on all sides, moving through the same space you’re inhabiting, there’s no fixed sightline to work toward, no fourth wall to lean on. Every word has to land regardless of where you’re standing or who’s standing nearest to you. Nair’s approach was to build tension through relationship rather than spectacle, letting information emerge slowly, holding back until the audience was already dreading what was coming. The result was exactly the atmosphere the material called for: not theatrical horror, but something more creeping and specific, the horror of exposure.
Pick A Hero took the same attentiveness and applied it to a completely different context. The digital web series, funded by the Rotary Club of Singapore and produced by SRT, tackled bullying and cyber-bullying for middle and high school audiences. Jenkins directed again, and Nair took the lead as Bobo, a sensitive and perceptive student who becomes the repeated target of everyday school bullying. The series traces how those behaviors migrate between physical and virtual worlds, and it approaches the subject without the tidy moral lessons that usually make this kind of work feel condescending to the young people it’s trying to reach. Instead, it focuses on empathy and the gradual cultivation of confidence as tools for resistance.
Carrying the lead in a piece like that, with minimal dialogue, performed on stage and then distributed to classrooms, requires a double calibration. The physical and emotional nuance that works live in a theater doesn’t automatically read on a screen, especially on a classroom projector. Nair has talked about working to “play all the keys on the piano wherever I could” in that context, building a performance that would hold its emotional center across both formats simultaneously. The social stakes of the material make it even harder. When you’re asking young people to see themselves in a character and to find something useful in that recognition, half-measures don’t work.
What connects Ghost Light and Pick A Hero isn’t just Jenkins or SRT. Both pieces ask the audience to actively participate in the meaning-making, one physically by moving through the space, the other emotionally by recognizing their own experiences in the story. And in both cases, that participation depends entirely on whether the actor earns it. Nair was already learning in Singapore how to make that transaction feel inevitable.
He’s since described his belief that theater exists to make “nebulous ideas of philosophy physical and personal.” The work he did with SRT before New York was where that belief started to take practical shape. Ghost Light and Pick A Hero aren’t footnotes in a career that got more serious later. They’re where the seriousness started.
