Edinburgh Fringe 2025
King
Jo Tan
Genre: Comedy, Dramedy, LGBTQ+ Theatre, New Writing, Queer Theatre, Solo Play, Theatre
Venue: Summerhall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
In King, Yen is the model of the perfect Singaporean woman: PR professional, dutiful girlfriend, socially anxious box-ticker. But when she slips into drag as Stirling Da Silva, a K-pop styled drag king, a new version of herself emerges, one that won’t stay hidden. With 21 characters, razor-sharp accents, and kinetic physicality, this is a smart, funny, and deeply Singaporean story about identity, image, and self-acceptance.
Review
I don’t know if it was coincidence or intention, but the Former Gents Locker Room at Summerhall is a fitting stage for a show about a woman discovering her masculinity. So, how did writer/performer Jo Tan end up there?
The story of King begins with Geok Yen’s quest to be the perfect Singaporean woman: efficient, pretty, a “female lead.” But after donning her boyfriend’s clothes for a costume party, she discovers Stirling Da Silva, a drag king persona modeled on K-pop masculinity. Stirling is everything Yen has never been allowed to be: bold, swaggering, magnetic. From then on, Sundays become a secret double life, with Yen playing the ideal girlfriend during the week and drag king on the weekends.
The performance is exhausting to watch in the best way: high-octane, rapid-fire, and breathless. In the first half, Tan ricochets between social anxiety, quick-fire punchlines, and character shifts with dizzying energy. The second half slows into graver territory, as Yen faces tensions with drag queens, strained secrecy with her boyfriend, and questions of authenticity. The contrast in pacing mirrors Yen’s struggle to reconcile image and truth.
Though it’s a one-woman show, King feels like an ensemble piece. Tan embodies 21 distinct characters, each realized through physicality and precise linguistic detail: from Yen’s Singlish, to expats with broad Australian vowels, to locals adopting a polished Americanized English. Language here isn’t just communication, it’s identity, and Tan uses it to draw sharp sociolinguistic portraits.
Some pauses would help the audience catch its breath, but the stamina and craft on display are undeniable. It’s the kind of performance that leaves the actor looking as if she’s gone ten rounds in a boxing ring, and the audience exhilarated just trying to keep up.
Beyond performance, King carries real cultural weight. In Singapore, queerness is still constrained by family expectations, social conservatism, and residual legal taboos. To embody a drag king on stage is a radical act of visibility. Stirling Da Silva is more than a persona- he’s a declaration that queer identities exist, thrive, and demand space in a society that prefers silence. On an international stage like Edinburgh, the work gains added resonance: it sheds light on queer culture in Southeast Asia and gives Western audiences a rare, necessary perspective on how identity is negotiated in conservative contexts.
Understanding the cultural backdrop makes King especially powerful. Singapore’s government eagerly imports Western soft power symbols like English as lingua franca, American media, Ivy League aspirations, while simultaneously resisting Western values. The result is cultural whiplash: citizens are trained to perform outward cosmopolitanism while expected to preserve an inwardly Singaporean self. The Japanese have words like honne and tatemae for this split between private authenticity and public façade. Singapore has no such terms, but the dynamic is real.
That tension runs straight through King. Yen has one outward self (the perfect girlfriend, perfect employee, perfect Singaporean woman) and one inward self (the drag king Stirling Da Silva). The genius of the show lies in mapping how those selves clash, overlap, and ultimately refuse to be separated. By the end, Yen cannot return to simply being the “perfect woman.” Stirling is part of her, and she embraces a new kind of leading role- not a female lead, but a male lead in her own life.
King is a Must See show: a tour de force of performance and craft, a bold act of LGBTQ+ visibility in a socially conservative society, and an invitation to audiences everywhere to consider what it really means to live authentically.
