TNS Team

Haresh Sharma is the Artistic Director of The Necessary Stage (TNS), and one of Singapore’s most celebrated contemporary playwrights with more than 130 plays staged in over 20 cities. Over the decades, he is known for crafting fearless and thoughtful devised theatre productions rooted firmly in collaboration, reflecting socio-political issues that are very much on the pulse of the times. These have spanned a diverse spread of themes, including political detention, minority communities, racial and gender discrimination and inequality.  

With his deep passion for education and mentorship, Haresh has been training young theatre practitioners under TNS, through popular workshop series including Devising with Actors and Playwrights and Playwrights’ Cove. He has also worked with organisations, to create plays that advocate for crucial issues such as dementia, palliative caregiving, and biomedical ethics. He recently collaborated with disability arts company ART:DIS on Invisible, a play about invisible disabilities where he explored the use of embedded narration.    

Haresh has been conferred the Southeast Asian Writers (or S.E.A. Write) Award, the Cultural Medallion and an Honorary Doctor of Arts by Bath Spa University (UK). He also had the honour of having a selection of his works featured at Esplanade’s first playwright-centred season at The Studios in 2017. His play Off Centre was selected by the Ministry of Education as the first Singapore play used as a Literature text for GCE N- and O-Levels. His book Reading the Room: A Playwright’s Devising Journey, documents his journey as a theatre-maker

Alvin is the Founder of The Necessary Stage and a leading proponent of devising theatre in Singapore, having directed more than 80 plays. He was the Co-Artistic Director of the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival from 2005 to 2015, and then the Artistic Director from 2021 to 2022.

He has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, the Young Artist Award (1998) and the Cultural Medallion (2014). In 2010, Alvin was conferred the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. The following year, he was awarded Best Director at The Straits Times Life Theatre Awards for Model Citizens by The Necessary Stage. He was also the Artistic Director of Peer Pleasure, an annual youth theatre festival by ArtsWok Collaborative (2015–2017).

Beyond TNS, Alvin has also been zealous about preserving whilst contemporising Peranakan theatre arts. By drawing from his own cultural roots, he created an intergenerational collective Tapestry, which continues to present new community-oriented work focused on contemporising Peranakan theatre and engaging new audiences.
‍