‘We have such fixed ideas of what women are supposed to be’: Oon Shu An challenges perceptions of 1920s women in new drama

How different are we from the women who lived 100 years ago?

Mediacorp’s new drama The Last Bout takes place in 1920s and ’30s Singapore, and local actress Oon Shu An plays Kit, a cabaret singer at the amusement park Golden World trying to overthrow the towkay (James Seah) who controls the venue and the lives of its performers.

“In that era, they had amusement parks which were places of great entertainment,” the 37-year-old told AsiaOne in a recent interview. “Although it was a really difficult time for people, how they escaped was through entertainment.

“So cabaret was the queen of this era, it was the main form of entertainment and then boxing started to come in.”

Two young men, Louis Neo (Benjamin Kheng) and Tommy Law (Yao, formerly known as Thomas Pang) aim to break out of an abusive family situation and poverty respectively by boxing at Golden World.

When Shu An got the role, she wanted to challenge herself on our preconceived notions of women from that era.

“I feel that we’re always told that women before were so traditional, women before just knew what it was like to be a proper woman, and I really wondered what that meant,” she added.

During her research for her role, she discovered American-French cabaret singer Josephine Baker whom she found “incredible”.

“One of the iconic videos was of her in this banana bikini outfit, and she’s shaking and moving and dancing, and she’s just so uninhibited,” Shu An said.

She felt that if a woman did that, even now, she would be asked: “What happened to all our values?”

“I feel we have such fixed ideas of what women are supposed to be, and I wonder where they come from, because I’m not really sure it comes from the women,” she added.

Shu An was also fascinated by Josephine’s life story, from her adopting “several children from different parts of the world” to being a spy during the Second World War.

When it came to Singapore’s cabaret performers, Shu An said that she couldn’t find much information from that era but discovered that the singers from the 1960s here were also “quite incredible”.

“They were philanthropists. They made money, and then they set up schools and charities, and did so much good for the community,” she said. “And I wonder why people have so much judgement when it comes to a certain type of work.

“Because when you look at cabaret or boxing, they’re both essentially entertaining with their bodies, right?”

‘We would just find a way to survive’

When asked how she would cope if she lived in the 1920s and ’30s, Shu An simply said that she would “just find a way to survive”.

“When we look at our ancestry, we see the powerful women who have come before us and they did amazing things for the time,” she said. “I just found out that my great-grandmother basically escaped from China when she was 14 and came to Singapore on a boat by herself.”

While Shu An is not sure if she could do the same, she feels “lucky” that she doesn’t have to find out in our modern age.

She pointed to her character Kit as being one of these strong women as she takes care of her sister who is unwell and even suspects that Golden World’s towkay may have something to do with her illness.

“For Kit and her sister, their backstory is that the sister made these beautiful dresses and wanted to set up her own shop, and Kit wanted to figure out how to sell some of the things her sister made because she’s more enterprising and a smooth talker,” Shu An said.

But outside her relationship with her sister, Shu An said that Kit is more of a lone wolf.

“I think throughout the show, she realises that you do need other people and she also does look out for other people because she has a strong sense of justice,” she said.

“But there’s also an element of self-preservation which happens in times of great, great suffering. And she tries to find the balance between looking out for other people and looking out for herself.”

The Last Bout, which also stars Tess Pang, Malene Waters and Amy Cheng, is available on mewatch and the Mediacorp Drama YouTube channel. It airs Mondays at 10pm starting April 29 on Channel 5.