This is a picture you do not often see – so goes a refrain in Invisible, the anchor show for the 2026 Singapore Fringe Festival.

The bulk of Invisible takes place in the room of a five-star hotel, where the wealthy, enigmatic Anita (Jaspreet Kaur Sekhon) checks in monthly. When she loses her Ganesha idol after a routine room service, a young and disabled cleaner Malini (Periyachi Roshini) becomes the prime suspect as the imperious Anita demands answers.

Co-directors Haresh Sharma and Grace Kalaiselvi have made a choice that is perhaps unorthodox: casting Sekhon, who has Down syndrome, not as the disabled character but as the demanding hotel guest. The other three actors – who are not disabled and play service staff – are all subservient to Sekhon’s character, a slyly topsy-turvy world that reveals prejudices in the real one.

Sekhon missed some lines early in the Jan 21 show, but recovered and delivered a commendable performance with a dose of humour as the unreasonable guest. A more allegorical segment of her as Parvati, Ganesha’s mother in Hindu cosmology, incorporated with movement work brings the audience into the inner world of Anita’s outward temper.

Sharma’s script gradually expands its scope to reveal that each character hides her own disability as a way of navigating a world of unspoken norms.

Malini’s supervisor Safiah (Dalifah Shahril, who delivers a powerful and emotional performance as usual) is patient with Malini, but has to reckon with the casual cruelty of the hotel manager (Deonn Yang). It turns out Malini has been hired partly so the hotel can receive government grants.

Through non-naturalistic and meta-theatrical segments, the cast break character to encourage one another to tell their own stories of disability – specifically dyslexia and diabetes – in a gentle nod to the power of fiction in creating the conditions for revealing secrets.

The overlapping stories of each woman weave a complex tapestry of what disability looks like and how many hide in order to “pass” in society. This collaboration between disability arts organisation Art:Dis and socially engaged theatre group The Necessary Stage offers a lesser-seen picture in a theatre scene that has been content with platforming non-disabled narratives and actors.

The Fringe is most compelling when it brings voices from the margins. In Invisible, disability is pushed into the foreground and the audience is forced to confront what continues to be absent or ignored in daily life and on stage.

Read the full article here