The Kingdom of Paper

Author’s note

This play is a work of dramatic fiction inspired by experiences involving family conflict, child protection, institutional decision-making and the struggle to have competing accounts properly heard.

The institutions, procedures and documentary materials that inspire parts of the play are drawn from real-world circumstances. The characters are theatrical constructions and, where necessary, composites.

The play distinguishes between events personally witnessed by characters; testimony and contemporaneous statements; official records; and allegations, interpretations and disputed accounts. Nothing dramatized in this play should be understood as a judicial finding of fact unless independently established as such.

The purpose of the play is not to declare one person innocent and another guilty. It is to ask a more uncomfortable question: what happens when the machinery designed to protect a child becomes more concerned with protecting its own version of events?

Read the play

1. PROLOGUE

   THE KINGDOM

   A printer. A filing cabinet. A fool with a mountain of paper. Welcome to the Kingdom.

   Single movement

2. ACT I

   THE HOUSE

   A kitchen table, two cups, a child’s drawing — and the first knock.

   2 movements

3. ACT II

   THE GUARDIANS

   The stage fills with officials. A two-headed serpent smiles — and writes.

   2 movements

4. ACT III

   THE FILE

   Reports hang from the ceiling. A giant file sits on a throne. Everything was received. Nothing was heard.

   3 movements

5. ACT IV

   THE DEVIL ENTERS

   Thunder. A crown made of contracts. Facts are obedient little creatures.

   2 movements

6. ACT V

   THE COURT OF TWO STORIES

   A decision is not the same thing as discovering the truth.

   5 movements

7. EPILOGUE

   A CHILD’S VOICE IN DARKNESS

   When adults write about children — do they remember that children can read?

   Single movement

The full manuscript — PDF

The complete publication edition, typeset for print with cover note, credits and dramatis personae. Available to Kingdom Readers.

Dramatis personae

Orpheus

The Mother. Intelligent, exhausted, persistent.

Lanthe

Her daughter. Seven years old. The moral centre of the play.

The Father

Orpheus’s former partner.

Belial, the Devil Father

A theatrical manifestation of the Father’s darker presence in Orpheus’s story — named for Milton’s Belial, the fair-spoken devil who makes the worse appear the better reason. He wears a crown made of contracts.

The Report

The institutional voice. Calm, polite and almost impossible to argue with.

The Raad

The Court. Sometimes one voice, sometimes a chorus.

Samen Veilig

A chorus of institutional guardians.

Lamia, the Two-Headed Serpent

A fictional composite — named for the child-eating serpent-woman of Greek myth. One head smiles. The other writes.

The Fool

A bureaucratic jester who notices what everyone else has learned not to notice.

Sibe

Lanthe’s opa — her grandfather. A retired teacher of clinical psychology. He watched, and he wrote down what he saw.

Cornelia

A neighbour. A witness. She opened her door.

The Police Officer

The Lawyer

The Doctor

The Clerk

The Interpreter

The Children’s Chorus

Voices from inside the filing cabinets.

Production note

The play should be performed with restraint. The humour should initially make the audience comfortable. Then the machinery should become progressively less funny. By Act IV, the audience should realise that the jokes were never really jokes. The absurdity is the tragedy.

The central theatrical image is paper becoming more powerful than people. The filing cabinet should therefore remain visible throughout the production. At the beginning it represents administration. By the end it represents memory, power, institutional authority and the danger of reducing a human life to a record.

The child must remain the moral centre. The play should never suggest that winning against another parent is the objective. The objective is recognition: a child must never disappear inside the story adults tell about her.

Author’s evidence note — for the full production

The play preserves the distinction between four kinds of material: direct observation — what Cornelia says she personally witnessed; contemporaneous third-party testimony — Sibe’s letter, in which the grandfather identifies himself as a retired teacher of clinical psychology, describes his observations, separates them from information reported to him, and offers to provide further information; official records — police, medical, child-protection, court and custody documents, dramatized as records with their own wording and limitations; and the mother’s allegations and interpretation, which remain explicitly framed as her account unless independently established by a document in evidence.

The production should show the documents rather than merely accuse. Project dates, headings, short phrases and redacted excerpts. Let the audience see the gap between a witness saying “I saw this” and an institution saying “received”.

The most important dramatic contrast is not simply “bad father versus good mother”. It is: what happened → what was reported → what was witnessed → what was investigated → what was written → what decision followed. That chain is the spine of the play.

The court is never portrayed as knowingly conspiring with the father. The stronger theatrical accusation is that institutional decisions can enable consequences without institutional actors consciously intending those consequences. The audience is invited to judge whether that happened here.

The play’s final question remains unanswered by the characters and is answered by the audience: when a parent acquires greater power through a chain of contested allegations, incomplete investigation and institutional decisions, who is responsible for what happens next?

Note for publication

For publication, names, identifying details and documentary passages should be reviewed separately. Where a real person or organisation could be identifiable, the publisher should consider fictionalisation, composite characters, contextualisation and legal review. The dramatic power of the play does not depend upon naming every real person. It depends upon making the audience recognise the Kingdom.

Disclaimer

A work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogue in this play — and in the poems and other writing published on this site — are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, to real events, or to actual places is entirely coincidental and is not intended by the author.

Ella Tan