The Fourth Trimester (2025)
Faith Ng’s beloved The Fourth Trimester returns in November, having clinched Production of the Year and Best Original Script at the 2023 ST Life Theatre Awards. This compelling play profoundly encapsulates the experience of life and parenthood in Singapore, and is essential viewing for all.
Touted as a “a must-watch for all sorts of people” (The Straits Times), The Fourth Trimester runs from 20–30 November 2025.
The Fourth Trimester is Culture Pass eligible! Redeem your $100 credits here for this production!
The first month is always the roughest.
Exhausted from battling sleepless nights and endless diaper changes, first-time parents Samantha and Aaron find themselves overwhelmed caring for their newborn. Close friends rally around them in support, but picture-perfect couple Lisa and Daniel are beginning to feel the strain of family life on their relationship, while Ann yearns for a space of her own. Next door, newlyweds Sofia and Johan deal with the pressures of starting a family. Faced with the tangle of life and its hurdles, ‘adulting’ has never seemed so complicated.
Incredibly rich, humorous and compassionate, The Fourth Trimester is achingly familiar in its portrayal of family life and all its uncertainties. With sensitive, nuanced direction by Claire Wong and insightful dramaturgy by Huzir Sulaiman, Faith Ng’s work casts a refreshing and timely light on parenthood, identity, and what it means to be happy in contemporary Singapore.
Expect the unexpected in this hopeful and heartfelt ode to the places we call home, and the people we choose as family.
Join us at The Fourth Trimester Gala and The Fourth Trimester Fundraiser Night for an intimate and delightful time at the theatre, and to champion Checkpoint Theatre’s telling of original Singapore stories — click here for more information!
Access Information
The following shows will be captioned performances:
• Sat 22 Nov, 2:30pm
• Wed 26 Nov, 8pm
The performance on Fri 28 Nov, 8pm includes Singapore Sign Language interpretation and will also be captioned.
Please book seats within the following sections for the best view of the captions and interpretation:
• D8 to D22
• E8 to E22
• F8 to F22
Limited wheelchair seating is available in Row L. Please call the SISTIC hotline at 6348 5555 to book wheelchair seats.
Creative Team
- Playwright
Faith Ng
- Director
Claire Wong
- Dramaturg
Huzir Sulaiman
- Cast
Isabella Chiam
Joshua Lim
Julie Wee
Hang Qian Chou
Rusydina Afiqah
Wan Ahmad
Liz Sergeant Tan
Reviews
- Press
Checkpoint Theatre’s The Fourth Trimester tells men to step up as parents.
Realist playwright Faith Ng’s The Fourth Trimester is given a re-staging three years after it debuted to acclaim.
It remains forensic in its examination of parenthood – that no-win early 30s rite of passage, marking adulthood but also the loss of selfhood, and that moment when youth’s ambition becomes a matter of choosing regrets one can live with.
Three couples come under Ng’s microscope, each a variation on a theme […] Five of the original seven-member cast reprise their roles, and Claire Wong and Huzir Sulaiman once more respectively direct and provide dramaturgy. Ng’s script […] is meatily observed and able to swing between moments of helpless anger and graceful levity.
[Isabella] Chiam has fully inhabited her role here, dishevelled and hulking around almost bow-legged at the pain of her body and the weighty fatigue.
[...] Who can begrudge the lashing out of an overworked mother? It is the men who should not be shouting, which is the punch of this ultimately feminist play.
Amid the pneumatic breast pumping that sound like accelerated heart beats […] it is on the men to not take tired acquiescence as licence to lapse into traditional patterns of care.
Ng does not sugarcoat it: Parenthood is a terrible, transformative process, and it is okay to regret it, sometimes.
THE STRAITS TIMES, SG
Faith Ng’s The Fourth Trimester is a sweeping tale of Singapore today, told through the prism of parenting. Epic in runtime & scope, yet intimate in the stories it explores, it carries many hallmarks of a classic Checkpoint Theatre production.
[...] Ng’s playwriting skill is on fine display as she interweaves all their stories and lives together in ways which never feel trite or particularly forced.
The performances all enhance Ng’s eye for detail and care for portraying human lives in their full, and often messy, complication.
[...] Claire Wong has crafted quite the ensemble here – each of them finds ways into their character which make them a pleasure to spend time with, and makes their dialogue reach into the hearts of the audiences [...]
CRITICS CIRCLE BLOG, SG