REVIEW: Stratford’s The Tao of the World is masterful comedy of manners set in post-lockdown Singapore

Writer-director Jovanni Sy 施崇梵’s The Tao of the World, inspired by (but not constrained to) William Congreve’s The Way of the World, is a charming and layered post-COVID-lockdown update of the classic 1700 Restoration comedy. The original play was one of many comedies of manners that arose in the wake of England’s 18-year Puritan theatrical drought to satirize the sexual and financial exploits of the upper class, revealing the hypocritical moral bankruptcy of the outwardly upstanding wealthy.