The Malaysian Insider :: Opinion
The Malaysian Insider :: Opinion |
| Posted: 25 Oct 2011 04:49 PM PDT [unable to retrieve full-text content]OCT 26 — Of course this essay would have to be about the Obedient Wives Club. One can’t pass up the chance to write about the one very titillating piece of news in the media, though the recent Auditor-General’s Report comes close. And that is a painful read. Like many Malaysians, I was flabbergasted and speechless when I read online accounts of ... 
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| What Malaysians can learn from theatre Posted: 25 Oct 2011 04:37 PM PDT OCT 26 — After spending the last few weeks directing a play for the Short + Sweet theatre festival, it got me thinking about theatre's place in our society. The play was in Cantonese. My actors were all Chinese, with varying fluency in the dialect. My Cantonese vocabulary doesn't extend much beyond numbers, food, swear words and phrases I learned from Hong Kong soaps like "chee seen" and "yao mao gao chou". Yet not once during the entire production was my lack of fluency in Cantonese and my obvious "non-Chineseness" ever brought up. What mattered, instead of my identity, was putting on a good show. Judging by audience reactions, I think we did all right. The funniest comment I got after the play was: "I thought you were a man!" Not a single "But you're not Chinese!" Not even a passing nod to my race. Outside the theatre, I find that my race and religion are often considered yardsticks of my performance. In school, I was my English teachers' pet not so much because of aptitude but because it seemed such a special thing to have a Bumi girl speak so well. A Malay man I went out with even asked me why I spoke well when, unlike him, I had never studied overseas. It's not that racial identities don't matter at all in theatre. Sometimes a role calls for a specific racial type and that's a given. Within the English-speaking theatre community particularly, race, religion and personal creeds don't come into the picture. Meritocracy is practised out of necessity. You hire a bad actor, you'll affect the entire production. If your lead actor is out-acted by a mop, you're in trouble. Theatre stems from the natural human instinct to tell, share and hear stories. What makes it an art is the technical difficulties that go into making a play work. A play is more than players on the stage, trading lines and making faces. It is a result of skilful coordination of things on stage and back stage. Even stage lighting is a craft in itself where good lighting is seen, but not noticed. When you start looking at the lights instead of the actor, the play obviously needs work. Our local theatre scene has its own problems. A while back, it was a small, incestuous scene. You would seem the same people over and over again, and for a long time, things were rather stagnant. Now, with festivals like Short+Sweet and more options for training in the performing arts, theatre's had a fresh injection of new blood and new opportunities. Theatre pays little but asks much. The rigours of acting on stage require stamina as well as honed acting chops. While Rosie Huntington-Whitely could get away with pouting through Transformers 3, she wouldn't be able to do it in theatre. Theatre is really the actor's medium; careful editing might save a film actor's performance but you can't hide poor acting on stage. To some, the arts seem nothing more than opium and escape from real life. But the thing about theatre, real theatre, is that it connects most when it relays the hard truths we often run away from. We admire actors most not for playing the unreal but the realistic. It is ironic, really, that you can find the truth on stage but in the lofty institution of Parliament, all I see are really bad actors. Every year, the Auditor-General's report is the traditional tragedy, with much anger, bombast and gnashing of teeth. Mummers from all parties, reciting dramatic monologues about hudud, apostasy and the evils of Elton John. And they couldn't even do us the favour of at least being entertaining. I wonder if those who bemoan the high prices of theatre show tickets ever think about what they pay for the farce advertised as a democracy. In my opinion, I think it's time we all ask for our money back. * The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist. Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
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