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kok man
Luxe and Lavish Lifestyle
Theatre Production
This is my first experience of Chinese theatre and I don��t know what to expect. Entering into the Actors Studio Box at Dataran Merdeka, Kuala Lumpur, I am greeted by a grating buzz and a dark sparse set with threads running across the walls and hanging from the ceiling. Already occupying the stage are four girls in white costumes, one kneeling face away on the far side, one stooped over on the floor just at the audience��s feet, one pacing slowly back and forth stroking the side wall, and a fourth one kneeling on a mat staring blankly into the space in front of her.
To get to my my seat I had to walk among them but the intensity of their collective presence made my scuffling all the more awkward. Taking a seat on the far left, I was captivated by the waifish, ghost-like presence of the last girl (Chin Lee Ling) on the mat. She was making a slow movement in which she stretched out her hands toward the audience,and then strained her whole being toward the point just beyond her fingertips, her eyes widening with mute exasperation until the necessity of the labour passes and she relaxed, for the moment, only to repeat it all over again. Whatever was happening, I certainly didn�t expect to be blown away even before the play began.
Brought to you by Dan Dan Theatre, AKU II: Ang Tau Mui was a continuation of the themes found in the original one man play Aku, which had actor/director Loh Kok Man stripping down to near nudity as he explored the meaning of identity and self. He repeated his exploration here with four girls as his latest canvas.
I attended the play only because I had recently been acquainted with the writer of the original English text. Interestingly, the writer, Leow Puay Tin, wrote the play as a personal challenge � to think in Chinese and write in English. In being translated back from English into Chinese, Leow�s script had now come full circle, and perhaps sounded nothing like how she had first concieved it. However, the richness of the lines in Mandarin (translator: Koh Choon Eiow) gives no indication that the play was actually written in a language different from the one I was hearing. The one scene which employed a voice-over that repeated the onstage dialogue in English felt redundant and even annoying.
The story tells of the life of a girl who sells red bean soup for a living, literally, an ang tau mui. The play gave sketchy details about her. We were not told her real name, but what�s a name to do with who she is, the play seemed to ask.
It began with her at age 12, reciting a letter she is writing to her idol, the glamourous Chinese actress Lin Dai. Spoken in turn by the four talented actresses, Kee Chung Phear, Chin Lee Ling, Gan Hui Yee and Hee Shiang Yin, the letters reveal the character�s fantasy. She wants to be like Lin Dai. But still, who is she really? This is brutally questioned when, several years on, she is interrogated by a police officer who catches her without her identification card.
�We have been looking,� says the officer, �for an Ang Tau Mui who sells red bean soup in Kappan Road. Every Friday night she goes to the New World Amusement Park. When she was 15 she ran away from home to get married.�
�That girl was not me,� Ang Tau Mui lies.
�She broke her mother�s heart. Later her mother told everyone that Ang Tau Mui had died. So Ang Tau Mui could not go back home after that.�
�That girl was not me.�
As the play started to rely less and less on the words of the character, it gradually became a document of her frantic search for the right answers, the right questions, the key to who she is.
After a sluggish middle-section, the play climaxed in a long but brilliantly choreographed sequence. It began with all four actresses drawing chalk lines on the floor and walls until they had surrounded themselves in a complex grid, then they paced across the stage in straight line, one arm outstretched. Every now and then they throw themselves on the floor with an audible gasp. One particular actress, Kee Chung Phear, whose expression is exquisite and whose control over her body is sheer poetry, flung herself which such ferocity that I twitched everytime she hit the ground.
The play, in the hands of director Loh, did not aim to enlighten us to the meaning of identity, instead it let us witness the terrible convulsions of a soul without reasons of being, of four souls searching for their meanings. The scene ended with all the actresses collapsed on the smudged floor, panting audibly and eventually succumbing to long infectious laughter. I felt similarly relieved, but with no inkling as to what I was relieved about.
With its intense deliberate movements and constant burst of energy, Loh's direction ensured the audience�s attention even though half of them did not fully comprehend the language. Almost every level of the production boasts of thoughtful artistry. Chuah Chong Yong's set design and the director's lighting design combined to achieve an Oriental goth effect, giving the stage an appearance of a forsaken cloister in some ancient Chinese chamber. The background music consisted of ambient industrial music which sometimes pulsated like a mechanical heartbeat on the verge of death. Interestingly the director discovered it on an anonymous CD in a bargain in Hong Kong.
Most of the cast and crew involved are graduates of Malaysia Institute of Art's theatre course. With sadness, they informed me that MIA had just shut down their drama department. We are thankful however that the course had been around long enough to produce these bold individuals. Even though Ang Tau Mui is sometimes a little obscure and indulgent, their productions represented a great unified effort from people with ambitious artistic vision.
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