TARAP MAN (STAR Review)

The review in THE STAR of 9th December 2007

More than meets the eye

In this play set 13 years ago in Sabah, double-edged one-liners helped to lift it into the contemporary realm.

THE TARAP MAN

Dec 5-9
The Annexe Gallery,
Central Market, KL

Review by SARAS MANICKAM

THEY said The Tarap Man is a journalistic thriller. They lied. The Tarap Man is more than that. It is an unflinching look at a system that failed and continues to fail the individual.

It is about socio-political reality failing common humanity; about the fourth estate (Senior journalist to young award-winning one: “Once upon a time, there was a Fourth Estate.” “Where?”) failing to maintain journalistic integrity, preferring to play ball instead. It is about metaphors of life, surviving the system and rising above it. The play may have been set 13 years ago but given recent events, the threads are wholly contemporary.

The Tarap Man is set in Sabah. It is about a boy incarcerated for the murder of his mother in 1952 and presumably still in prison with the system having forgotten about him. More than 50 years later, a journalist struggles to unravel the truth about him. Against the backdrop loom the state elections of 1994, a critical testing time for the system, individual and the public at large.

When Aashi (Anne James) finally meets the tarap man (Vernon Adrian Emuang), she is swept into his secret, cryptic world.

The play could have descended into ponderous pathos; instead, it is largely accessible and absorbing, thanks to gifted acting, direction and production. Double-edged one-liners helped to lift the play into the contemporary realm. Goes one line: “What makes you think that those who fight for democracy are democratic themselves?” And when Cornelia (Mia Palencia) is chuffed about her award-winning piece on endangered corals, she meets with “So you think that if they know, they will care?” Perhaps the most thought provoking line belongs to Leong Kin (Thor Kah Hoong) when he tells his editor: “Do not mistake my silence for my compliance.”

Rising above being merely entertained, the audience is constantly forced to assess meaning within meaning and so an interactive process is created. For this, if not anything else, go watch this wholly original local play by Ann Lee. The play is in English but incorporates naturally into its flow, other languages such as Hakka, Telugu, Kadazan and Malay.

Aashi (Anne James) is a Semenanjung journalist in Sabah, in cold storage, for writing one too many critical pieces against the establishment. She is advised by friend and colleague, Leong Kin, to lie low. Aashi is incredulous. “Lie low? I am in Sabah. How low do you want me to go?”

When Leong Kin corrects her usage of a preposition, she barks about his ability to “debate the details to death and miss the main point entirely”. Frustrated, cynical, increasingly depressed and dependant on her pills, Aashi finds in the search for the tarap man, a lifeline to rescue herself from her own darkness and rigor mortis.

As she delves deeper, she comes up against a hardened, routinely obstructive public system as well as the authoritarian stance of her editor, Regina (Christina Orow), indifferent to “the epic miscarriage of justice”.

As character interacts with character, the players find that the quest for the tarap man has irrevocably changed their own perspectives. Leong Kin learns to stand up for truth, forsaking security and even Aashi, in her quest for truth, learns about honesty from fresh-faced, idealistic Cornelia.

When she finally meets him, Aashi connects immediately with the tarap man (Vernon Adrian Emuang).

A different kind of mentoring. Leong Kin (Thor Kar Hoong) wants more from Cornelia (Mia Palencia) than what she is willing to give.

Their critical scene together, pivotal to the play, is perhaps the weakest scene, marred by a script that suddenly becomes a mishmash of the obscure, the incomprehensible and the simply too confusing. A tighter reined script here, that allows the leaps and incoherence without sacrificing understanding, would have been good.

We get the gist though: the tarap man is no mad creature. He is governed by his own unconventional views and methods. Perhaps saner than many, he is cryptic, mysterious, complex and he cunningly keeps his secrets.

Single-minded in pushing his agenda, Aashi refuses to acknowledge or cover the larger-than-life political crisis in Sabah then and so is sacked again.

There are many threads in the play and not all of them quite work. We don’t know what is really in the letters. Did the tarap man actually kill his mother? Is he mad pretending to be sane pretending to be mad? There are no neat tie-ups but it doesn’t quite matter.

Director Zahim Albakri is brilliant – though I can’t understand the necessity for the table tennis scene. Vernon Adrian Emuang, Anne James and Thor Kah Hoong are outstanding and the rest of the cast, very impressive.

At intermission, the audience finds itself ushered out by a cold-faced prison guard: “Pigi! Pigi! Pigi! Cepat!” Her words are chilling. I would use the words with more warmth and say, “Pigi! Pigi! Pigi cepat and watch the play.”

Quoted In Asiaweek

The article below appeared in Asiaweek's From Our Correspondent: Enter Here
Websites offer convenient access to the Kuala Lumpur arts scene
By SANTHA OORJITHAM. The original source is here.


Kamil Othman, head of creative multimedia at Malaysia's Multimedia Development Corp., is a theater and movie buff -- but he's too busy to search the newspapers for information about what's on where. A couple of weeks ago, a friend told him about KuLture, a web-magazine about the arts in Kuala Lumpur (www.kulture.com.my). Kamil visited the site, found some international art films being screened at the Mid Valley Megamall and a theater production (Four Men and a Woman) on stage at The Actors Studio, and headed over.

Without KuLture, Kamil wouldn't have known about these shows: "Websites are useful for special interest groups," he says. "I open my e-mail every day so this just takes one additional move." Launched in June last year, KuLture is the newer of two sites devoted to the arts in Kuala Lumpur. The first Malaysian arts website, www.artseefartsee.com, started up in May 1998. Both have fuelled--and benefitted from--a boom in the arts scene. Arts enthusiasts welcome both -- and say there is room for even more.

"I wanted to bring together the three loves of my life -- the Internet, marketing communications, and the arts," says Artseefartsee founder Vernon Emuang, a Malaysian actor and performer. In the early 1990s, as creative director at Bozell PR, he designed free websites for Dramalab and the Five Arts Center. After leaving advertising, he decided to start the country's first weekly website on the arts "to demonstrate to the arts community how critical electronic media is in communicating economically, efficiently and speedily." He started out with 30 subscribers and now has about 4,000 on his e-mail list. The site gets over 15,000 hits per month.

KuLture was founded by a couple of expatriates -- journalist Jenny Daneels and urban planner Barbara Camus. "There is a lot available in the Kuala Lumpur art scene, and we want to make it more accessible," says Daneels. After 10 months, they have 1,000 subscribers and their site receives 100 hits per day. Inscribe Webmedia helped them design the site and they have sponsors: Novartis, Boh Tea and the Alliance Francaise. On April 11, they launched a new design (following an online survey in November last year) and announced that they were incorporating. They've hired a website manager and now hope to attract advertising revenue. Access to their webzine and subscriptions to their e-mail list are free.

Both sites offer listings of what's on (music, theater, films, dance, and art exhibitions), reviews, links to regional and international websites (for similar listings, arts festivals, etc.), live forums for arts discussions, and directories of other arts and culture publications and institutions. Both websites send out e-mail alerts. KuLture offers a classified section where subscribers can offer to buy and sell things like arts-related tickets and instruments. And it has a glossary of arts terminology.

The arts websites took advantage of a growing audience, says Krishen Jit, founder of Five Arts Center: "There's been an appreciable change in the size of audiences in the past five years -- and especially in the last year. And the websites also gave us some sense of world-wide exposure, which has never happened before. We get visitors from Australia, the U.S. and Britain who knew about us because they had read about us on the website."

Five Arts Center's Jit says Artseefartsee has "warmth and coziness" thanks to founder Emuang's "intimate relationship with artists Š and sense of who they are and what they are doing." KuLture, he says, "is looking in from the outside, not participating and not involved. Perhaps they may not have passion, but they have very useful knowledge and objectivity." Both need to expand, he says, and there's room for more such sites: "These are both mainly Kuala Lumpur-based and in theater, for example, they focus on English-language theater. There is a niche [to be filled] outside Kuala Lumpur and in other languages." Emuang, for example, has helped the state-funded Penang Arts Information Center to set up a similar website (penang.net.my/arts) and e-mail list.

The arts community uses both KuLture and Artseefartsee, although their audiences overlap somewhat. "We use both avenues because we want to reach a lot of people and we don't want to miss anyone," says Lim Ee Lin, an arts administrator in Kuala Lumpur. "They are free, and they offer an additional web presence as well as their e-mail lists." The print media tend to "pick and choose" which arts events they cover, says Lim. The websites, in contrast, "offer the whole range, concentrated. It's an opportunity for people to find out what else is happening, to plan their schedule. And people do take note of their reviews."

The best way for both sites to keep their subscribers, Lim believes, is by providing "regular updates and useful information and services." What do audiences want? "I wish it could expand," says KuLture subscriber Kamil. "There are not enough in-depth reviews; they are more like announcements." KuLture's founders say they are expanding its content, but the number of reviews which it can commission will depend on its commercial viability.