Instant Cafe Theatre soldiers on with a play on travelling and realising dreams, writes Aref Omar
THE Instant Cafe Theatre turns 25 next month, and for this milestone, it will stage a new work, Raj And The End Of Tragedy.
Written by actor, director and ICT co-founder, Jo Kukathas, the play is a small celebration for her as her establishment struggles to carry on as one of Malaysia’s premiere theatre companies.
“Raj is atypical for an ICT production.
People were expecting our usual satiric comedy revues but we’ve always wanted to come up with new ways of storytelling,” says Jo during an interview at ICT’s office in Kampung Tunku, Petaling Jaya.
Jo says she started writing the play a few years ago with a first draft completed last year.
“I submitted it as part of a new writing grant under the State Culture and Arts Department and was supposed to stage it last year but I have yet to receive the money,” she says.
With things already set in motion, she decided to go ahead with the staging this year.
“A friend suggested I do a fundraising drive to fund the show as well as ICT’s future projects since this is the 25th anniversary,” says Jo, eager to keep things afloat despite the many challenges.
DREAMING OF TRAVEL
For the play Raj, Jo was inspired in part by people she’s met and her family.
“It was a desire to write about people I feel familiar with but they are fictionalised versions of course,” she says with a smile.
The play follows Raj, whose family has locked him up in a mental hospital in Tanjung Rambutan.
He learns upon his release that his well-travelled Uncle L is looking for a travel mate to journey to New York.
Raj is ecstatic since he has always dreamt of going to the US.
“There’s a fine line between being a dreamer and being mentally ill,” she says.
Jo elaborates that part of the inspiration also came from her experience of watching mak yong and wayang kulit in Kelantan with Eddin Khoo of Pusaka, where she discovered the concept of “angin”.
“The Malay traditional performing arts are based on this essential idea of watching the shows to rebalance your soul (or “angin”) —you have to fulfil who you are or you’d get sick,” she says.
Jo adds that Raj also represents the idea of people being restless and wanting to travel as the globe is a constant place of shifting people, always on the move.
“Sometimes we get too caught up here about belonging, we can’t accept that it’s a natural state that humanity has been on the move from way back,” she says.
“Everyone has a path to follow and they each have things that call to them.”
CROSS-BORDER COLLABORATION
According to Jo, the play will be made up of the various quirky characters the two meet during their travels.
“It’s a picturesque tale that journeys from a small personal space to a larger world, which shows that we are also par t of this larger world,” she says.
Other inspirations come from travel author Bruce Chatwin and his book The Songlines which features the idea of why people travel and focuses on the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime.
“ There are these walkabouts where people follow these invisible paths that they seem to know instinctively,” she says.
Jo says that the play is not about the plot or dialogue.
She adds: “It’s very physicalised and visualised storytelling with five actors thrown in.” Aside from Jo, the other actors are Ghafir Akbar, Doppo Narita, Suhaili Micheline and Anne James.
“They were chosen for their strong physical presence,” she says.
In the play, they portray many different characters, quickly switching within a few lines.
“We play multiple roles together and sometimes two of us play the same character at the same time, so it’s a very different way of storytelling,” says Jo.
She adds that there’ll be lots of movement and they’ll also be portraying objects, animals, moods and environments.
“It’s all heightened, so hopefully it’ll be a funny, poetic and tragic story told on multiple levels,” she says.
Raj will be directed by Singaporean theatre director and dramatist Natalie Hennidige.
Jo had sent her the script last year to get some feedback.
“She’s a friend and fellow writerdirector who has a very strong visual imagination and instinct, seeing things in pictures when she reads a play,” she says.
For Jo, having someone else direct would bring additional layers and a fresh approach to her work.
“I asked her and she said yes,” she says of Hennidige, who directed the play Cuckoo Birds at Five Arts Centre in KL five years ago.
“I acted in Cuckoo Birds which she wrote and directed and was later invited by her to act in other plays in Singapore,” says Jo.
“I’ve been doing lots of work there in the last few years so I thought it would be nice to invite someone from there to work with me here.” FUNDRAISING For Jo, the reason ICT is still here today after 25 years is due to audience support.
But she laments the difficulty of carrying on.
“Which is why we’re doing this fundraiser,” she says.
The fundraiser night will happen on Nov 30, where tickets for Raj will go for RM500 and RM200.
While people want the arts to flourish in Malaysia, not many are putting money on the table.
She explains that there’s a lack of sustained funding for the arts and clear corporate sponsorship.
“People can’t expect the arts to be done for free — we need funds towards cultivation and development,” she says, adding that funds need to be consistently provided for a proper industry to be established that will eventually become selfsufficient later.
“The government does play a very important role.
If it says the arts are really important, everyone will follow, as long as the proper mechanisms are put in place and enforced,” she says.
Jo acknowledges that there are CSR programmes that go towards important issues like poverty alleviation and education.
“But the arts are important too,” she says.
For Jo, the arts presents a mirror to society, with the role of the artiste to create works that will bring people closer together and foster better understand of each other.
“Right now we’re hanging on by a thread and hopefully the light at the end of the tunnel is not a train coming to hit us,” she says with a laugh.
As for Raj, Jo keeps it simple with a story about an ordinary person and his tiny life.
“I want to do a play about people and humanity,” she says.
“We’ll leave the politics alone.
— I think we give too much power to politics here.”