Our Event, the Capricorn!

So ... it turns out that our event, Readings, is a Capricorn (since it was born 8th January 2005) which makes it (according to audience member, Dave Tee, "ambitious, strong willed and never prepared to say die"!)

Forgive a short detour to nostalgia.

We began of course at Darling Muse gallery, and later in 2005 moved to Seksan's and have had a home here ever since. Bernice was the mummy of Readings, and I took over as adoptive mum when her mum became terminally ill, and then she fully handed over the event to me and started a new one, Ceritaku!, at No Black Tie.

Over the years we've given more than 160 writers space to read their work and given them a meeting place where friendships have been forged and collaborations born.

And as straits-mongrel (who also gave me permission to use his beautiful pictures) points out beautifully in his post Reading in Colours,  this event has brought together a huge diversity of folks in the kind of Muhibbah spirit that this 1 Malaysia thing is supposed to be about. Frankly, that's never been on the conscious agenda, but has definitely been one of the best things that has naturally emerged from the event.

And now we've launched a book project which hopefully will put event and writers on the map.

So a party to celebrate this was in order, and party we did.

We welcomed back some of our earliest readers and introduced some new ones.

I've been trying to get hold of The Loud girl aka Elaine Foster ever since I first heard her read at one of The British Council's Wayang Kata events.  She could also be crowned slam queen of KL, and is organising spoken word events now in collaboration with Word Forward in Singapore.  I especially loved the first piece she read, which she had written in collaboration with George Wielgus and Tsiung Han See about the coming revolution and what it would not be like!

Jo Kukathas, actor, playwright, director, and driving force behind Instant Cafe Theatre had been one of the participants in the British Council's creative writing workshops earlier this month.  I loved the pieces she brought to share with the group, and she read from one of them - she isn't prepared yet to say whether it is fiction or autobiography ("It's a something.") which tells the story of larger than life family members.  I really am looking forward to more.

Some three years back, O Thiam Chin told the sad story about how hard it was for him to self-publish his first collection of short fiction and get the copies sold.  How far he's come since then, with a very well-received second book, Never Been Better, published by MPH. (And the bookshop sent along copies for sale.)

And then it was time for cake! We actually had three cakes.  Two of them were red velvet cakes with butter-cream icing ordered from That Last Slice, and they tasted every bit as good as they looked. (Thanks, Aishah,  for driving over from Shah Alam to deliver!)

The third was an absolutely delicious chocolate cake which Saras had had a friend bake for us, and very much appreciated. 

We blew out candles and made a wish - for the next 5 - no, 50 years of Readings to be as successful.


After the break, Bernice Chauly read from the book she is finishing Growing Up with Ghosts which she describes as:

... a literary autobiography, a memoir of sorts in five voices ... about her Chinese and Punjabi family and diasporas which span hundreds of years.

It will also form part of her MA in English Literature and Creative Writing at University Malaya.  Bernice has also been chosen as one of four writers worldwide to participate in Winternachten's (International Writers' Festival of The Hague) tour of the Dutch Caribbean and Suriname in April on the theme A Sense of Belonging.

What I've heard of the new work so far (in the workshops and here in Readings) shows that Bernice is working with fascinating material, and as she says, writing of this kind has been very much neglected in Malaysia. I think it also takes a lot of courage to put your own story out there in the public arena.

Do read this interview Bernice did with The Nutgraph last year, in which she shares some of her personal history with us.

Kam Raslan is the writer who has read more frequently at Readings than any other and  we have followed his Datuk Hamid from his first tentative fumblings with a Swiss milkmaid,  appearing in his own column in Off The Edge, and finally getting a whole book - which the Malaysian public took to their hearts - dedicated to his adventures.  Now it seems that there is a sequel in the pipeline, and the extract that Kam read was as endearing and as funny as ever.  It had the Datuk in a department store attempting to choose a perfume for The Wife's birthday, when a whiff of a fragrance called Betrayal sets off a train of Proustian memory ...

I  had to put Rahmat Harun last, because he is just such an impossible act to follow.  And of course the famous  Keranamu Malaysia had to be the centrepiece of his performance ....  This guy is a force of nature!

Thanks very much to Seksan for the wonderful space (though I was a bit sad that for the first time there was no art on the walls), to all who read and all who supported, to Aishah and Saras for cakes, and to all those who helped set up and clear away.  Nothing happens without you all.

Imagining The Nation

This from Jo Kukathas who urges you to sign up quickly if you are interested as places are very limited :

Imagining the Nation: A Play-writing Workshop with Sakate Yoji

Epitaph For The Whales/ Breathless/The Attic - the plays of Sakate Yoji

THE PLAYS OF SAKATE YOJI

Most of Mr. Sakate's works are based on real political history and events and social issues in Japan - the rise of garbage, the rise of Japanese cults, and the phenomenon of "hikikomori," or the "withdrawal" of people into their homes - young people who refuse to come out and engage with society. He focuses on how myths - national, traditional and social - lead people to believe in false realities. He writes plays that lay bare a more bizarre reality. He has created and directed several masterpieces in theatre by introducing his own particular method of documentary writing, myth-making.

At the same time, his plays are inspired by the dramaturgy of traditional Japanese Noh theatre, established by Zeeami. He structures social issues as well as mythological visions of Japanese people - these two strands run parallel in his plays and are based on his unique dramaturgy inspired by Noh.

THE WORKSHOP

This two day workshop will focus on Mr Sakate's play-writing technique and style. Participants are required to attend his talk on Jan 8 where Sakate will introduce his work and Matsui Kentaro will give a talk about Japanese theatre.

INTRODUCTION and TALK

Jan 8 830pm

IMAGINING THE NATION: A history of Japanese theatre - Continuity and Discontinuity

A talk by MATSUI KENTARO producer and dramaturg and Director of The Asia Centre for Creation and Research, Tokyo on the history of Japanese theatre from noh to the present day.

"Imagining the Nation is based on the idea that language is a means for the making the notion of the “nation state”. From the perspective of theatre as the art of language, the theatre has to have its own particular function to be able to develop the notion of “nation” and “nation state” through making and presenting plays. It doesn't only mean using languages for writing plays - rather theatre has its own theatrical language with spaces, acting, directing, musical elements and so on. These theatrical languages have been influential to people to get the images of 'nation'."

NARRATING THE NATION: The Plays of Sakate Yoji - Epitaph For The Whales/ Breathless/The Attic

A presentation by Sakate Yoji playwright/ director of theatre company RIN KO GUN and President of the Playwrights Association of Japan who shares his body of work and talks about the contemporary theatre movement in Japan.


PLAYWRIGHTS WORKSHOP PART 1 with SAKATE YOJI

Jan 9 1030am - 3pm

An introduction to the work of Sakate Yoji - political realism, documentary and mythology in a single play. The parallel worlds of Sakate Yoji's plays.


PLAYWRIGHTS WORKSHOP PART 1 with SAKATE YOJI

Jan 10 1030am - 3pm

A more in-depth look at the marriage of style, technique and content.


(Closed event. Participants must register first. Please e mail jokukathas@gmail.com to register)

WORKSHOP FEE:: RM80 inclusive of lunch


THIS EVENT HAS A SISTER EVENT: X CHANGE!

A MALAYSIAN JAPANESE THEATRE EXCHANGE

Is the NATION a FICTION or a REALITY? And who creates the NATION?

Who creates the fiction of a nation? Who dreams these things up? Who dreams up a One Malaysia or a Rising Sun? Of a Vision 2020 or A Malaysia Truly Asia?

Theatre is one place where alternative realities of a country are imagined and therefore created. It is a country of Gold Rain and Hailstones. A Country which dreams of Atomic Jaya. A Country where the Death of a Patriot is not the death of a Patriot and where you cannot **** Mr Birch. It is Brickfields, The Sandpit and Bolehwood, a place where Pak Dogol, Tok Perak, Athan and Ang Tau Mui live out their lives in the margins of the main narrative.

In this Exchange between Malaysian and Japanese speakers we ask how theatre can and should create strong alternative fictions to any fiction of One-ness.

CHECK OUT OUR EVENT PAGE ON THIS - COMING SOON.

PROFILES

SAKATE YOJI

Was born in 1962, in Okayama. He grew up in the region before went to Tokyo to study Japanese literature at Keio University. In 1981, he became a member of Transposition 21 Theatre Company while he was still a university student.

Transposition 21 was led by YAMAZAKI Tetsu, who was born in 1947, a playwright and director. YAMAZAKI is one of the leading figures of the second generation of the little theatre movement (shogekijo undo) or post-shingeki movement which began in 1960s. This is the theatre which SAKATE first came across and which influenced him.

In 1983, SAKATE formed a new theatre group, the Theatre Company RINKOGUN with himself as leader, playwright and director. He is politically active and his plays, like YAMAZAKI’s, have strong views on contemporary political and social issue in Japan. RINKOGUN’s productions are the result of an innovative collaboration among its residential artists including the stage and lighting designers.

SAKATE has achieved his first major breakthrough with two plays, The Tokyo Trial and A Dangerous Story, which he wrote in 1988. Both plays are about the injustices of the legal system. He wrote a play about lesbians, Come Out in 1989, and Breathless in 1991. Breathless, which discusses the problem of the garbage in Tokyo and the religious cult, Aum Shinrikyo (threatened the Japanese nation with their poison gas murder of Tokyo subway commuters in 1995), had received the Thirty-fifth Kishida Drama Award.

SAKATE wrote Epitaph of the Whales and The Capital of the Kingdom of the Gods in 1993. He continues his experiments in the use of noh in Capital of the Kingdom of the Gods. The play is about Lafcadio Hearn, a writer who came to Japan at the end of 19th century. The production toured in Europe and U.S.A in 1994, 1995 and 1998 to great acclaim. The Boiling Point of the Sea (Umi no futten) in 1997 discusses the situation of the land and the people of Okinawa, Japan’s most southern and newest prefecture.

In 2001, the group traveled to Berlin, Leipzig, Krakow, and Warsaw with their production of Breathless. The company has also created work in collaboration with theatre artists from abroad. Whalers in the South Seas, a work produced in 2000 is created with actors from Indonesia, Philippines and U.S.A.. The company's acclaimed production of The Attic was appeared in Pittsburgh, Miami, Los Angeles and New York in February 2005.

AWARDS
2000:
- Winner, 7th Yomiuri Theater Award for Best Direction - The Emperor and The Kiss (Tenno to Seppun)

- Nominee, 7th Yomiuri Theater Award for Best Production, RINKOGUN - The Emperor and The Kiss

2003:
- Winner, 10th Yomiuri Theater Award for Best Direction, Yoji Sakate - The Attic (Yaneura), Until the Last Person Standing (Saigo no Hitori Made ga Zentai de Aru), Charlie Victor Romeo, Abe Sada and Mutsuo (Abe Sada to Mutsuo)

- Winner, 54th Yomiuri Literature Prize (Drama), Yoji Sakate - The Attic (Yaneura) http://www.curtainup.com/attic.html

- Winner, 37th Kinokuniya Theater Award for Individual Achievement, Yoji Sakate - The Attic (Yaneura), Until the Last Person Standing and Blind Touch (produced by Theatre group EN)

- Nominee, 10th Yomiuri Theater Award for Best Production, RINKOGUN - Until the Last Person Standing (Saigo no Hitori Made ga Zentai de Aru)

MATSUI KENTARO

Mr Matsui set up the Asia Centre For Creation and Research to help develop Exchanges between Asian countries. His long-term goal is to facilitate intellectual and creative exchange between Asian producers, researchers and artists. He has worked extensively with Asian theatre people often in collaboration with the Japan Foundation. He was the producer of the Malaysian Japanese collaboration The Island In Between/Pulau Antara written by Jo Kukathas and Kam Raslan. He created and facilitated a 3 year Asian collaboration project with participants from Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand and the Philippines. The Malaysian participants, Jo Kukathas (Instant Café), Loh Kok Man (Pentas Projects) and Nam Ron (Rumah Anak Theatre RAT) continue to collaborate in Malaysia. Mr Matsui wants to build on the strong connections made in previous collaborations and deepen the exchanges on a intellectual and research level.

--
Jo Kukathas
Director
The Instant
CAFE HOUSE of ART and IDEAS
[CHAI]

No 6 Jalan 6/3
Petaling Jaya 46000
Selangor
Malaysia
(+6) 03- 77848792
(+6) 0163582035

A Sense of HOME

Instant Cafe Theatre present HOME, new works by Jit Murad, Jo Kukathas, Ridzwan Othman and Zedeck Siew around the theme of HOME and family on September 5, 2009, 5.30-7.30 at their new home - CHAI House, 6 Jalan 6/3, Petaling Jaya.

The exhibition HOME is still on till 16 Sept so be sure to turn up early to have a look at the show or stay on to talk about the work over a nice cup of chai.

Admission is free but donations are welcomed.

More details here. Or call 0377848792, or Email: chai@instantcafetheatre.com

Just my Cuppa CHAI

Instant Cafe Theatre has a beautiful new home in a converted bungalow in Section 6 Petaling Jaya called House of Art and Ideas, CHAI, for short. And and on Saturday they had their grand opening with lots of things going on and art in every corner. (Take the tour here, and just see how much you would like to live in this little house.) Of course there was the official obligatory opening with a local bigshot, and YB*, Minister of Culture and Space (above) tree planting ceremony with YB, Deputy Minister of Space & Tourism filled the role nicely (remember how he was in Bali) ... except as he noted, politicians don't like to be seen with dirty hands, so poor old Zalfian Fuzi had to do the actual spadework. The art on display reflected the theme of Home, and there were installations in all kinds of spaces (even inside cupbaords!). Reza Rosli approriated the bathroom with his underwater theme - he made hanging lamps of fishtanks and had a jellyfish floating in the bathtub. (It was a nice spot to hang out, feet dangling in the water, and everyone who had come to use the utilities now had to hop off and find an alternative.) The bedroom had a story called Bed scrolling across the walls which you had to lie on the bed to watch. I was so happy that my favourite local band Dewangga Sakti came along to play some songs. And there were an awful lot of nice people to chat to. Interesting things will be happening in this space including art, performance, readings, meetings, and I'll be happy to keep you posted. (For non-Malaysians : YB is Yang Berhormat which means The Honourable, and is a term of address for MP's.)

Censorship in Malaysia

If you missed veteran journalist and playwright Kee Thuan Chye, dramatist and actress Jo Kukathas, Malaysia Today editor Raja Petra Kamarudin talking to Riz Khan on Al-Jazeera about press freedom and censorship of the arts - well, here it is again thanks to the miracle of YouTube!

Chye and Jo and RPK On Riz Khan's Show

Learned (via Facebook, where else?) that you can catch Kee Thuan Chye on "Riz Khan Live" on Wed (Dec 3) at 10pm (1400 GMT) on Al Jazeera, Ch 513 (Astro). He will be talking about culture and politics and the ISA with Raja Petra Kamarudin and Jo Kukathas.

Unmissable, I'd say!

Malaysia's New Place in the Literary Sun ...

... Gets a Sunflower!

The reviews for Preeta's Evening is the Whole Day have started to appear. Salil Tripathi writes a very nice piece in The Independent called - ahem - Malaysia's new place in the literary sun. It begins with a lovely loud cheer for the changes occurring in our local literary landscape :

Samarasan represents the quiet emergence of new Malaysian writing in books such as Rani Manicka's The Rice Mother and Touching Earth, Tash Aw's The Harmony Silk Factory, and Tan Twan Eng's Booker-longlisted The Gift of Rain last year. These writers have significantly broadened our understanding of the region earlier seen largely through the gin-soaked, misty eyes of Somerset Maugham, the Tiger-beer induced nostalgia of Anthony Burgess*, or the laconic fiction of Paul Theroux.

He discusses the socio-political background of the novel :

Malaysia permeates Samarasan's novel without didacticism about the country's identity politics. It shows the symbiotic and separate relationship between Malays, Chinese and Indians. Jo Kukathas, the gifted satirist, once joked that in Malaysia "the Chinese do the work, the Malays take the credit, the Indians get the blame". Buried within the quip is a stark divide, explaining the consequences of the May 1969 riots which formed the basis of Lloyd Fernando's 1993 novel, Green is the Colour. ... Those riots led to Malaysia's preferential policies, which benefited Malays over Chinese and Indians, so forcing many non-Malays to seek educational and employment opportunities abroad.

and calls the story multi-layered, but feels that the plot gets rather complicated.

Francesca Segal in The Observer yesterday found the novel :

Vibrant, descriptive, and peppered with colourful Indian-Malaysian dialogue, this is an epic that's informative without being worthy, and engrossing but not frivolous.

Indian reviewers seem perplexed by the novel - you can almost hear them thinking How come this novelist of Indian heritage, clearly influenced by Indian authors, isn't writing the kind of Indian novel we expect? Check out Amardeep's review and the interesting debate in the comments at Sepia Mutiny.

You can find other reviews on Preeta's website.

I'm feeling more than a little frustrated at the moment because I'm longing, nay dying, to talk about what I think of the book, but since I have reviewed it for next month's Off the Edge, am not going to go there yet. Except to say that I told Preeta that I think she wrote the novel especially for me! I was so hungry for this kind of fiction about my adopted country.

I will, though, be posting up extracts from an interview with Preeta here soon.

The novel is in the bookshops now (I saw trade paperback copies in MPH the other day for RM59.90) and there are bound to be discounts and rebates to factor in here and there to bring the price down further.

Postscript :

Shirley from MPH reminds me to say that Preeta will be here to do bookshop appearances in October ... and hurray, she will be at Seksan's again too!

Postscript :

Another nice message from Shirley :

Good news! MPH Bookstores will be giving out cut-out coupon 25% for Preeta's book in StarMag in June Reads Monthly, coming out on 29 June, valid till 13 July.

*I think this statement shows a misunderstanding of The Malayan Trilogy though ...

Do Malaysians Really Get Satire?

Satire ... [1] is a literary genre, chiefly literary and dramatic, in which human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, or other methods, sometimes with an intent to bring about improvement. [2] It is used in graphic arts and performing arts as well. ... Although satire is usually meant to be humorous, the purpose of satire is not primarily humour but criticism of an event, an individual or a group in a clever manner.

from Wikipedia.

Does satire flourish in Asia?

One of the most entertaining panel discussions of the Ubud Writer's and Readers' festival debated the question. Besides our own Kam Raslan, we met Sri Lankan author Manuka Wijesinghe who writes beautifully about the absurd in her novel Monsoons and Potholes, and Indonesian Isman Hidayat Suryaman who talked about how he hides his criticism of authority in humour since he cannot do it openly. He added a nice detail for us, Indonesia doesn't have a "censorship board" it has an "enlightenment board!" which does the same job! The session was moderated by Nury (who gets everywhere!).

Kam talked about how satire has become increasingly popular in Malaysia, and he read from Amir Muhammad's book to illustrate the fact that in Malaysia actually satirists are not needed because politicians do the job beautifully for them!:

Our job is to mock authority and our politicians make it too easy ...

he said, talking about how the politicians provide most of the material for KL's Instant Cafe Theatre for which Kam also writes skits.

When it came to question time I asked the panelists if they felt that their audiences really get their satire? As Instant Cafe founder Jo Kukathas (who was in the audience*) pointed out, of course Malaysian audiences understand satire ... otherwise why would their own company have been so successful?

I was actually thinking about satire on the page, particularly when it doesn't have a box around it saying "This is meant to be funny". And I was thinking specifically about this post on Amir Muhammad's blog on a spoof column he wrote as Ambi Mohan for the New Straits Times - the reactions from angry readers who didn't understand that their leg was being pulled actually makes funnier reading than the articles themselves!

Jo actually took me to task about the question I'd asked a couple of nights later, at the party at Blanco's house, and gave me plenty of examples of her own to support her argument. Somehow (might have been on my part the wine) we managed to entangle the question of "Do Malaysians get satire?" with "Do Malaysians get irony?" (which is a somewhat separate one, but nevertheless worth considering ... and I would say much of Kam's humour is gently ironic.)

On satire, with censorship so tight, and self-censorship added to it, there really is little tradition of making fun of authority figures here by means of the written word ... although happily the blogosphere is becoming increasingly good at using satire, much to the discomfort of politicians.

(It's worth noting too is that Kam's deliciously satirical sense of humour was shaped by TV programmes like Monty Python, as he grew up in the UK.)

My question then, is there a tradition of satire here, particularly on the printed page?

The issue is still knocking round in my own head. Would love your views.

(Incidentally, Isman has a very amusing blog calld The Fool Has Landed and wrote this session up very well himself. And Deepika writes a lovely piece on Manuka.)

*Now can you guess who the obnoxious politician was?

Adaptation

Was lucky enough to be invited to attend the workshop on adapting texts for the stage oranised by FIRSTWoRKS/Instant Cafe Theatre and was much brain-boggled by the company I found myself in ... the other participants included stars in the theatrical firmament Ann Lee, Kee Thuan Chye, Jo Kukathas, Anne James, Thor Kah Hoong as well as best-selling author (!) and screen writer Kam Raslan, Zedeck Siew of Kakiseni, Bernice Chauly of the myriad talents, and the group of budding playwrights being nurtured by FIRSTWoRKS: Animah Kosai, Ridzwan Othman, Rahel Joseph and Shanon Shah.

Laurence Strangio the writer/director of Alias Grace talked us through the process of adapting his play from Atwood's novel telling us that he only drew on Grace's first person narration, and then only a small proportion of that. Although the film rights have been bought he said, it would be a very difficult film to make a movie because one of the most delightful ambiguities of the book is whether the mysterious peddler Jeremiah is the same person as Dr. Jerome La Pont, who hypnotises her. In the novel and in the play it is possible, Laurence says, for both possibilities to live at the same time.

He says he read and reread the book, putting post-it notes on the sections he liked best and then typing them onto computer. He says he played "fast and loose" with the arc of the story, and says he knew the book well enough to reinvent it. The first draft was three and a half hours long when read through, and was, of course, substantially cut. Laurence also showed us transparencies of a particular scene so we could see how it had changed over time, and explained how the actor's portrayal of the role (in this case Caroline Lee) fed into the way the work was written.

We talked about reasons for adaptation, and then we discussed texts that we had brought along to the workshop to adapt.

On the second day we drew a poster presentation of the key touchstones of our texts and here're some photos. (I put the full set on Flickr.)

Kee Thuan Chye hard at work ...

Me, being creative on the floor! I chose Tinling Choong's FireWife since I'd just finished reading it and found it very visual. (Eight women, eight photographs, fire, water).

Bernice wrestles Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia down to the ground!

Kam show-and-telling his take on Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Chye and Ridzwan inspect the posters. (I think they're looking at the naked lady covered in sushi picture on mine!)

The most exciting part of the workshop I think was when single images were taken and improvisations built around them creating a new set of striking images.

Now adapting a text to a play is something I would very much like to do and seems more manageable somehow than starting from scratch ...

Fundamentally Very Happy

Years back when Jo Kukathas asked me if I would try my hand at writing for theatre as she liked the voice in one of my short stories. Until now, I hadn't taken a move to do so and it took another phone call from Jo to prompt me. But I'm very glad I took part in the FIRSTWoRKS Fundamentally Happy Playwriting Workshop organised by Instant Cafe Theatre and led by Singaporean playwright Haresh Sharma (left).

Starting from exercises designed to help us get to know our protagonist, we drafted scenes in the first workshop last month. (The most useful activity was "hot chairing" where we played the role of our characters while being interviewed.)

We were supposed to have a whole seven act play written before the second workshop, but most of that fell a little - ahem - short of that. ("Your commitment has to be at least 8 out of ten," said Haresh, giving us a well deserved scolding.)

What an incredible experience it was to have scenes those scenes acted out in this second workshop! My characters came to life in front of my eyes and my dialogue actually sounded quite good.

Amir Muhamad (right) is not my actor of choice though, as he finds everything funny. But Animah brought my expat housewife to life with a depth of feeling I'm sure I hadn't written into the script.

I feel I learned an awful lot even if my attempts really weren't quite there, and am feeling quite inspired now.

Biggest thanks to the FIRSTWoRKS team for organising this and inviting me, and to Haresh for his patience and very useful feedback.

Here's an interesting article about Firstworks from the Sun which I missed when it first appeared. You will get a chance to see some of the work of the FIRSTWoRKS playwrights who are currently developing their plays on June 23rd at Central Market Annexe. More about that nearer the time.

(left Shanon Shah, who is still developing his play).

FIRSTWoRKS Firsts

Animah (left) snapped last night after the reading of her play Malacca 'o7 at Stor Theatre, Dewan Bahasa Friday night.

I rolled in late (horrible jams, taking the wrong turning off the highway, walking round in the dark trying to find the venue) and missed a good slice of the first play Shannon Shah's Air Con.

From the part I did see, it looked extremely interesting. Not least because I was a teacher in a school very much like the one attended by Shanon's characters. Though my boys didn't hang out with the transvestite prostitutes at the railway station ... did they? I liked the interplay betweeen Shanon's characters ... they felt very real.

Animah's play was intriguing. She took a real historical incident - the demolition of the Portuguese fort in Malacca and added a cast of characters which included a gutsy activist type heroine and an UMNO youth type guy out to foil her plans. I could vicariously see just how thrilling it must be to write something and have it lifted from the page by a cast of actors (who incidentally were excellent).

It's still a work in progress, so won't say too much here, but am so proud of my friend!

Incidentally, how do you pronounce the name of the British governor: William Farquhar. I'm as certain as only a Brit can be that it is pronounced (Farkwa) not, as the cast and Animah pronounced it (Fakuha). The name is Scottish and derives from the gaelic. Any Scots on the blog?

(To digress for a moment, the Brits have several surnames which are pronounced very differently from their spelling including Featherstonehawe which is pronounced 'Fanshawe', and Cholmondeley pronounced 'Chumley'. The pronunciation is simplified over time, though not the spelling as aristocratic families hold on to evidence of their lineage.)

Congrats to both new writers and to the others whose works were read last night at Stor.

Yes, am somewhat envious and thinking ... hey could I do this?