Aint meeting the other half today, as the weathers been quite bad.
On a sidenote, i gave a friendster message to Alfian Saat to congratulate him on the book 'Bisik', and give him my two cents worth. The book basically was a compilation of plays by him, Alin Mosbit and Effendy Ibrahim, local Malay playwriters.
Quoting from him, i sure am 'pleased as a punch' that he wrote back. teeheehee!!
His reply:
Hello you,
I'm pleased as punch that you liked 'Bisik'. It was an experiment for us at Ekamatra, to try putting out a book that was unapologetic about how it uses
bahasa pasar, bahasa kasar, bahasa campur-campur, etc in the face of so much baggage in the Malay language that insists on certain standards of linguistic propriety.
Reading plays is always difficult, pasal a lot of the action you have to imagine. I also sometimes have problems figuring out stage directions, visualising the space the actors are supposed to be in, and of course identifying at which point which character is speaking.
(Kalau you baca Anton Chekov plays lagi teruk--many many characters, and each person got different names--sometimes they are referred to by family name, sometimes own name, etc!)
But yeah, your brain gets used to it. : )
Unfortunately, I can't recommend you offhand any other Malay drama publications that might be worth a look. If you go to the Esplanade library, there are a few anthologies, but I found them to a bit dreary lah, rather conventional, written in that kind of overly-puitis bahasa of the 'cinta menggunung' kinds.
But Huzir Sulaiman's collection (8 Plays) is very very good. Though all in English. Haresh Sharma's collection (This Chord and Others) is also good; I'd like to point out a particlar favourite called 'Rosnah'--which Haresh devised with Alin Mosbit. Excellent--about a Singapore Malay girl called Rosnah who goes to London to further her studies.
Judging from what you liked from 'Bisik', nampaknya you suka cerita kampung2 eh!
Much love,
Alfian. : )
[End]
So those two books will now be my next priority when i get to the library.
