“Apa erti semua tadi tu?” kata makcik yang\ntelah mencegatkan dirinya bertentangan dengan aku tu. “Saya… tak berapa\nfaham.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aku gunakan terma “makcik” tu in\na loose sense, sebab sebenarnya kalau aku berselisih dengan dia di jalanan and\nI didn’t know she had a grown-up daughter, hiris pergelangan tangan aku takkan\nsangka dia dah separuh usia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anak perawannya tu, yang menemankan dia\nmalam tu, baru habis ambik course finance, dan balik for good dari Australia.\n“Why?” adalah satu-satunya soalan yang pada aku appropriate setelah\nmaklumat tu diterjahkan ke dalam consciousness aku. Kuala Lumpur, Sydney…\nSydney, Kuala Lumpur… Hmm, pilihan yang sangat susah tu, babe. Not.\nMalangnya, bola tenis verbal yang aku lontarkan tu dibiarkannya saja terkulai\ndalam gelanggangnya. Dan dengan begitu aku masih lagi single.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyway. Makcik tu, entah kenapa, dia\ndengan selesanya menyusurkan dirinya hingga dia tegak berdiri depan aku. And\nshe’s demanding to know what it all means.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She might as well have asked me what the\nmeaning of life was. This is, after all, a play by Samuel Beckett that we were\nwatching and talking about during the intermission. Meaning? Ada ke makna di\nbawah sebutir batu kerikil yang dibaham tengik mentari? Apa maknanya kalau kau\ncari juga makna di bawah batu tu?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Itu masalahnya dengan karya-karya pentas Samuel Beckett. Most of the time he writes what, on the surface, amounts to clever nonsense. It is meant to be an accurate representation of reality, in which more often than not things stand meaningless until we smart humans come along and imbue them with intention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Macam puisi “Jabberwocky” si\nLewis Carroll, hanya kanak-kanak saja sebenarnya yang mampu menghayati keindahannya\ndengan sesempurna-sempurnanya. Task yang sukar sekali untuk yang si adult,\ndengan mindanya yang merenyut mahu letak maksud pada setiap yang tersirat dan\ntersurat, kalau tidak kepalanya — dan dunianya — akan spontaneously\nself-combust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sukar sekali mahu tonton karya Beckett\nkalau itu niat dan natijah kamu. Tambah lagi dalam dunia pasca Roland Barthes\nni, where the author lies dead on the floor, smoking gun in hand. Thank God for\nthe garbage truck, I say, however mean that may be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Happy\nDays<\/em> adalah karya yang\ntuan tulisnya sendiri pernah describe as “a kind of profound\nfrivolity”. This is supposedly his most cheerful work. Which immediately\ndiscourages you from thinking of Beckett on a miserable day. Biarlah para\ndentist saja dengan statistik suicide yang tertinggi antara kalangan\nprofesional… tak payahlah kita tambahkan pula dengan peminat-peminat seni\nteater.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The play, directed by Chris Jacobs,\npresented by Masakini Theatre and Instant Cafe Theatre (Fri 23 Jun – Sat 1 Jul\n2006, Panggung Bandaraya) is quite simply a pseudo-monologue. Made\n“pseudo” by the fact that there are actually two people in it,\nalthough 90 percent of the time only one of them is speaking. The other crawls\naround on stage a lot and mumbles toward the wall, away from the audience.\nWhich, inadvertently in this case, adds to the profoundness, I suppose, even\nthough in reality it was actually just annoying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What makes the play enjoyable, pada aku,\nadalah persembahan Jo Kukathas yang memang deserving of a standing ovation.\nMalang sekali, malam tu cuma segenggam orang saja yang datang, jadi aku nak kasi\ndia standing ovation takut malu pulak. Jadi aku cuma tepuk tangan kuat-kuat at\nthe end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jo was clearly in her element that night.\nAku menangis, aku ketawa, aku kerut dahi bersama-sama dia, walaupun semuanya in\nspirit aje lah. But she gave a moving performance, I felt, and it underscores\nher as probably the best comedic talent we have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Struktur play ni (sebab it doesn’t really\nhave a plot as such) mudah aje: in the first part, when the curtain rises we\nfind a woman (or what appears to be one) named Winnie (played by Jo Kukathas)\nburied to her hips in rock. But we soon learn that she was not placed there:\nshe ostensibly grew out of the stone. In fact, it is a natural state for her\nand she thinks nothing of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Crawling around hidden from the audience\nmost of the time in the rock formation is a man named Willie (played by Terence\nSwampillai). Mamat ni kerja dia asyik baca paper aje sepanjang hari and, as\nmentioned earlier, has a mumbling habit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the second half, kita dapati Winnie\ndahpun tertanam (atau batu tu yang cambah upwards to swallow her?) up to her\nchin, sementara Willie pulak finally manages to crawl, like some kind of giant\ndeformed caterpillar, to the front of the rock shelf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Along the way, Winnie gosok gigi, ponders\nthe illegible scrawl on her toothbrush, and expounds her observations and\nphilosophies on life. Much of what she says is incongruent with what we see\nbefore our eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Another heavenly day,” dia\nkata, dengan optimisnya, sedangkan dirinya tu terpacak separuh badan dalam\ntanah. Kemudian lagi, “Something of this is being heard, I am not merely\ntalking to myself, that is in the wilderness… ” Tapi siapa yang ada di\ntimbunan batu tu selain dia dan seorang mamat yang cuma asyik baca paper? And\nso on and so forth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jadinya, erti macamana yang kamu nak gali\ndari sesuatu yang absurd sebegini?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tapi makcik tu masih juga mendesak, dan\naku lihat keningnya berkerunyut-kerunyut. Out of human compassion, I reached\nout to her and tried to put her troubled thoughts to rest. Aku kasi dia satu\ndaripada… seribu? Selaksa?… interpretasi that you can project ke atas drama\nni.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, kata aku, kita boleh lihat play ni\nsebagai analogous kepada kewujudan kaum wanita dalam dunia cauvinis yang berputar\natas hukum patriarki. The woman set in stone, kata aku, bolehlah kita andaikan\nsebagai wanita yang secara keseluruhannya terpaku ke bumi, mungkin oleh tangan\njantan. Yang lebih menjahanamkan, bagi aku, mereka sendiri tak mahu melepaskan\ndiri dari kubur yang perlahan-lahan menelan mereka tu.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the fact that Winnie constantly looks\nto Willie for validation, sambung aku lagi, dengan lidah yang seperti disapu\ngris kereta, bolehlah kita umpamakan sebagai jerat yang kaum wanita sendiri\njerut kepada tengkuk mereka dalam dunia kita ini.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is, it is not so much that men who\nhave imprisoned their women, but rather that the women themselves dengan\nrelanya membiarkan diri mereka tertambat begitu. It is their way of imbuing\nmeaning into their meaningless situations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aku tamatkan monolog aku with a satisfying\nfull-stop. It was a good exposition. Or so I thought. Makcik tu, dia masih lagi\nterpinga-pinga. “I think I’ll just watch it to the end and then see if I\ncan make sense of it,” dia kata. The best I could manage was a polite\nsmile. Macamana nak perah makna dari batu?<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Entahlah, entahlah,” kata\nmakcik tu. Sejurus lepas tu loceng dewan dibunyikan dan semua orangpun dengan\ntertib berbaris semula ka dalam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Entahlah, entahlah.” Huh. Maybe\nshe did get it, after all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Happy Days<\/em><\/strong> is running at Panggung Bandaraya, KL till Sat 1 July. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n ~~~ <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ruhayat X would like it to be known that if you are that makcik, then you should have your daughter e-mail him pronto because he would still like to have his tennis ball back. Please. <\/p>\n\n\n\n First Published: 29.06.2006 on Kakiseni <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Apa erti semua tadi tu?” kata makcik yang telah mencegatkan dirinya bertentangan dengan aku tu. “Saya… tak berapa faham.” Aku gunakan terma “makcik” tu in a loose sense, sebab sebenarnya kalau aku berselisih dengan dia di jalanan and I didn’t know she had a grown-up daughter, hiris pergelangan tangan aku takkan sangka dia dah separuh […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,3569,3535],"tags":[4282,3329,608,4283,835,49,2085,4284,46],"language":[7531],"writer":[7731],"class_list":["post-27786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-review","category-theatre","tag-chris-jacobs","tag-instant-cafe-theatre-company","tag-jo-kukathas","tag-masakini-theatre","tag-panggung-bandaraya","tag-review","tag-samuel-beckett","tag-terence-swampillai","tag-theatre","language-bahasa-melayu","writer-ruhayat-x"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27786"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39228,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27786\/revisions\/39228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27786"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=27786"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/writer?post=27786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}