RACE

What happens when you put together two young actor-directors who are frustrated with the dismal show of talent in KL’s theatre scene? For Soefira Jaafar and Kimmy Kiew, whose careers on the stage started out around the same time a few years ago but whose paths only crossed intermittently, it’s resulted in the creation of a new show featuring four new 15-minute plays, featuring the involvement of new and familiar faces.

Presented by KL Performing Arts Centre and Rather Peculiar Theatre, RACE promises to be an irreverent and incisive look at race relations in this country, with Soefira and Kimmy directing a multiracial cast made up of Shanthini Venugopal, Sarah Shahrum, Adrian Seet, Nor Hazlin Nor Salam, Chong Keat Aun and a golden crop of exciting young talents, Ahmad Firdaus Che Yahaya, Shariffah Mariam Syed Abdullah, Lakshman, and Ledil Putra Alaudin.

The quartet of plays that make up RACE include award-winning playwright Ridzwan Othman’s “Angsa” and singer-songwriter Shahnon Shah’s “Once You Pop, You Just Can’t Stop”, both which reveal insidious slices of Malaysian life, in all its dirty glory. The other two plays are “One In A Billion”, a devised play by Kimmy Kiew which uses comic marching movements as a metaphor for race and class struggle, and “Up & Down” by emerging playwright Fauzuly Hamdan Tahir.

According to Soefira and Kimmy, RACE will appeal to theatregoers who are intent on watching interesting new works that touch on issues that are close to home. Inspired by what they refer to as an underbelly of “violence” in Malaysian culture, the play aims to expose some of these elements, but in an irreverent way. Working closely with the playwrights and cast, and using each other as sounding boards, the two directors are adamant about steering clear of political and cultural cliches, made even more interesting by its various collaborators from different disciplines and backgrounds.

TEXT Jerome Kugan