THE BOLD AND THE BORING

IT WAS a taboo but recently popular subject, that of the life of a transvestite, delivered in monologue style. So, what else is new and inspiring about this play titled SALLYm, staged by Unimastage at The Actors Studio Theatre in Kuala Lumpur recently?

Sitting through 55 minutes of the play was excruciating, especially when the subject could not sustain the attention of the audience. For one, there is nothing new that scriptwriter Vanitha Abdul wants to say. Secondly, the sequence in which the whole play was delivered was not engaging. The plot was too simple, with a trite message, and the script too plain. A supporter commented that the play was a ``bold and brazen attempt by students.''

On the contrary, this reviewer thinks reading articles in magazines or newspapers about transvestites would have been better. There was nothing the audience didn't already know about the subject.

So, we were told that ``Sallym'' was born a perfectly normal child and his birth name was Mohd Salim. His life took a dramatic turn when he joined a boarding school, where his peers teased him with names like "Sotong" and other derogatory nicknames. Eventually, Salim was raped by one of his classmates.

To ``justify'' his dramatic change, the play indicated in detail how Salim was raped, the act and emotions were well depicted. It was quite visual, leaving little to the imagination.

In one scene, Salim was seen rolling on the floor and groaning - now, was it necessary?

When Salim started to change his lifestyle by first changing his name to Sally and cross-dressing, he began working in a hair salon. This was a kind of stereotyping by the scriptwriter.

Sally fell in love with ``her'' boyfriend Razarul, someone whom she described as ``a different man altogether.''

Razarul's kind and good-natured romantic ways won over Sally and convinced her that she was made to be a real woman. When Razarul finally proposed and suggested that Sally

went for a sex operation, she was elated. It was only when Razarul fell ill and was diagnosed as an HIV carrier that Sally knew her life too would come to a tragic end.

There was no poignant scene here. The part in which Sally, played by Mohd Azhan Abdul Rani, grieved over Razarul's untimely death was far from sad.

In fact, it failed to trigger any emotions. What we heard was endless and exaggerated whining about the plight of a lovelorn person.

Then, inexplicably, strips of white and black cloth hanging from the ceiling were supposed to depict that Sally had died and met a so-called Haji who suddenly went missing. This particular scene in which ``Haji met Sally'' was not clear. The audience was left wondering what the relationship was between the two.

Perhaps, Vanitha should have probed what impending death meant to someone like Sally.

It wasn't clear whether Sally was remorseful over her sins or whether she would have wished for a different life. What next after mourning for her dead lover and waiting for doomsday? All this would surely be a lot more interesting than a run-of-the-mill story of a transvestite.

Working around Sally's predicament as a man trapped in a woman's body would also be another good topic to explore.

Azhan may have had the whole stage all to himself but his act was not powerful enough to captivate the audience for long. His performance was mediocre. But with more coaching, he would probably make a good actor someday.

All in, SALLYm was not an exceptional play. With a shallow and loose script, it looked like an amateur effort, which in all fairness it was, as it was not put together by professional theatre practitioners.

But the fact that it did score Best Play and Best Actor at the recent Makum Theatre Festival (a theatre competition among local universities), makes one wonder about the quality of the other student plays.

BY ZIEMAN - PUBLISHED 24/4/2001