Coverage: Our Sister’s son: The Story of a Boy Through The Eyes of his queens

Kuala Lumpur, 2^nd August 2013 – Our Sister’s son: The Story of a Boy Through The Eyes of his queens is the latest play written & directed by Mark Beau de Silva featuring the lineups of Roax Tan, Amelia Tan, Douglas Wong, Bella Rahim & Ashraf Zain.

Story Introduction:

The story of the play is regarding Ah Mei (played by Amelia Tan) who knows that her boy ah Ren (played by Roax Tan) is different from typical boys. Ah ren doesn’t like typical boy activities such as football, fishing and etc. Instead, he would prefer to sing Cantopop with his quirky aunties. Currently, Ah Ren has grown up and he has left his home. Ah Mei and her sisters are left in their kampong house located in Kulim. While in the house, Ah Mei and her other two sisters recall and imagine how Ah Ren’s life would be, living as an “unconventional” boy.

How would Ah Ren’s life be if he’s not a typical boy?

Find out the story of the play at Pentas 2, klpac from 1-4 August 2013.

Performance:

The play was presented in English, Bahasa Malaysia and Hokkien. For those of you who do not understand Hokkien, do not worry, because there will be subtitles on the screen for those scenes with Hokkien Dialogues. It was a unique play which tackles on the issue of sexual identity in Malaysia setting. It has successfully brought out how it would like if a person was living under the skin of a different gender. The imagination and reminiscence shown in this play were almost similar to real life situation if a person happened to be living distinctively as a transgender in our local settings. There will be both acceptance as well as rejection by our cultural norm and all these were depicted well throughout this stage play.

For acting wise, all five of the casts were impressive as their acting were really good and convincing. It’s a brave attempt by Roax Tan to perform as boy with a girl’s soul trapped inside of his body. It’s a different role from his usual plays. However, he was managed to deliver the character convincingly. As for the rest of the casts, Douglas has been as funny as always and was able to bring a lot of laughter to the crowd with some of his cheeky dialogues. Amelia and Bella on the other hand were spectacular too with their fine acting and great facial expressions. On the other hand, Ashraf Zain was very impressive as he tackled a few different roles in this play yet was able to make different characters come to live. Overall, the admirable acting by all these casts has definitely earned the audience’s affection.

Costume:

The costumes for all the three sisters are almost the same throughout the show. However, there were a variety of costume sets for Roax and Ashraf, well, especially Ashraf. The three sisters’ costumes were traditional wears which you could expect to see in kampong area. The costumes by Roax are usual male wears consisting of shorts, singlet, jeans and etc. Ashraf costumes were the most varying ones. He has been switching from male formal attire to lady apparel, then to a normal menswear and etc. There were many surprises from Ashraf’s set. Anyway, the costumes were all consisted of the common outfit in our local setting.

Verdict:

It is a pleasant experience which will give you an insight of how someone’s life would be like when he/she is in the struggle of sexual identity crisis.

“ Unique and adept performance with daring theme in our cultural context! ”

(This article is written by WLJack.)