The evening of the Sunday I went to watch The Necessary Stage's Malaysian run of Good People (at the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre's Pentas 2 from May 14th to 18th, 2008), as we walked to the car park, a fellow theatre-goer pulled out a cellphone and began SMS-spamming his address book. The message? Watch Good People: Sukania Venugopal is a national treasure.

Slightly hyperbolic, but I found it difficult to disagree. If you've been following English-language theatre for the past twenty years with even moderate avidity you will have likely seen Sukania onstage and been impressed; even a once-through of recent history -- from 2005's rousing stage-songbook Encore to 2006's blockbuster spectacle Puteri Gunung Ledang and sublime dramatised-text anthology Second Link, all critical successes -- reveals a capable performer in possession not only of that golden sing-dance-act triumvirate of skills, but the emotional understanding to wield them with depth.

On to Good People. The play is set in a Singaporean hospice; Sukania played Radha, the institution's newest client: formerly a radio starlet known throughout the island-state; then a defeated wife whose husband forbade her to sing; now a spirited sexagenarian dying of cancer. Upon arrival Radha is all smiles and warmth: exchanging chuckles with the facility's medical director Miguel (Rody Vera, from the Philippines), disarming the guarded fatalism of her nurse Yati (Siti Khalijah Zainal, Singapore's own), and even leading the place in a mass karaoke session of Frankie Valli's “Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You” -- in a rather muhibah English / Bahasa Melayu / Tagalog medley (no languages from the Indian subcontinent make an appearance, oddly; Radha apparently, isn't proficient enough to ad-lib).

That cheer, of course, doesn't last for long; the woman is, after all, dying. Radha winces during her song-and-dance routine; we soon discover she is frequently in debilitating pain, and the physician-sanctioned regimen of drugs does nothing. Her balm is smoking cannabis: illegal and punishable by death, under Singaporean law – and, predictably, word gets out; policemen and papers are soon involved. Weed is also immoral, according to both Yati (“Because it's illegal,” -- though here, like you'd expect of young people, her conviction tends to waiver) and Miguel (it's against his Christianity, an affront to conventional medicine, and a betrayal of his control over the hospital).

Two pot-related scenes stood out. The first was oratory: Radha, towards the end of the play, defends her use of the herb to all comers, pointing out that, among other things, it is charas, a sacrament of Shiva, and therefore her religious right as a Hindu. Sukania delivered this speech with blend of fatigue, conviction and mocking self-awareness: terminally ill, she really didn't have much else to lose. The second was physical agony: halfway through the play Radha's stash is confiscated by the authorities; that night, the old woman's groans become squeals and ragged whimpers; Sukania all but fell off her bed and, crawling, futilely attempted a break-out, a drooling animal trying to escape from its torment. When a panicked Yati finally musters enough levelheadedness (and overrides her ethical compunctions) to call her drug dealer, the relief is immense. We could not take much more of that suffering.

Those sequences illustrated Sukania's command. Even though one bordered on the didactic, and the other on the hysterical -- both, therefore, could have been easily bungled -- at neither did it ever cross our minds that the performer and her character were separate people. The illusion of the stage was never lost: Radha's words, and her pain, were also Sukania's; I was gritting my teeth, nearly unable to watch hurt so completely cripple and debase a human being.

Good People, Bad Play

Good People was a handsome production: Mac Chan's suspended light-bulbs (a phase he obviously hasn't left, yet) merged with Vincent Lim's hospital-curtain maze, creating a twilit world of footsteps, whispered conversations, and silhouettes: a mise en scene in which Alvin Tan's direction flourished.

And, while Sukania was a clear focus, her fellow performers pulled their weight. Veteran theatre practitioner Rody Vera had Miguel -- an anal Catholic with a Protestant work ethic and all-efficiency exterior -- down to his crisp shirt and resolute walk; the actor empathetically managed the character's gradual exasperation in the face of a headstrong patient. It would have been all too simple to play the cold, medical villain, but when we saw Miguel cradle his head in his hand we understood: he was only trying to do what he believed was best.

Siti Khalijah was equally solid. The young actor was last seen in Kuala Lumpur for Zizi Azah Abdul Majid's How Did The Cat Get So Fat?, where her baby-faced pout availed her well for that text's intrepid prepubescent. She employed a similar expression through much of Good People: the conflicts that beset Yati (her grasping of right and wrong, her practice of Islam, the tug between her filial duties and her musical passions) are meant to be youthful conundrums, and Siti Khalijah's hardened (almost comic) sulk is a hallmark teenage-to-early-twenties mask.

All in all, a stable tripod; together these stellar elements validated my friend's recommendation. The text, unfortunately, did not.

The Necessary Stage's resident playwright Haresh Sharma went through a rigourous process in writing Good People: a week of fleshing out the characters with his three performers; a preview staging with a test audience; more drafts over the next few months. His overarching idea was multiplicity, dialectics without final synthesis:

“Good People is different from previous TNS productions in that it explores multiple positions more profoundly. One is led to empathise with each character but not side one over another so easily. That way, the audience is engaged in numerous debates because to make a clear moral stand is a complex process.”

Which should not have been a problem.

Haresh's error was, perhaps, too much emphasis on his stated intention. The play is a brittle Frankenstein, with outbursts of moral and ethical I'm-going-to-talk-about-the-Issue-now moments of pedagogy forcibly sewn into a narrative about a woman facing death. The “multiple positions” and “debates” failed to persuade us because they didn't belong, as in when Radha accuses Miguel of religious intolerance; her “You hate me because I'm a Hindu!” left us blind-sided, because there was no indication that he was -- and we safely ignored that entire argument. At this point, we don't really care about the complexity inherent in determining what is right. How could we? Inquiry can't become art if it is merely shoehorned into the living stage.

Death

While watching Good People I couldn't help but be reminded of another production Sukania was in: Jo Kukathas's part in the 2006 Break-ing (Ji Po) Ka Si Pe Cah trilogy, “Silence, please”. There are (tenuous, admittedly) parallels: three characters, a story of illness and death, an intervention by callous external forces that strips away the dignity of passing away.

To me, at that time, I saw one primary difference between these two works' treatment of mortality. Jo's text explored a corporate acceptance: daughters mourning their mother -- and, at the end, there was a kind of comfort in grief shared. Radha's daughter, by contrast, is mentioned only once (her mother has forbade her to visit); though Miguel and Yati both get pulled into Radha's orbit, the three characters remain estranged till the very end. Good People's investigation of the mystery of death is a lonely one.

And it is a solitude devoid of respite: the happy herbs anaesthetise, but do not cure; Radha, for all her rhetoric, does not appear to buy into what she declaims. Whatever the case may be, there is no panacea for the uncertainty of cancerous death. She knows it is coming, but not exactly when. That period of waiting is a twilight with no answers, no meaning. “I want to die!” Radha screams. You can understand that recklessness.

Good People's climax is its most painful, most truthful moment: Radha, alone, is propped up on her bed, immobile, facing us. Her hair is piled up, a tangled mess, her mouth bloodless, her eyes seeing nothing. Death, finally, is near. The stage is silent. But there is no courage, no peace, no dignity -- only a long, drawn-out death rattle.

Then a corpse.

~~~

Zedeck Siew writes and blogs for Kakiseni.

The Necessary Stage's Good People, an intercultural collaboration between the Philippines (Rody Vera), Malaysia (Sukania Venugopal) and Singapore (Siti Khalijah Zainal, Alvin Tan and Haresh Sharma), ran at KLPac's Pentas 2 from May 14th to 18th, 2008.