HAWA by Hatch Theatrics

“Preach it”

Reviewer: Gabriel Lim
Performance: 25 April 2015

In the story of Adam and Eve, Eve was tricked by a serpent into eating the forbidden fruit to gain immortality. She entices Adam to do so as well. However, the fruit gave them something else; the knowledge to judge right from wrong.

But what if right and wrong is all … relative?

“Hawa” in Arabic has several meanings. It can mean the biblical figure Eve, wind, and sometimes desire. Hawa, the production, attempts to interpret life and death, and reconsiders faith and love. A recent Islam convert, Siti (Isabella Chiam), is given the responsibility by her partner Sarah to oversee her funeral. She hasn’t got a clue what to do. Enters an undertaker (Saiful Amri) who instructs Siti on the funeral processes. Siti is thrust into different situations; one of which is to gather enough people to pay their respects, a condition of the funeral. She is faced with a decision of whether or not to notify Sarah’s family of her funeral; and later she is compelled to do a water cleansing on Sarah’s corpse. To add to the series of misadventures, the play introduces Zaki (Al-Matin Yatim) who gatecrashes the funeral with an unseemly ambition to hook up with Hijabistas (or a fashionable Muslim woman). The result: an impossible funeral scene that questions the place of homosexuality (between Sarah and Siti) in Islam, through conversations that is thought-provoking and humorous.

Director Faizal Abdullah paces the play with great intricacy and sensitivity from start to end. The transition of scenes offers a room for meditation with its use of aphoristic motifs of tarot cards and Rumi’s words flashed across the veiled backdrop. Sound designer Suhaili Safari adds to the mix with a haunting voice-over of the text. In another instance, the use of a phone as a recurring communicative device in the play helps to bridge the storyline on-stage and off-stage, even though it is over-exploited. Zaki is the proverbial wild card. He challenges Siti’s view of Islam and becomes an instrumental force in the funeral proceedings.

Hawa carries with it the refrain of ‘sin is but a name’. This series of misadventures does not advocate doing away with tradition, but asks us to reconsider it. When the undertaker takes his time to demonstrate the ablution, that moment of wordless ritual is one of the instances that gave the audience space and time to reflect.

The only gripe I have for this production is a technical one. The surtitles presented the production’s major flaw. The syncing of surtitles and dialogue is often off. However, this can be overlooked as it hardly compromises the overall experience.

With a young team of theatre practitioners, Hatch Theatrics’ first show of the year impresses and sets the bar high for their future productions.