A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Teater Ekamatra

““Me? I am cured… kemurnian”.“

Reviewer: Idelle Yee
Performance: 29 September 2019

Is being stripped of agency truly the only solution to deviance?

This seems to be the question posed by Teater Ekamatra’s staging of A Clockwork Orange, performed entirely in Bahasa Melayu with English surtitles. The choice of language has a particular historical resonance — the author of the original novel, Anthony Burgess, worked as a teacher in colonial Malaya during the 1950s and was fluent in Malay. In fact, in one explanation of the book’s title, Burgess claimed that it was a pun on the Malay word orang, meaning man. The titular clockwork orange is a human being who has the appearance of life, but is inside merely cogs and wheels, emptied of agency; a living corpse.

Regardless of whether Burgess meant this origin story sincerely, there is nothing insincere about Teater Ekamatra’s production. The production cleverly employs a modified thrust stage, which allows the audience to be situated in most of the action. When Al (Alex in the novel) undergoes aversion therapy to reform his violent impulses, the audience too is subjected to a grotesque greatest hits montage in the genre of gore. By situating the audience physically in Al’s space, we also become implicated in his experience of this dystopian “therapy” as well as the suffering it causes; we too become interrogators of its ethicality and needfulness.

Later, when Al is presented to a crowd of admirers as a supposed success story of the “Othman reformative treatment”, several cast members stand in the back of the audience, clapping. The audience realises with dawning horror that we too are cheering his apparent loss of will to make decisions, this being viewed as the successful “cure” to violent deviance. We realise the fluidity of roles one may acquire in a repressive, totalitarian state as we move without warning from being victim to perpetrator; perhaps we may derive sobering reflections on parallels in our own extra-theatrical reality.

In this production’s interpretation of the infamously violent source material, the cast performs with both primal brutality and eerie fluidity, the latter being assisted by timely neon purple stage lighting. Control of body and physicality is strong across the board for this cast, but it would be most remiss not to highlight Rizman Putra’s remarkable performance. Rizman’s Al goes from hypermasculine aggression to grovelling sycophancy with astonishing seamlessness. As he spasms in sinewy agony strapped into a chair for aversion therapy, the audience cannot help but resonate with his bodily expressed protest of this cruel “treatment”. There is a throbbing viscerality to Rizman’s performance that reverberates with humanity, even in one who supposedly embodies social deviance.

At the end of the play Al stands, beginning again to exhibit in his body the primal aggression displayed in the beginning, and declares that he has now been “cured” – he has returned to kemurnian, meaning purity. And yet, in losing all “deviance”, and returning entirely to a sanitised, blank purity, it is possible that we lose also some of our vital humanity.