“Double-Bill: Riders Know When It’s Gonna Rain & Hawa”

Reviewer: Isaac Lim 
Performance: 2 July 2016

It may be easy to label these two plays as essentially Malay plays, centred on Malay and Islamic issues in Singapore. However, the two plays, presented as a double-bill, are much more than the race and religion they appear to represent.

Riders Know When It’s Gonna Rain attempts to expose the ‘Mat Moto’ subculture to a wider audience. It strives to get people to understand the mentality of Malay motorcyclists on the road, and issues they face off the road. The play follows four best friends from the day they got their 2B riding licences, through multiple skids and accidents and hospital stays, until one major crash that ends with a fatality.

The scenes are all a tad under-developed, too short for the emotions of the characters to build up, and often snaps at an anti-climax. When the story fails to unravel itself through the dialogues, characters are then given awkward and unnecessary expository monologues. The actors were rather casual in their performance throughout. They occasionally lack the energy to project their voices, even in over-the-top scenes in which their characters are arguing with each other.

Perhaps, rather unfair in comparison, Hawa (which both refers to the Quranic Eve and the female gender) is a far more nuanced piece.

Hawa brings together alternative views on Islam as a religion, and female homosexuality. Siti (played by Koh Wan Ching) is a recent convert, and is faced with having to settle the funeral rites of her deceased partner. In the span of half a day, she struggles between fulfilling the duty of being the only next-of-kin and the demands of her new religion. Then come Ahmad (Saiful Amri), the funeral services director with a fabulous sense of dark humour, and Zaki (Al-Matin Yatim), a funeral gatecrasher of sorts. The three are embroiled in conversations about life, the after-life, religious obligations, and religion rights, in a convivial but non-diminutive manner.

The actors play the respective characters with conviction, making them believable and relatable. Koh, as Siti, manages to present her frustrations and worries without coming across as unreasonable. Yatim as the endearing Zaki who goes to strangers’ funerals to “provide comfort to (our) veiled sisters” is so wrong, but nonetheless charmingly portrayed.

Marketing the two shows as a double-bill calls for unnecessary comparisons. The three-hour run time of the two plays also tests the audiences’ patience. No matter how good the plays were, there was a slightly audible collective sigh of relief heard at the end of the evening.

“Double-Bill: Riders Know When It’s Gonna Rain & Hawa”

Reviewer: Lee Min Jie
Performance: 30 June 2016

In Riders Know When It’s Gonna Rain (Riders), four impressive looking motorbikes line side by side upstage composing an Instagram-worthy set. It is a coming-of-age story about four friends, within the oft-misunderstood mat motor community in Singapore, whose lives are anything but picture perfect.

Riders opens with its four protagonists gathered around a void deck’s circular stone chairs and tables. A versatile setting chosen for its possible negative associations as a place where rowdy and rebellious youths hang out or smoke. The chairs niftily change into traffic barriers in the last scene.

Broken families, unstable financial incomes and a knack for everything but academics, forces them to juggle familial responsibilities, work and school simultaneously. This leaves them with their love for motorbikes and makes their passion for riding the only escape from life. Unfortunately, their love for motorbikes is a double edged sword, binding them as well as dividing them.

During the soliloquies, characters pour their hearts out and turn stereotypes about motorists on its head. No doubt such a direct mode of presentation is at once personal and forthright but it comes across as too simplistic for a professional cast. After all, “show not tell” is the modus operandi of theatre.

In Hawa, Siti (Koh Wan Ching), a Chinese who recently converted to Islam, is overwhelmed by the sudden responsibility to oversee the funeral arrangements for her Malay girlfriend. As she grapples to come to terms with her loss, the funeral director and a “gate crasher thief” reminds her to fulfil her religious and social obligations.

Koh is sincere and sensitive in her portrayal of Siti. Understandably crude and curt in her exchanges with the others, she succinctly delivers the complex emotions and struggles of a homosexual faced with rejection from family and religion.

Saiful Amri is charming and comical as a funeral director who lives by the mantra “business is business” and “a human only has dignity when he is alive.”

Al-Matin Yakim is able to hold his own as Zaki, the uninvited mourner. A conscientious and conservative portrayal saves that character from coming across as a sleazy and one-dimensional hijab-chasing deviant.

Hawa boldly interrogates the position and value of religion in today’s society where faith seems to be waning in the face of progress in science and where heterosexuality is no longer the only sexuality endorsed. Non-Muslim audiences are also treated to a rare opportunity to peek into the rituals behind an Islam funeral.

“Double-Bill: Riders Know When It’s Gonna Rain & Hawa”

Reviewer: Dawn Teo
Performance: 30 June 2016

Riders Know When It’s Gonna Rain is a glimpse into the mat moto subculture, complete with lingo of the Singapore motorbiking community and youths going with the fast ride. Audience members follow the journey of four friends from the day of receiving their 2B licenses to the unexpected detour of their friendships.

The play is presented mostly in Malay as it captures the essence of its characters as well as the culture itself. Having surtitles help non-Malay speakers to understand the conversations, but even through the acting, I am able to figure out what is going on at any given point in time.

Straightforward, clear and heartfelt, I find myself empathising with all the characters throughout the play. Nessa Anwar captures their growth and personalities in her writing simply, and the actors have tremendous chemistry in breathing life into the characters.

Some scene changes felt clumsy and excessive but each setting is used to great effect and adding layers of meaning to the text.

Through the building up and the slow burn of events, the ending for Riders Know When It’s Gonna Rain really hit it home for me. I enjoy how the fragments hinted through the play came together in the end without the over-explanation and fuss.

Hawa delves deep into the topic of religion, sexuality and love. This text-heavy piece is mainly presented in English, which provides a good guide to the audience on certain Islam-specific terms. Dialogue is the key to this play. Many back-and-forth banter question each character’s beliefs and intentions, while giving audience members the space to be part of that conversation.

The gem in Hawa is really watching the whole process of cleaning a body – how to cover it and clothe it with white pieces of cloth. Being able to witness something so intimate and important proves to be meditative, and somehow, very emotional.

Catching both plays in a single night is quite an experience since I got to see multiple aspects of the Malay culture and Islam side-by-side. Considering that I am not part of these groups, it is a true privilege to be able to experience these events in the form of theatre and educate myself further.

“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.

“Final Ablution”

Reviewer: Beverly Yuen
Performance: 25 April 2015

The power of a poignant story told with nuance and complexity, coupled with sharp directing and strong acting results in a stunning, moving and thought-provoking performance entitled Hawa. Hawa, a Malay word which means the Quranic Eve or female, is written by Johnny Jon Jon, presented by Hatch Theatrics and directed by Faizal Abdullah.

The play opens with Siti (Isabella Chiam), a Chinese who recently converted to Islam, making funeral arrangements for her close Malay friend Sarah, who is later revealed to be her lover. Disowned by her parents for living a life of sin, Siti moved in with Sarah and lived in a small isolated world of their own. After Sarah’s death, Siti finds herself having no friends to invite to the funeral and she is reluctant to inform Sarah’s parents of her partner’s demise. Ahmad (Saiful Amri), the funeral director, tells her she must arrange for many people to be present at the prayers, and if she is unable to do so, he can help her with the task by charging her $5 per person. Siti refuses. She is then greeted by a “funeral crasher”, Zaki (Al-Matin Yatim) who claims that it is his duty to God to comfort the “veiled woman”. Through witty exchanges between the three characters and vignettes of memories, the romantic story of Siti and Sarah, Zaki’s family woes, and Ahmad’s religious livelihood unfold.

As a female is required to give ablution to a female corpse and Ahmad’s wife who usually handles this task for him is serving as a midwife in another household, Siti is asked to carry out the work of washing the body. Ahmad demonstrates on Zaki the meticulous process of bathing, dressing and wrapping up the dead. The breathless silence from the audiences who watch intently lulls them into a state of meditation. The final ablution of the dead almost serves as a cathartic for the observers too. The delivery of a baby and the completion of the ablution take place concurrently towards the end of the play, which suggest the beginning of a fresh journey. Siti eventually agrees to pay a fee for Ahmad to assemble a crowd for prayer before the dead is buried.

Through a courageous portrayal of a homosexual relationship between two races, with liberal references to Islam and God, the play questions the meaning of sin, holiness, rules and love. The minimalist lighting which plays with shadows, the white translucent pieces of cloth that form the set on which poetic texts about stages of life are projected, and the sweet scent in the space offer me a simple and aesthetically pleasing haven for reflection, a good contrast to the emotive issues presented in the play. There is an undercurrent of unsaid negotiations between self and Self; self and the play. This is a beautifully sorrowful; poetically explosive; humorously serious piece of work.