MA’MA YONG: ABOUT NOTHING MUCH TO DO by Najib Soiman

“About quite a lot of things, actually”

Reviewer: Isaac Lim
Performance: 23 October 2015

A beautiful, raucous mash-up of languages, pop culture and Shakespeare, there seems to be nothing that cannot happen in Najib Soiman’s Ma’Ma Yong: About nothing much to do, a very loose adaptation of the Bard’s Much Ado About Nothing.

Presented through Mak Yong as a framing form, this predominantly Malay production features a multi-ethnic cast, who sometimes speak in their mother tongues. Mak Yong combines singing, dancing, acting, and rituals. This is paired with Shakespeare’s play, which originally featured characters of different European ethnicities, to present a colorful staging like no other.

The non-Malays in the ensemble went through intensive lessons to speak and sing in Malay before the rehearsals started.

The result: fluent and non-jarring recitation of the lines by the cast, almost like native speakers.

Soiman, as both playwright and director, installs the play-within-a-play, throwing in much fun but never losing control of the plot. Set in a modern-day mental asylum, literature teacher Fatimah (played by the inimitable Aidli ‘Alin’ Mosbit) is believed to be possessed by the spirit of a Mak Yong veteran. She is the main narrator, while the rest of the cast act out the play.

There is singing and dancing, in both traditional forms like Joget and Dangdut, and also to K-Pop tunes. There is also shadow puppetry, in a form similar to Wayang Kulit. And there is audience interaction aplenty, as the actors busy themselves around the thrust stage, and breaking out of the characters at times and planting themselves among the audience.

Despite so much happening, the audience never quite gets lost, as the story is told in clear chapters. Another notable element is that Soiman deliberately retains the original names of the Shakespearean characters. Amidst all the laughter, the themes of infidelity, deception, mistaken identity and “nothing/noting” are still clearly brought through in the performance.

Ma’ma Yong is as good an introduction to Malay traditional art, as it is to multicultural Singapore. Apart from the ethnic song-and-dance, the live band plays with traditional instruments such as an gendang (drum), rebana (tambourine) and rebab (two-stringed bowed instrument), among others. The multi-national cast speaks, apart from English and Malay, a mix of languages such as German, French, Jamaican, Tamil and Thai.

The tourism promotion board sure has something to learn from this show about marketing Singapore.

Soiman takes a gamble in adopting the format of teater rakyat or folk/community theater in presenting this story, and pushing for Mak Yong to come alive again in Singapore. This bet pays off handsomely for him, as he creates a most unique show for people from different age groups and cultural backgrounds.

Ma’ma Yong has nothing much to do? Quite the opposite, I would say.