4S STORIES AFTER BEDTIME by A.D.I Concept

“4S Stories After Bedtime”

Reviewer: Jorah Yu
Performance: 19 November 2016

Marketed as a horror genre, this play does not meet the expectations of what the synopsis offered.

The play explores four Malay superstitions – Santau, Susuk, Saka, and Seru. The attempt to blend modern humour into the play is applaudable, but ultimately feels over the top and cheesy at best, seeing that unless the play is specifically written to be a combination of horror-comedy, it breaks any and all tension that is set up by the show up to those points.

The Black Box is a medium sized theatre that has the tendency of feeling a little too hollow and stark if used unwisely.  To stage 4S here runs the risk of the detaching the audience from the play. This is exactly what happens. I find great difficulty empathising with the characters  nor do I find the story engaging. It doesn’t help that the physical distance between cast and audience further isolates us so that we miss the spookiness and creepiness the play wanted to showcase.

As for the pacing of the play, whilst the short story-descriptions for each superstition makes sense, each individual scene is far too short, with some of them maybe being the length of a single page or so, in terms of dialogue – I can not tell whether this was due to a weak script or bad directing, but it definitely affects how the audience’s ability to follow the story.

To summarise, 4S feels like a sloppily shot late night television show that is produced only because it can be, with little actual direction. A good try at imbuing horror elements and local stories into a play, but further work is necessary for the production work to fully communicate any message that it is trying to convey.