An Afternoon To Remember

It was Noi who noticed that as part of the Pesta Raya season celebrated in and around the Esplanade, a play entitled Randai Macbeth was to be performed over this weekend. She sort of half-shyly asked if we might go along some three weeks back, and I'm very glad indeed she did. We caught today's matinee (and sadly final performance) this afternoon and I have to tell you, it ranks up there as one of the best things I've ever had the pleasure of seeing in any theatre anywhere.

Put simply - in fact, overly simply - it's a Malay version of the Scottish Play. So when it was first broached that we might attend I did have a reservation - but this was not that we'd be watched something performed in Bahasa Melayu. To be honest, this was something of a pull factor as I knew immediately that the novelty of the language would help me off-set the weariness I feel whenever viewing the play is suggested. I think I said it before in this very Far Place: I've taught the play so often that I'm suffering from such a degree of the fatigue of familiarity that it's the one Shakespeare play I'd refuse to teach again. As it is, I had to force myself to watch the brilliant movie version starring (I use the word advisedly) the mighty Mr Denzel Washington. The fact that I watched it twice is sort of mitigated by my having to break up both viewings into smaller, highly appreciated, chunks.

Anyway this is drifting from the central point about today's experience. The show was fabulous in almost every respect, and I feel the need to tell the world this. But there were so many good things about it that I'm a bit overwhelmed at the moment - and looking forward to my dinner, which is a bit of a distraction from writing too much about the show now. So here's my solution: inspired by my overuse of the word bit in the previous sentence I intend to recall all the best bits, of which there were an abundance, ahead of tomorrow's post and list as many as possible when I put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, or whatever.