I love art and film and theatre. I love dysfunctional characters who have bad relationships with their parents. I love dreams and psychedelics. I love Rachel Sennott. I love being a hopeless romantic.

Embark on this journey with me through the vastly distinct worlds of four student-directed plays. This will be a relentless stream of consciousness filled with hedonistic and existential desires and my personal affinity towards theatre. I genuinely believe that art and theatre is grossly underfunded everywhere in Malaysia. So, before I begin walking you through the meticulously crafted plays by our very own Monash students, this is an urgent call for Monash to start! allocating! more! funds! to! MUMPAC!!! It would genuinely be such a crazy experience watching these ideas blown up on a much larger scale. The fact that MUMPAC was able to create such a pleasurable viewing experience simply at the badminton court is a testament to how creative and excellent they are at crafting ideas and executing them and I can’t begin to fathom what they would create if they simply had more resources! 

Three Dogs and a Soup: May the Best Dog Win!

We were given a disclaimer before the play started by the narrator that we would definitely understand the title of the play before the credits started rolling in. So in protecting the integrity of this play, I will allow you to interpret the title by yourself while reading my thoughts and hopefully you too will understand it before I move on to the next play. 

Presenting: Greg the nerd, Danny the rebel, and Oliver the jock. This play highlights these three friends with conflicting personalities, forming a confusing and peculiar friendship dynamic. The scene starts at a cafe. Danny was fooling around and accidentally spilled soup on a waitress working at the cafe. Coincidentally, Greg, Danny, and Oliver were absolutely enamoured with the waitress’ beauty and they began thinking of ways to approach her when they realised that she went to the same school as them. Unaware of how their confessions would turn out, the three boys started approaching soup girl with one main intention- to have soup girl like them back. 

The cast was excellent. Tang Wei, Leshan, and Farish, along with Karen (the romantic interest) and Terrence (the narrator), did a fantastic job at translating script into dialogue. With terrific dialogue delivery and stage presence, all of the characters successfully made everyone in the audience laugh. 

Do you understand the title yet?

Scarlett’s List: Revenge, Prom, Mamma Mia!

Take the dysfunctional relationship Lady Bird (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2017) had with her mother and place it in the cinematic world of A Ghost Story (dir. David Lowery, 2017) and you’ll have the fantastic imagination of Scarlett’s List. Scarlett’s List centres around River navigating through the feeling of grief and angst stemmed from his best friend, Scarlett’s death. River attempted to placate his emotions by completing Scarlett’s bucket list. Accompanying him through this distressing journey is Scarlett, trapped in time through her spectral state, passively watching life pass her and River slowly making his descent into insanity. 

Both Noel and Sandra who played River and Scarlett respectively, did an absolutely insane job at portraying the intricate levels of emotions. During each scene where River was overwhelmed with his emotions and starts to break down, we don’t see him experiencing solely sadness. Noel portrays sadness while being intertwined with anger and anxiety and hopelessness. We see all of these emotions amalgamated into one giant ball of expression that compliments each other really well. This was very surprising to me considering that everyone acting in these plays were just students. I don’t think anyone expected professional-level acting but Noel and Sandra did such an amazing job at portraying emotions considering that sadness, in general, is a difficult emotion to work with in acting. 

Do you have mommy issues? Yes? That’s great, so does Scarlett. My personal favourite scene in this entire 20 minute play was the scene of River with Scarlett’s mother. It’s established that I think Noel is a fantastic actor but Scarlett’s mother, Shu Qin absolutely crushed it with her short monologue. Extremely little stage time but she left such a huge impact on the entire play. Please, never stop channelling your emotions into creativity and theatre!  

Among the Shadows: You’re the Murderer! I Knew it! I Knew it! 

A Gen-Z counterpart to your classic Agatha Christie novels. In this thrilling play, we put our focus onto a group of friends stuck in their dorms right after finishing finals. Slowly, they begin to die off one by one finally revealing the killer that lurked amongst the shadow. The director and writers, Noor Sethi and Alyssa Adira, did a fantastic job at framing the personalities of each character to ensure that the actor is able to sufficiently replicate the desired temperament. We found out later, during the Q&A discussion session, that the actors were casted before the script was written. This collaborative approach to ensure that each character was framed well, definitely made the play flow super smoothly. 

Among the Shadows deviated from tradition. We don’t have a typical theatre setting of maintaining our attention solely to the stage and having the actors be confined within the parameters of the stage. This was an aspect of the play that I loved! Towards the end, Kelly, the final character standing, waiting to be killed off by the murderers, ran through and around the audience trying to escape. This blurred the lines between audience and actors where we were successfully placed within the scene itself. 

I’m not sure if this was intentional but the first thing that came to me once the play started was Rachel Sennott in Bodies, Bodies, Bodies (dir. Halina Reijn, 2022). The sense of anguish, fear, and desperation of all the actors in Among the Shadows emulates the simplicity of acting in Bodies, Bodies, Bodies. A simple storyline with excellent acting and directing can definitely create a memorable experience that surpasses our expectations! 

Dissonance: The Dichotomy of Baju Kelawars and Tutus! 

Do it with me and swallow twenty tabs of acid. Let’s begin this psychedelic kafkaesque journey into garbage place to meet Kaira and Crystal. Around you is clutter and colour and the immense confusion of finding out if you truly want to escape your newfound comfort place, away from responsibilities and the capitalistic constraint to conform to the cookie cutter lifestyle. Do I want a 9-5 job or do I want to be a ballerina? Do I want to find my purpose in life or do I want to just dance? There’s so many options but so little time. There’s so many emotions to experience as a child but we’re confined by endless limitations. One prevailing question: do you want to leave garbage place? Yes? Okay, now JUMP! You’ve done it? Great, now tell me your deepest darkest desires. 

Dissonance is an absolute mess of ideas and concepts but along this, is a linear and organised thought process that places itself in a whimsical and surrealist timeline that an average person can never begin to comprehend. Kaira, you are not an average person. Your ability to pluck this conceptual reimagination from your experience with mental health, coupled with Crystal’s stellar performance which complimented the overall context extremely well, this play will forever be the most creative project anyone has ever done in Monash. 

Dissonance imbued a sense of comfort. Kaira and Crystal do not leave garbage place but for some reason I’m fine with it. I’m inspired with the idea of Kaira and Crystal each finally being able to escape the bureaucratic nightmare that awaits them in the real world, where we, me and you reading this, are currently at. They don’t have to wake up and worry about paying taxes, or finishing a chemistry lab report, or figuring out their ultimate life purpose. Being frivolous and silly while dancing to charli xcx is my ultimate life purpose. 

Final Thoughts 

Alas, my rambles will never do justice to the spectacular display of creativity and passion by everyone from the MUMPAC team. From the directors, to the actors, and the backstage crew, you guys did an amazing job at revitalising art in Monash. Thank you for ensuring that Malaysian theatre does not dissipate with time and that performance will forever play a mending effect to those at hardship. Can’t wait to see what MUMPAC concocts next year!  

Article by Yashven Jayabalan
Photos by Ezriq