Artistic innovations and risk-taking have come to characterise the annual George Town Festival. Not least is this seen in the creative theatre staged this year.
No politics this time. Let me talk instead about my experience participating in this year’s George Town Festival (GTF) as an actor in the play 2 Houses, which was specially commissioned as one of the festival’s closing shows.
We performed the play as a site-specific piece of theatre and our venue was Soonstead, one of the once-proud mansions on “Millionaire’s Row” along what used to be known as Northam Road (now Jalan Sultan Ahmad Shah). Built in 1919, it was an ideal location for a drama about a set of characters whose lives are disrupted by the Japanese invasion of Malaya and their attempts to pick up the pieces three years after the end of the war. It provided the requisite period backdrop and opulent ambience to evoke the appropriate atmosphere. As the writer and director of the play, Lim Yu Beng, said many a time to us actors throughout our rehearsal period, “The house is also one of the actors in the play.”
Indeed, almost everyone who came to see 2 Houses was wowed by the setting and Soonstead’s suitability as a site for the drama. They also relished the experience of being inside a dwelling that housed the rich and powerful of Penang in its halcyon times. It was not an opportunity that appeared every day, that’s for sure. They were able to move from one room to another to appreciate the building’s size and architecture, and in some instances, it has to be said, this inadvertently distracted them from the unfolding plot. But the fact that site-specific theatre was new to many of them (although it has been around for the longest time, and the term started to be used as early as in the 1980s in Britain to describe “performance specifically generated from or for one site”) made up for it – in that it contributed an added value to their experience.
