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| National laureate Noordin Hassan (born 1929) |
Noordin Hassan, whose first and marvellous
comedy Peran (mask for comic actor),
was staged in Kuala Lumpur last month, is a playwright-director with a rare
combination of virtues. After all the nasty things I’ve been saying in As I Please
about the tribe of “bumigeois” sasterawans
and senimans, it actually makes me
feel good to praise one of them. It is made easier by the fact that this “one
of them” is in some ways not quite “one of them.”
Otherwise I doubt I would be so consumed by
the urge to sing his praise. “His praise” here refers both to the person of the
author as human being and to his works. It is an axiom in modern literary
criticism that there is no correlation between the quality of a work of art and
the moral character or personality of the author. A selfish, petty-minded, egocentric
bastard can, if he or she has what it takes, somehow produce a marvellous poem,
novel, or play. Even a bloody chauvinist or fanatic, believe it or not, is not
necessarily incapable or producing what a humanist, if he is objective, would
have to call a good work of art. It may be that the fanaticism or chauvinism in
such cases has been kept out, and that work therefore appeals to you because of
its strong formal or other qualities. It is also not uncommon that a writer can
be guided in real life by values that contradict those cherished in his works.
The word for this contradiction is
hypocrisy. And the odd thing is that we, if we are capable of aesthetic objectivity,
would have to admit that he or she is a good or even great writer though a
lousy human being. For the sake of those marvellous poems, novels or plays, it
is just as well that the vast majority of us don’t have the dubious privilege
or personally knowing their authors. Some of you may find this rather amazing.
You want to know what I find really amazing? That a bore or an insufferable pig
can produce an interesting story, a charming poem or a brilliant play. I have
met writers whose work I like but whose company I find excruciatingly boring or
a pain in the neck. It’s as if when they write in the privacy of their room,
some mysterious power of agency transforms them. How the muse can be so
unpredictable in her distribution of favours beats me.
Given all this, how marvellous it is to
meet and know a writer whose character and personality we like as much as his
work , and whose behaviour in real life doesn’t contradict the values affirmed
in his writings. Such a person is Noordin Hassan. Noordin is the most
courteous, the gentlest and the least pretentious of the senimans and sasterawans
I’ve met. Neither his ego nor his head is swollen. He is also an uncommonly
intelligent playwright-director with a highly individual style and a marvellous
sense of theatre. His theatrical consciousness is multi-dimensional, capable of
blending the traditional and modern, and thus generating images and resonance
that transcend barriers.
Noordin may be soft-spoken but do not
assume that the softness of his manner means a lack of moral or intellectual
spine. Whoever thinks so should recall one of the most shameful episodes in the
history of modern Malaysian theatre, and how Noordin, who rarely engages in
polemics, reacted to it. The episode I mean is the blindly savage attack on
Noordin by one of his fellow playwright-directors, Khalid Salleh, a man subject
to sudden seizures of epileptic chauvinism. The attack, published in Berita Harian in 1986 after the staging
of Anak Tanjung, was basically not
unlike the attack by Mohd Affandi Hasson on Prof. Muhammad Haji Salleh which I
dealt with in this column about two months ago. Muhammad Haji Salleh was
accused of being anti-Islam; Noordin was savaged for having allegedly sold out
to the non-Malays. The article didn’t deserve to be published even in a gutter
newspaper. The tone was hysterical and the allegations meaningless and totally
without foundation. What provoked it was apparently the positive treatment of
Malay-Chinese relationships and the sympathetic portrayal of non-Bumi characters in the play. And the
fact that Noordin has a Chinese wife must have helped to fuel the demagogic
rhetoric of the critic even more. Noordin, whom I suspect doesn’t get really
angry easily, wrote a stinging reply. But the sting was lost on the thick skin
and even thicker brain of the chauvinist.
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| Khalid Salleh: epileptic chauviinism |
Noordin knows what he believes in; and he
is very much his own man. This is even when there is a coincidence of personal
perception and that currently approved by his community or society or fellow Bumis. He has the mind and imagination
as well as the faith, the sensibility and artistic discipline to embody his
values and his vision in the form of a truly living theatre. His is among the
few which come nearest to that difficult thing called “Malaysian” rather than
Malay theatre.
Even when he is motivated by a deep-seated concern for the
future of his race or inspired by the desire to dramatize what he perceives as
compelling religious truths, the Malaysian spirit is never far from his heart
and his art. Aspiring young dramatists should think of him and his kind of
theatre as a model to emulate. With him, pride in his racial and cultural heritage
doesn’t lead to the mind being trapped in the divisive categories of race and
religion. He is open to the sheer variety of life, just as he is open to the
marvellous possibilities of the theatre. He takes his theatre very seriously
but is never solemn about it. His delight in the sheer fun of theatre-making
communicates itself to the audience seductively. And that urge to delight
ensures that in his plays even serious matter can be treated with wit and
humour without compromising their seriousness. The wit and humour of Noordin’s
plays have their roots in folk imagination enhanced by modern Western influence
such as surrealism (most evident in his plays of the Seventies).
Since his first major play, Bukan Lalang Ditiup Angin (1970),
Noordin has been a dramatist whose profound social concerns have always had a
religious dimension. In the last decade or so, the religious dimension has
become more pronounced, but never (with the possible exception of 1400) at the
expense of theatre. Being a “natural” theatre man and an open-minded humanist
despite (or because of?) his religious faith, Noordin seems to know
instinctively that the true religious conversation must embrace reality (both social and
metaphysical) in all its complexity and variety. In his best plays, he doesn’t
preach; he shows, knowing full well that the language of theatre has a special
kind of power and penetration. This was shown once again in his new play Peran, a hilarious satire on the theme
of big heads and small heads, of swollen fantasy and painful reality. The comic
form Noordin had chosen for this play dramatizes even more suggestively and
compellingly that ambiguous complexity of his vision of man. Considering that
Noordin has demonstrated his talent for visual and verbal satirical wit in his
earlier plays, it is rather surprising that he never attempted a comedy until Peran. When asked why he hadn’t, he said
that he was afraid of the temptation of frivolity that comedy as a form offers.
That I thought was a rather funny reason. Now that Peran has been a great success both as entertainment and as a piece
of serious theatre, I hope Noordin will write more comedies in future.
6 April 1991
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