Pintu

Buku ini memuatkan tiga buah drama Isa Kamari Isa Kamari iaitu “Sidang Burung”, “Pintu” dan “Restoran.” Dua drama yang terkahir merupakan karya asli beliau, sementara drama yang pertama, seperti yang dicatat oleh pengarang, merupakan adaptasi daripada karya klasik Fariduddin Attar, Mantiq Utthair atau ‘Musyawarah Burung.’ Dalam drama “Sidang Burung” yang melepaskan imaginasi kanak-kanak untuk mencipta wujud heroik masa depannya, drama ini turut dianyam dengan kelincahan teknik yang agak surreal yang sesuai dengan kembara minda imaginatif dunia kanak-kanak

Terdapat beberapa unsur yang agak surreal juga di dalam drama  “Pintu”. Ini antara lain adalah cerita tentang manusia sebuah kota, manusia yang telah dilumpuhkan dan dikuasai. Dalam drama seperti ini yang berusaha lari daripada kaedah konvensional, penulis kurang mementingkan plot yang berpaksi pada  hukum kausaliti atau sebab-akibat. Isa Kamari juga mengindahkan skripnya dengan penampilan  lagu, puisi dan narrator.

Sementara drama “Restoran” bukan sahaja membicarakan salah satu keperluan asas manusia, tetapi bagaimana di kota yang maju, canggih dan dianggap berbudaya, ada dimensi kemanusiaan yang tidak dapat diselesaikan oleh elemen pascamoden dan robotik.

Penerbitan buku drama ini bukan sahaja menambah kepustakaan drama Melayu Singapura, malah drama Melayu umumnya.

SN Dato’ Dr Anwar Ridhwan

PINTU - This debut play from Isa Kamari shows plenty of promise, with the novelist and poet integrating many lyrical moments into an engaging, if at times esoteric play. Incantation serves as a particularly effective linguistic technique here. The title of the play for door, and the motif of doors - cramped complicated pathways leading towards all manner of things - recur in several interesting ways.
- Straits Times, 28 Dec 2006

“Pintu” karya Isa Kamari, sebuah teks drama mutakhir yang mendapat sambutan sewaktu dipentaskan. Terlihat ia sebagai sebuah teks semiotik yang idealistik. Pintu bagaikan sebuah indeksikal kehidupan yang memasuki dunia real yang pelbagai makna dan signifikasinya. Kombinasi teks dengan unsur moden dan pascamoden, realiti dengan magisnya dan permainan bawah sedar, yang menjadikan drama ini sebuah eksprimental yang berjaya di tangan seorang dramatis yang faham dalam idiom kepengarangannya. Di tangan narator ada suara dialogisme pengarang yang secara implisit menyuarakan permasalahan kemelayuan. 1970an Melayu melarat, 1980an Melayu simpang siur, 1990an Melayu gaduh sama sendiri, 2000an Melayu tersesat masuk JI, dan begitulah Melayu hilang identiti, membazir dan tiada arah. Idealisme drama ini menjadikan pintu pembuka fikir, tikamannya tajam tetapi tidak melukakan dan tikaman itu diperlukan kerana ia bakal menyembuhkan. - Mana Sikana

Straits Times

28 December 2006

Door leads to promising debut

by Hong Xinyi

This debut play from Isa Kamari shows plenty of promise, with the novelist and poet integrating many lyrical moments into an engaging, if at times esoteric play.

Incantation serves as a particularly effective linguistic technique here. The title of the play for door, and the motif of doors - cramped complicated pathways leading towards all manner of things - recur in several interesting ways.

For example, a yuppie played by Saiful Amri Ahmad Elahi, recites repeatedly for the audience the process of his daily routine commute. He waits for the bus, a door opens; he taps his EZlink card at the MRT gantry, a door opens; he boards the train, a door opens. These perfectly mundane moments coalesce into the dull, mutely horrific substance of a modern urban life, a series of mechanical actions leading towards a black hole without meaning.

Not all the vignettes woven into this play worked. Some, like the sub-plot involving an affair between a young woman and a religious cleric seemed oddly inconsequential, although M Saffri A Manaf delivered a solid, fiery performance as the latter. Actor Erwandy Bernama also impressed with his subtle performace as a young man detained under suspicion of terrorist sympathies.

By and large, however, director Sani Hussin shaped a production that was oddly cheering, like a dream-like fairytale that stops just shy of going into full-blast nihilism mode. The issues that whizzed by in the play were no means light-weight - the definition of community success, and the often problematic entanglemant between overlapping definitions of religion and politics.

But steering clear of vitriol and pessimism, the play instead uses a 1950s pop song Buka Pintu (Malay for Open The Door) as its musical chorus: "Open the door, open the door/ There's a dog barking/ Open the door, open the door/ It's raining and I'm getting wet".

The ensemble cast sings these lines with a desperately cheerful tone, like the ragged end of an absurd musical, where instead of the big finish you get a growing realisation that nobody knows where all this is leading to.

TODAY

TEATER Ekamatra’s Pintu — titled after the Malay word for “door” — started out with a rich and potentially controversial premise but ended up being only a tepid, conceptual exercise.

Situated at the heart of ambivalences about the Malay identity and its religious politics, the play — which was performed at the Playden at The Arts House last Thursday to Saturday — was made up of potentially intriguing vignettes about literal and symbolic doorways.

In one story, a white-collar executive walks through the same doors every day, presenting a common semblance of urban banality that is disrupted when he is shown to be linked to the same terrorist group asa man on death row. At the same time, his wife is sleeping with a religious leader obsessed with building a bigger front door for his mosque, so that worshippers may take a better look at him during prayer sessions.

The door was a metaphor for a longing for religious revelation that never comes or for a quest for existential fulfillment that is ultimately futile.

The play strived to portray the hypocrisies and self-delusions that accompany the attempt to become something larger than yourself at the expense of empathy and compassion. This truth can be a locked door, as one of the characters pointed out.

In the end, however, the stories in the play failed to have an emotional impact owing to a lack of elaboration on the part of Isa Kamari’s script.

The touch-and-go feel of the narratives could also be a bad theatre trend passed down from many a past production by The Necessary Stage, since many of Ekamatra’s playwrights mentored with TNS.

However, the actors tried their best to indulge in the gravitas of their brief scenes, with mixed results.

Audiences might have connected better with the messages and implications of the performance if the narratives in the play had been drawn out further, with stronger links made between the colourful characters.