Come What, Come May

It is said that the arts offer comfort, insight and discourse in times of trouble – and none does this better than William Shakespeare. The Peak speaks to Dato’ Faridah Merican and Omar Ali of the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre on its timely resurrection of Dato’ Seri, the Bahasa Melayu adaption of The Tragedy of Macbeth, that takes place this month.

- Kirat Kaur

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble. Most would recognise this as one of the many famous quotes from William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, and, yet, it somehow accurately sums up the experience of meeting Dato’ Faridah Merican and Omar Ali, captains at the helm of the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre’s (KLPAC) upcoming Dato’ Seri. No, they aren’t placing a curse on an enemy, but rather bubbling with excitement, playfully teasing each other and, most of all, filled with a fiery passion for theatre and the arts. This time, the passion is directed at Dato’ Seri, the Bahasa Melayu adaptation of Macbeth.

“This isn’t the first time the play has been staged at KLPAC,” says Dato’ Faridah, Executive Producer of KLPAC. “In fact, it was performed in 2016 to much success. The audiences simply loved it! They were raving about the language and pleasantly surprised by how relevant the story was to today’s times. Who would’ve expected a story set in the late Middle Ages of Scotland would ring true for the lives of modern-day Malaysians?” Why, indeed, is a story written five centuries ago by an Englishman, no less, pertinent in a land 10,000km away? “The answer is simple: Macbeth is a timeless, universal human story,” enlightens Omar, Director of Dato’ Seri. “When you strip away the embellishments, the story is about power, responsibility and its devastating effects.”