Spellbound

Shafeeq Shajahan, playwright and director of award-winning British-Malaysian theatre production company, Liver & Lung Productions, explains his love for stories and the magic of performance

- Koyyi Chin

“There’s something profoundly beautiful about being in a room with 300 people, where the lights are dim, and the only visible thing is a singular column of light illuminating a character onstage as they deliver a monologue,” says founder and director of Liver & Lung Productions, Shafeeq Shajahan. “And I think there’s nothing more magical than that.”

After recently watching Melur the Musical, Liver & Lung’s latest and most ambitious work in February, I can attest to the sense of wonder that Shafeeq describes about the performance arts. As the lights dimmed and the stage remained, one couldn’t help but be transported into the narrative, swept by the music that filled the hall and the characters whose stories resonated with the audience. The musical, set in colonial Malaya and revolving around the Malayan Emergency, was more than just a tragic romance. Its titular character was the Pontianak, a mythological creature spawned from feminine rage and loss.

In 2020, Liver & Lung bagged three BOH Cameronian Arts Awards for its musical adaptation of the late Yasmin Ahmad’s Sepet. And in 2017, another BOH Cameronian Award for innovation in musical theatre for Mahsuri and Other Peculiar Tales, a series of old Malaysian folk tales taken for a modern spin and performed in a cafe. The theatre production company was also shortlisted for the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award that very same year.

From stories that explore the layered intimacies of self-exploration and interpersonal relationship to ones that depict the darker sides of humanity, Liver & Lung’s repertoire is daring, pushing the envelope when it comes to genre as well as its themes, with each show just as unapologetically bold and human as the last.