In the film
Election, Reese Witherspoon and Chris Klein battled for the
student council presidency in a high school contest fraught with name-calling
and petty vindictiveness. Election Day demonstrates that grown-up politics
can be just as juvenile, taking as its setting the 1999 Malaysian general
election that swept UMNO back into power.
The set piece at the heart of the play is a wickedly funny portrait
of the different groups canvassing outside a polling station, each side
convinced that their candidate has been chosen by god to lead the constituency.
The average student council candidate's hand-drawn posters look sophisticated
next to the tactics adopted by this slightly crazed grassroots effort
- golf umbrellas, fluorescent vests, and hackneyed slogans trotted
out in a vaguely sinister fashion.
The play is not really a political one, though, or perhaps it is more
correct to say it studies not politics itself but how the political
can become the personal and vice versa. Its focus is on three housemates
affected in different ways by the election - Dedric, a Chinese
activist; Fozi, a London-trained Malay architect, and Francis, the crabby
Indian narrator.
Huzir Sulaiman's script is filled with acidly funny observations about
the state of Malaysian society and the quirks of each racial group.
In a kind of reverse political correctness, there is no demographic
group that is not dissected by Sulaiman's pen.
The real treat here, though, is in Sulaiman's performance. He plays
every character in the show (apart from the enigmatic femme fatale,
Natasha) - ducking in and out of accents with uncanny facility,
subtly changing his body language to alter his age, race and gender
at will. The effect is mesmerising, like a Malaysian one-man Under
Milk Wood.
In the end Election Day is a rather charming study of how
human beings in a claustrophobic environment can get just a little carried
away with their beliefs. Its plotting, however, is audaciously implausible
- the ending has Natasha returning to turn the entire story on
its head - and its comments on politics are more witty than insightful.
Where it succeeds, though, is at the level of pure entertainment -
I do not recall an evening out at the theatre when I have had more fun. |
"I do not recall an evening out at the theatre when I have had
more fun"
|
