True to this, KLSP has primarily been focusing on theatre in education as they work with students in primary and secondary schools, as well as tertiary institutions.
“Even across the English-speaking world, Shakespeare, for the most part, has often not been taught effectively,” said KLSP executive director Lim Soon Heng. “By teaching Shakespeare and getting students to perform, they can learn.
“Given that the command of the English language has slipped [in Malaysia], Shakespeare has become more difficult to the point that, when students are exposed to his works, it’s only one poem or monologue,” added the 69-year-old, who graduated as an English major from the United States.
According to him, students can learn English while still being strong in the Malay language, without one being at the expense of the other.
“When children realise Shakespeare can be fun and interesting, instead of being a daunting writer who writes in a language they don’t understand, that’s the delight.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by KLSP artistic director Lim Kien Lee, who told FMT: “When we go to schools, we often perform to an audience that does not know anything about Shakespeare or even theatre.
“For many of them, it would be their first time watching a professional theatre show, and they might have thought theatre was boring. So, it’s a joy seeing their reaction to Shakespeare plays,” said the 47-year-old accountant by training.
For the masses
KLSP aims to “demystify Shakespeare” by truncating parts of the Bard’s plays and weaving them with contemporary English narration. For primary school students, a storytelling format is used, with each show lasting about 100 minutes.
“A lot of times when public school kids watch us, they say they finally understand the context of the poem they learnt at school. This makes it very worthwhile,” Kien Lee said.
Describing these students as their “future audience”, he added: “You need to start them young and give them something interesting and engaging.”
KLSP began as a group called “Shakespeare Demystified” in 2011 before changing its name to KL Shakespeare Players in 2014. Its first show, “Julius Caesar”, took place in 2011 to a total audience of 200 at the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre.
Two years later, they staged “The Merry Wives of Windsor”. “It’s a comedy, and suddenly people saw that Shakespeare can be very funny,” Soon Heng recalled fondly.
Soon, the troupe found themselves travelling to Penang, Langkawi, Ipoh, Sabah, Sarawak, and even Manila and Seoul to perform. In 2018 alone, they did more than 90 shows.
That year, they also started “KL Exchange Theatre”, a form of interactive performance that serves as a platform for discussion on various topics such as gender issues, unconscious bias, and cultural differences.
“During exchange theatre, we first do a short skit of a scenario on a particular topic, after which the audience discusses it,” Kien Lee explained.
“The team will then perform the skit a second time, but this time, audience members can stop the scene at any point and jump in to replace a character and say their piece.”
All the world’s a stage
When the pandemic struck in 2020, Soon Heng and Kien Lee decided to move all their shows online, including exchange theatre. As Kien Lee put it: “In times of crises, we need to pivot and find new ways to work with new restrictions.”
They soon developed a virtual storytelling format, and received funding from Yayasan Sime Darby (YSD) in November that year to introduce these performances to public schools and teacher-training institutes.
This resulted in them performing 17 online storytelling shows. Last year, YSD sponsored a further four storytelling sessions of “Sang Kancil” stories.
Altogether, KLSP managed to perform 72 shows across 2020 and 2021 – no small feat, considering the devastating impact the pandemic had on the local theatre scene.
More recently, KLSP spent about six weeks working with children from the B40 community who live at three different PPR flats in the Klang Valley.
“Before we began, we recruited them for our workshop series by going to the community centres within the flats. The goal was to work with the children on mental health so that, when they joined us, they would feel happy and safe,” Soon Heng explained.
“During the last session that lasted for about five hours, the children did a small performance they created on their own,” he added with pride.
The programme, which ended in late March, was held every weekend at a studio in Bukit Tunku, Kuala Lumpur, and was attended by 24 children from Year 4 to Form 3. Five facilitators conducted the sessions, which included theatre games and activities.
And with international borders having reopened, KLSP is not resting on its laurels. In June, the company will be heading to Milan to stage “Old Lear” for a competition organised by Italian performing arts theatre Spazio Teatro No’hma.
‘Accomplished and satisfied’
At a time when companies – performing arts-related or otherwise – have been forced to shutter, Soon Heng and Kien Lee are thankful they have managed to keep going.
“We feel both accomplished and satisfied because I think we are one of the very few theatre companies who got to keep working consistently during the pandemic,” Kien Lee said. “We are also grateful to have been able to provide actors with a source of income.”
Learn more about KL Shakespeare Players via its website, as well as Facebook and Instagram profiles.