New Indonesian Plays

New Indonesian Plays

I must admit that I know very little about Indonesian culture and history, let alone drama. This is probably because there are very few published anthologies of Indonesian drama in English translation and fewer still performed in the UK.

In 2019 the Indonesia Dramatic Reading Festival (IDRF) was invited to showcase some plays as part of the London Book Fair. This anthology has been published to promote Indonesian drama to international readers and cultivate a new audience for these plays, which are little known to UK audiences. There are 7 plays, all quite concise, and the collection tackles a wide array of issues, all hard-hitting but very varied in content ‘from religious teens to sex workers, to the survivors of political turbulence…providing insight into the changing nature of Indonesian society today.’

I think that reading plays in translation is often quite difficult as you never really capture the essence of the original language. Understanding more about Indonesian culture is something which I felt that I ought to have done before reading these plays, as the historical conflicts, and cultural and religious tensions are something which I feel I should know more about in order to explore these plays more fully.

This anthology was extremely interesting from an intellectual point of view, as was the introduction and history behind bringing these plays to a new audience. I enjoyed some of the plays, but I must admit I found others hard, either because I felt I didn't grasp the nature of the pieces or because a few were quite unusual in their content. Two headless ghosts talking to each other in one play, and a little girl having a conversation with her bedroom door and a gecko on her ceiling in another are just two examples. I found The Silent Song of the Genjer Flowers very poignant and The Makassar Trilogy interesting as it is a docu-theatre piece with a very contemporary, almost Artaudian performance style, but the others were less accessible. If you are looking for contemporary plays which explore the changing nature of Indonesia today, then this a great anthology to read in order to understand more, but if you are looking for new performance texts, then I think you're going to find these plays hard going.