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Review of Best Of (His Story) by The Necessary Stage


I am talking to my friends beside me. We chat about school, about mutual friends, about the drear in our lives. 

Then a man, tall and smiling, strides into the room. The lights do not dim: I assume he is simply another audience member. But he does not go to the empty seat; instead, he goes right to centre stage, and greets us. There, he begins telling his story. This feels like a conversation where only one person is talking, but a conversation all the same. 

He faces the audience as he expounds on his story. He maintains eye contact with a few of the audience members, does a few hand gestures, and tells a couple of jokes - almost as if he were giving a prepared presentation. Yet, the intimate setting of the black box provides a genuine sincerity. His story, of course, being one that is distinctively personal and private.

He bears his soul, his innermost thoughts to the audience, as if we were his closest friends. He talks of his closest friends, his family, and most poignantly, his wife. This story revolves around the divorce that he had to go through, but he elaborates on so much more on that. He talks of his childhood: how he grew up with his grandfather being his role model, and how that man taught him to be a man.

We learn that he struggled to maintain his marriage because he failed to reconcile his roles of a husband, a Muslim, and a friend. Divorce is inevitable when his wife calls him a degrading slur which coarsely questions his manhood, at once proving the fundamental differences between both man and wife. He can no longer keep his pride and his marriage: he must choose one or the other, so he chooses the former. 

He later rues that he should have gone after his wife, to take her back when she moved out of their house. We see that he is still a flawed man no matter, who struggles and will continue to struggle with finding his identity. But because Sani Hussin does such a good job involving the audience, I felt like I was truly close to the character he portrayed. I empathised and sympathised with his story, because he took the time to tell it, both patiently and earnestly. 

In the penultimate scene, he goes to a chair on the stage, pulls a translucent screen over him to cover himself, and begins to sob. We see him cry, and we see a man who is fragile and deeply hurt, and not because he did anything truly 'wrong'. We share in his struggle automatically: we, who understand his story after hearing him tell it for 70 intimate minutes. 

An average man, who goes through something that is not uncommon in today's society. But the pain he feels and we see is all real, and all sacred. So, I cry with him. 

And when he does a Malay dance (something he enjoys and is good at) to end the play, he smiles widely. So, I smile with him. 

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