Meeting Anike and the Writer

The last play to learn and read. Finally… The semester has come to an end. Anike a play by Wong Phui Nam and I was lucky to meet the playwright in person on 3rd of April 2006. Although this play is a parallel to Antigone by Sophocles, the setting of the play Anike is more local to the Malaysian readers.

In describing Anike, the playwright considered it as a dramatic poem where people can enjoy reading it as a poem instead of staging the play. I found this quite interesting and different as I never thought that there was such thing as dramatic poem. I agreed with him though, as his way of presenting this play in words looked more like poetry than a play. As quoted from him "poetry is meant to be read".

The other thing about this play that is quite different from Antigone is that, the description of the rotting corpse really made me fell sick. When asked about this, Wong Phui Nam said that he wanted the readers to see how cruel the Raja is in the story that he has the gut to do such a cruel thing to other people.

Lastly, the play Anike is a good play to read and the message that the playwright tries to bring about is just so relevant to the current issues that have happened in any countries around the world lately. I'm really looking forward to watch the staging of this play as it's going to be brought over to UPM.