In 'Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me' at KLPac, actors (from left) Donnelly, Yap and Judd step back into the harrowing roles of three men – an American doctor, an Irish journalist and an English academic – imprisoned in a windowless cell in Beirut. Photo: Tat Chin
It's a curious detail, almost poetic in its timing. One of Joe Hasham’s favourite theatre plays – Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me by Irish playwright Frank McGuinness – has never made it to the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) stage.
Despite Hasham being the longtime artistic director of both The Actors Studio and KLPac, the play remained absent from the venue’s repertoire.
Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me last appeared in January 2011 at The Actors Studio @Lot 10, a rooftop arts venue in KL now long gone.
Next week, Hasham returns to Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, restaging the powerful drama as part of KLPac’s 20th anniversary celebrations.
From Aug 15-24, the play takes over Pentas 2 – and there’s a twist: the original 2011 cast is reuniting for the occasion.
Trio back together
Fourteen years on, British actor Charles Donnelly, Australian Kingsley Judd, and Malaysian Gavin Yap step back into the harrowing roles of three men – an American doctor, an Irish journalist and an English academic – imprisoned in a windowless cell in Beirut, Lebanon.
Cut off from the world, bound by fear and fragile hope, they face the question no one dares to ask out loud: will they ever make it out alive?
For Hasham, the play left its mark on him – he’s wanted to bring it back for years, and figured now is as good a time as any.
Hasham returns to 'Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me', restaging the powerful drama as part of KLPac’s 20th anniversary celebrations. Photo: The Star/Izzarafiq Alias
“It’s one of the most powerful scripts I’ve ever worked on. With KLPac’s 20th anniversary and Ireland’s 30 years of diplomatic presence in Malaysia, it felt like the perfect moment to restage it. Collaborating with the Embassy of Ireland and the Australian High Commission, as well as reuniting with our original international cast has made it even more meaningful,” says Hasham in a recent interview.
He adds that they will stay true to the play’s original spirit, as the story’s strength lies in its simplicity and emotional intensity.
Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me is based on the real-life abduction of Irish author Brian Keenan, who in 1986 was taken by militia on his way to his teaching job in Beirut, where he was held hostage for four-and-a-half years.
A year after his release, Keenan recounted his horrific ordeal in an autobiographical book, An Evil Cradling, which won the Irish Times Literary Prize for Non-Fiction in 1991 and was adapted into a film in 2003.
A cultural bridge
Australian-raised but born in Lebanon, Hasham shares a personal connection to the play’s Beirut setting.
“This restaging is about revisiting something powerful and letting a new audience experience it,” he says.
In the play, three men go from strangers to friends to comrades, and the same could be said for Donnelly, Judd and Yap, who share an undeniable chemistry on stage.
“I never thought we would do it again and to be honest, I wasn’t sure I wanted to, because I look back on the 2011 and 2012 productions very fondly. But I love this play, and I love the character so much that it brought me back,” says Yap.
Cut off from the outside world, the characters in this classic Irish theatre work fight despair with bursts of song and laughter. Photo: Weeling Chen
Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, with Hasham as director, was also shown in George Town, Penang and Singapore back then.
“More than anything, what strikes me the most about the play is its humanity. It really is a story about the resilience of the human spirit, brotherhood and friendship. It feels great to be back and to be working with Joe, Kingsley and Charles again. It feels like brothers reunited,” says Yap.
He adds that the play still feels as relevant today as when it was first produced back in the 1990s.
First staged in 1992, Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me ran on London’s West End and then on Broadway in New York, where it received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Foreign Play.
Currently based in Dublin, Ireland, McGuinness is heartened to hear that his play still resonates to this day, making its way to Malaysia again.
“In this world still driven by violence and wars, I hope its message – that to survive, we need to learn to live with each other, to acknowledge and to celebrate, and even enjoy our differences – hits home for audiences,” says McGuinness in a KLPac press handout.
A timely message
Given the ongoing war in Gaza, the play’s themes – displacement, captivity, endurance, and the search for shared humanity amid conflict – feel more urgent and resonant than ever.
“Sadly, it is a tale that could be taken from present-day headlines. That said, I am so grateful to revisit and restage this magnificent piece of writing and to reinhabit the role of Edward Sheridan,” says Judd.
'When I walked into the rehearsal room, I could feel the butterflies taking wing as we prepared to step over the edge and once more into the pit,' says Donnelly. Photo: Weeling Chen
With absolutely no contact with the outside world and an uncertain fate, the characters in Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me fight boredom by breaking out into song and laughter, pretend they’re in a flying car and do just about anything to stay sane.
At the same time, they must also learn to overcome personal and nationalistic differences.
Reflecting on what it’s like to reprise their roles after 13 years, Donnelly says it’s only natural that each of them has grown emotionally since the last staging – and that growth will inevitably shape their performances.
“Our life experiences since then may colour our response to the situation the characters find themselves in. That’s not to say that anything will change, but there may be subtle differences in the performance,” says Donnelly.
“When I walked into the rehearsal room, I could feel the butterflies taking wing as we prepared to step over the edge and once more into the pit,” he concludes.
Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me plays at Pentas 2 of KLPac in Sentul Park (Jalan Strachan, off Jalan Sultan Azlan Shah), KL from Aug 15-24. Supported by the Embassy of Ireland in Malaysia and the Australian High Commission in Malaysia, the restaging by The Actors Studio also marks the 30th anniversary of Ireland’s embassy in KL.
