No freedom to express

Cancelled: This varsity play was slammed after some people, who had only seen a video of it, found some scenes ‘suggestive’ and too hot to handle. — Facebook

IN my teenage years, I attended a local boarding school that had a penchant for fostering competition among its students. We had inter-class, inter-form, inter-dorm, and inter-house competitions in everything, including singing and performing plays. One memory stands out in particular: In one of our many competitions, my class (or was it my house?) staged Raja Bersiong, the story of the Fanged King in 10th century Kedah who, after tasting blood in his food, became a cruel and authoritarian vampire.

We were free to stage the plays in any way we liked. In one scene in our play, the evil king was about to rape a young woman. We didn’t show this of course, only that the king jumped onto a bed where a woman lay, before the lights went out. The screams from our audience of schoolgirls indicated that we all knew what the action implied.