Calling the Local into Play: Raising the Dead in Terence Toh’s Restless
- Robin
- 17 hours ago
- 5 min read
Does theater force us to confront our specters or does it allow us to escape them?
What possibilities are art afforded when enacted in a Malaysian context? What qualities make a play Malaysian? These are questions that the Literature and Drama Society’s Local Play invites. In an ambitious, well-executed staging, the cast and crew valiantly bring Terence Toh’s Restless to life, but their capabilities are ultimately hampered by the mediocrity of Toh’s play.
The story opens on three friends who have just moved into a new house in the city. Daniel (Shaz), a “sensitive guy”, mopes around in a post-breakup funk; Jenny (Feena) is a struggling reporter whose pragmatism settles her into a mothering role; George (Naushan) is a roguish, devil-may-care type. Their different personalities set the stage for conflict, but this comes from another direction—the two ghosts who haunt the house. Edmund (Daniel, thrillingly magnificent) is a vengeful self-proclaimed mob boss while Natasha (a brooding Jessica) is genuinely frightening at first as a jilted bride who committed suicide and has been unable to forgive her fiancé or herself.
However, the motley bunch of characters soon causes the writing to sag under its own weight. The characters’ motivations and relationships are muddled: the ghosts terrorize the humans because they feed on their fear, yet they also hope to drive them out like the previous tenants. Daniel implausibly falls for Natasha and attempts suicide when she rejects him; later, Natasha and the humans have an abrupt heart-to-heart and are reconciled. The same irregularity colors the play in general: relentless raillery and heated arguments are interspersed with quiet moments that hint at the characters’ sincere love and care for each other. The anticlimactic shuffling undermines the play’s emotional and tonal coherence, but the core physical clash between the humans and the ghosts is nonetheless compellingly sustained by the actors. This leads to several thrilling scenes in which an increasingly hostile Edmund ratchets up the conflict, culminating in an all out battle between Edmund and everyone else. The action then peters out with Natasha released from her ghostly form upon coming to terms with her past, while the humans finally move out, leaving behind a lone Edmund with the devastating news that the house will be demolished.
The play’s straightforward plot effectively conveys a sense that developments are proceeding apace, but it also renders the characters invisible at times, as though they exist primarily as passive receptacles for events rather than as agents who shape them. Despite the intensity of the action, the characters emerge from it unscathed and take their leave not much changed from when we first meet them. Absent from Toh’s play, then, is the kind of epiphany or transformation that stems from a gradual but radical rearrangement of the self. Moments of self-realization in Restless arrive in erratic, spontaneous flashes: George returning to help fight Edmund instead of running away, Edmund forced to face the truth when his fantasy of being a gangster is torn apart, Natasha’s self-forgiveness freeing her from her past. These are naturally the play’s strongest scenes, for they illustrate the fact of being human in all its depth and specificity.
What Restless gets right, on the other hand, is the easy and explicit way in which it grounds itself in an everyday Malaysianness. This is achieved not only through the setting or the actors’ occasional shifts into Malaysian English, but also through the play’s treatment of specific cultural anxieties. For example, when Jenny hesitates before the opportunity to work for a Singaporean PR firm, George lashes out at her lack of appreciation for “Singaporean dollars”. George’s envy replicates the perennial Malaysian fixation on Singapore’s economic superiority, even as Jenny is driven by her attachment to the familiar to resist the pressure to relocate.
Racial and religious anxieties also converge in the figure of the fraudulent exorcist (Joti) who is hired to rid the house of the ghosts. In a colorful but questionable episode, the exorcist, who speaks in exaggeratedly accented English, details contingencies for dealing with ghosts of different religions. Joss sticks and “JAKIM-approved”, halal-certified anti-ghost toolkits poke fun at the intersection between organized religion and local superstition, but Toh never explores what it means in a multiracial and multifaith society that such categories remain intransigent even in death. Consequently, the poking fails to stab at the heart of things and comes off as irreverent, juvenile quips. The humor tips into bathos; emotional and political tensions are dissipated before they can take shape. Rather than forcing the audience to confront uncomfortable realities, Restless repeatedly offers them an escape hatch.
Such a move, while superficially entertaining, does not come without its dangers.
Admitting Malaysia as the play’s setting without questioning its premises risks reproducing and reinforcing the same old structures of power and exclusion. Implicit in this is Toh’s decision to make romantic love the play’s central psychological axis. The narrative falls back on tired tropes: the depressed and abandoned lover, the lusty Don Juan, the wronged woman haunted by her lover’s betrayal. This both flattens the characters and reinforces sexist stereotypes. George brags about his sexual conquests and extolls the virtues of infidelity, objectifying women and normalizing masculine sexual promiscuity; in the same breath, Edmund rants against women who dress as “sluts” and stay out late instead of doing the cooking at home. By resorting to sexual innuendo and “hot takes” to engage the audience, Toh’s play tries to chase laughs by being provocative instead of insightful, and ends up being implicated in the very attitudes it attempts to satirize.
Nevertheless, on a certain level, the play works.
Despite the limitations of Toh’s script, the production takes full advantage of the interpretive possibilities presented by the ghosts’ supernatural presence. The direction integrates different elements—the makeup and lighting are especially brilliant—for an all-around convincing artistic vision. Throwing themselves into the performance, the actors inject energy and life into the material, successfully preventing the play from falling flat.
In an early scene, Jenny remarks that ghosts are everywhere to be found in Malaysia, and that Malaysians have long learned to live with them. But can it really be said that ghosts do not trouble us as long as we leave them alone, in a play that thematizes the incompatibility between the living and the dead? What does it mean that the exorcism and the holy water fail to eradicate the ghosts, who persist in haunting the house? It turns out that one must, in fact, bother old ghosts—and that this is precisely art’s purpose.
Restless is at its most powerful when it offers a vision for the future of Malaysian theater: one where plays mirror Malaysians’ lived experiences yet boldly shatter that mirror to bare the fictions that underlie everyday life. Latent in Toh’s play is a unique hauntological potential—the exploration of how unresolved, incomplete pasts linger and structure the present—but this remains unexploited, as Toh stops short of interrogating what, exactly, haunts Malaysian society. What do the ghosts in the play represent? A theater of the future would take this question as a starting point and compel us to face our personal and collective ghosts rather than laugh them off.
And Malaysian audiences are ready for it.
Note from LADS:
A huge thank you to Terence Toh for allowing us to use this wonderfully ghostly script and bring it to life! We’re so proud of everyone in LADS for their hard work, creativity, and energy in making the magic happen on stage. And of course, thank you to everyone who came down to support us! We hope you had an amazing time and left with plenty of laughter and joy! As always, rest well don’t restless! - LADS 25/26!
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