Teater Ekamatra’s La Luna a crowd-pleasing, if simplistic, fable

La Luna

Teater Ekamatra
Singtel Waterfront Theatre
April 16, 7pm

For the longest time, the cloistered Kampung Bras Basah has been led by the tyrannical village headman and imam Tok Hassan, who bans rock music and enacts antiquated forms of physical punishment to keep villagers in line. When Hanie arrives from the city to open a women-only lingerie shop, Tok Hassan finds his patriarchal authority challenged.

Teater Ekamatra’s Esplanade-commissioned stage adaptation of La Luna – Singapore’s 2025 entry for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars – is crowd-pleasing fare at Pesta Raya – Malay Festival of Arts.

It stages a conflict between authoritarianism and freedom, urbanites and villagers. Hanie’s arrival is a literal earthquake as the villagers shake from actual tremors in the ground, a moment for physical comedy even as it is an on-the-nose metaphor for seismic changes to come.

This rousing story of a new arrival wreaking havoc is delivered by a powerhouse cast working overtime to entertain the crowd.

Many of them break out into song mid-dialogue and, were this a variety contest as it sometimes feels, it is Siti Khalijah Zainal (who plays a trapped tailor Jenab) and Fauzie Laily (Tok Siak Qahar, a community do-gooder) who emerge victorious with their power ballads bringing the audience to rapturous applause.

It is powered, too, by strong acting. Sani Hussin’s tongkat-wielding Tok Hassan is rendered thoroughly unlikeable, an archetypal patriarch villain with an insatiable appetite for ruthless behaviour and misogyny. Mat Noh, played by Rizman Putra as the village head’s comic underling, is a sycophantic construction boss who parrots Tok Hassan’s edicts.

They are played against Munah Bagharib’s Hanie, a force of both assertiveness against patriarchal norms and tenderness towards the band of women like Cikgu Enah (Farhana M. Noor) she gathers in her little refuge.

Playwright Ridhwan Saidi’s script keeps the action brisk and entertaining, if imperfectly so.

The scenes which are stratified by gender are provoking depictions of how space is shaped by the people who occupy them.

La Luna, the name of Hanie’s lingerie shop, in particular, becomes a space for solidarity and mutual education among women, a small square of utopia for them to escape oppressive patriarchy. Meanwhile, Tok Hassan commands most of the public space that is marked by threats and even physical violence.

The story is framed by a young city-raised girl Azura (Haziqah Hashir), who is trying to write a thesis on her village titled “Of Beras (rice) And Bras”. But this device does not feel integral to the story and one is left wondering what Azura’s academese about the village that bookends the play is meant to convey.

Some elements of the story get short shrift, like Hanie’s blossoming romance with Salihin (Fir Rahman) and Azura’s with Yazid (Ali Mazrin).

Instead of a realist kampung setting that drips with nostalgia, director and set designer Mohd Fared Jainal proves himself again an innovator of stage design, and creates a structure made of wooden slats that feels at once evocative of the village and the modern city. It is an incredibly fluid space for actors to move through, creating a sense of seamlessness to the action.

In opting for easy black-and white binaries, La Luna reads like something of a fable with easy villains and heroes instead of a social study of tussling values. The moral of its story is that the oppressed, too, can come together to assert their rights, that the semblance of unlimited power is also a mere illusion.

There is not much room for more complexity, but La Luna, at the end of this struggle between the new and the old, is an uplifting one.

Book It/La Luna

Where: Singtel Waterfront Theatre, 8 Raffles Avenue
When: Till April 19, 8pm (Fridays), 3 and 8pm (Saturdays), 3pm (Sundays)
Admission: From $50, eligible for SG Culture Pass
Info: str.sg/Dikf