The wretched of Salina's Kampong Kambing: a treatise on Teater Kami's 2025 staging of Salina

How does one begin to adapt a seminal work like Salina? This is a monumental task Teater Kami is no stranger to, having staged the play before in the 90s and now in this new offering retrofitted for a newer generation, with a shortened runtime from slightly over 3 hours to about 2 hours and 30 minutes.

In A. Samad Said's Salina, Kampong Kambing is inextricably linked to Salina's essence, its residents sharing her circumstances in terms of living and material conditions. The characters of Kampong Kambing carry with them the traumas they have experienced during the war as they encounter the realities of a post-war environment that has deemed them a wretched lot. No detail is spared as A Samad's pen skillfully crocheted this searing multifaceted tome.

Teater Kami, to its credit, has made a seemingly impossible task look within reach by adapting this play. The actors and actresses embodied their characters relatively well, taking care to stay as true to their character's natures from the book as possible, and the set itself admirably captured the look and feel of Kampong Kambing. The sounds of Salina are faithfully reproduced, with the motifs of Hindi music and period Malay music punctuating scenes involving Abdul Fakar, and particularly certain scenes involving the blossoming interactions between Hilmy and Nahidah which was a welcome touch that reflected the growing Indian influence in Malay entertainment at the time e.g. the nickname of Abdul Fakar's other woman Madhubala, the midnight screening of the Hindi film etc. The play itself does a very good job of smoothing out the narrative, making it very easy for even newcomers to theatre or sastera to follow which is apt as a significant amount of audience members at the showing I went for were youths.

Ariati Papar and Fir Rahman as Salina and Abdul Fakar respectively were perfectly cast as they both worked well off each other and never looked out of place as the couple. Rusydina Afiqah as Zarinah was a tour de force on her own, skillfully embodying deep-seated anger, resentment, and also a cunning that enabled her to truly command attention at pivotal moments such as Nahidah's disappearance and her scheming to shoo Sunarto away or entice Nahidah into becoming a hostess. Rizal Aiman as Hilmy too had a standout performance, adding charming touches of naivete as well as maturity in navigating his rite of passage as a young man in Kampong Kambing. Amirah Yahya as Nahidah was a solid fit, lending charm and vulnerability into a role that involved near-constant interaction with her family as well as residents of Kampong Kambing and her workplace in the restaurant she worked at. Shahril Wahid as Sunarto was a good foil for Zarina and Abdul Fakar and added depth to the rest of the characters. The supporting cast of Salina too did an admirable job in adding the necessary moods when scenes called for them.

As mentioned before, it is quite a tall order for anyone to adapt quite arguably one of the most important works of modern Malay literature given the context in which it is written and the need to make the work palatable for an audience that is far divorced from it and this is, unfortunately, where the shortcomings crop up. In trimming the story for the play, Teater Kami has had to accept that a significant amount of the richness of A. Samad Said's prose in fleshing out the themes and characters of Salina will be tempered down or most notably, be absent in certain scenes.

Although the play faithfully retains the initial interaction between Hilmy and Salina about their backgrounds in the beginning, more could have been done to explore the background of central characters like Salina and Zarina because their developments are crucial to their interactions with the other characters and provides a lot of much needed context e.g. Zarina's background as a hostess in encouraging Nahidah to be one herself, Salina's sheltered upbringing and the uprooting of her life as factors in her choices. 

Another aspect of the book I felt was noticeably missing is the contestation of morality by various players that was ever present throughout the book. There is a pivotal scene in the book set in Masjid Sultan where Haji Karman and Hilmy were discussing the residents of Kampong Kambing and their supposed inclination towards immorality to which Hilmy rebuffs with clarity, stating that the residents were products of their lived realities and environment (post WWII) and that there is more to guiding others to the "straight path" than just preaching and mere pity which would have added more colour and depth to the play's presentation. Arguably, Razman's encounter with Salina towards the end of the book is a more significant contributor to Salina's decision to leave Abdul Fakar rather than Katijah's protestations, owing to Razman's role as confidant to Abdul Fakar. 

Regrettably, Salina's role in this play was diminished in the play which is a shame because Salina is in essence a perfect encapsulation of Kampong Kambing and its many idiosyncrasies. She is inextricably linked to the material and social fabric of every character she encounters from her role as surrogate elder sister to Hilmy and Nahidah, to her being the central topic discussed in Kampong Kambing from Haji Karman to Kurupaya Samy to Razman, and everybody else. Although the decision to give more time to the other intersecting plots rather than show how intertwined Salina is with other characters was understandable given the time constraints, it does negate the core aspect of the book.

For all its shortcomings, one particular aspect that Teater Kami nails in the play is the centering of women which is manifestly apparent in the book. Women ran their households, women took up the role of breadwinner to support their dependents, and their views and interactions form the backbone of the play. Despite their perceived wretchedness the women themselves were shown to have agency and were more morally conscious than the men. The irony of Abdul Fakar's words in saying that women like Salina were irredeemable is apparent when he is left scrambling for her presence upon her own redemption in leaving him.

In closing this brief treatise, I would like to state that I actually enjoyed this play. This was no mean feat and to their credit, the cast and crew did very well in attempting to bring to life an iteration of a generational work. From what I could gather some audience members were unable to follow certain plot lines clearly due to the omission of certain scenes or context but with a shortened run-time, a new generation of audience members, and the sheer size of the book itself, Teater Kami had to make what they felt were necessary changes to make the play as encompassing as possible. The book takes place in 1950s Singapore amidst the Malayan Emergency which explains Mansur (Nahidah's brother) and Hilmy's enlistment into the armed forces. The question of Merdeka and social upheaval loomed large and added to the anxieties and fears of the populace captive to successive colonial administrations in finding their way in this new frontier. Perhaps these key contexts could have been made more apparent in this play but to paraphrase an oft-repeated quote, a picture is worth a thousand words but they cannot replace words. The book was a product of its time but it is evident that this work is ripe for picking by a newer audience and it would be a subject of much interest if there were another staging of the play albeit with more context left in.