Ella and Sabrina

A CLOCKWORK ORANGe SILENT SCREAM

Review of Teater Ekamatra’s A Clockwork Orange by Sabrina Faisal and Ella Wee

It was very haunting. I can still see bits of it in my mind — mostly the violence, the gore, the sexual violence… It really made me think about trigger/content warnings, especially when portraying such abject violence on stage. Because it was really difficult to watch. Really uncomfortable. I spent the entire time trying not to cry and peel my skin off. I watched the movie a year or two before watching the play, so I already knew what was coming, but because they gave no warning, I thought, maybe, maybe, they had adapted so it wasn’t so… horrific, but it was.

I definitely wasn’t prepared mentally. I was straight up disturbed. It was so freaking disturbing. But it was also awful because the acting was so good, and that it was just awful to watch something so good be so horrible.

I think the bulk of the discomfort came from the fact that I was being exposed to these horrific, violent and dirty things and that I didn’t like, obviously, but also because it’s something I don’t often see in my life and that I can usually choose not to see.

Yes! Because I don’t understand Malay, I had to look up to read the surtitles. And it was extremely painful during the brainwashing segment where Al (Rizman Putra) was exposed to a collage of violent images/videos. I really, really wanted to stop watching. But I couldn’t because I felt that I had to understand what was being said. It was an, ‘oh I need to do this review. I need to read the surtitles. I need to watch’.

Honestly, the fact that I had to do this review completely left me when the suffering came on. I distinctly remember tilting my gaze to focus on the surtitles that I didn’t need, rather than watch the screen or watch Al specifically. I was like having auto-zoom on my own vision to avoid all the… bad.

It is definitely something to think about. What the audience chooses to see or not see. I really forced myself to watch the whole scene, and actually, a lot of the scenes. I didn’t want to watch the violence-stuffed videos or the physical violence on stage, but I was somehow so drawn in that I couldn’t stop looking.

And I wish I didn’t have to because after that whole ordeal, I had nightmares. I can still conjure up images of the videos. I started reading articles on content warnings —I am quite caught up on this— and how some companies are quite averse to them.

Some companies and audience say that the theatre isn’t meant to coddle theatre goers and that it’s meant to shock and challenge the audience. But that is not what content warnings are for. It is not to coddle, it is not to assume that ‘oh no you’re soft and weak and need warnings because you’re too much of a baby for this’. Trigger/content warnings are meant to warn theatre goers so that theatre goers (or any consumer really) can prepare themselves before engaging with difficult content.

It is important to feel uncomfortable sometimes, but the audience should be given the resources to work through this discomfort and shock. I think the use of violence images is very ironic, because Al was exposed to all these images, which broke him, and so were we, and it broke me.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe we are meant to be Al.

There’s a bit of dissonance inside me with this. See, if it were a play about women and rape culture you best bet I will DEMAND for trigger warnings. What the characters have to go through in A Clockwork Orange is horrible, yes, but for some reason I didn’t question why there weren’t any. Which in hindsight, what the hell? Why were there no trigger warnings? But in double hindsight, you’re right. We all know Al didn’t get trigger warnings. Why should we be so lucky?

The thing is, there were a lot of scenes where women were raped. (I know! But somehow I found it disturbing and dirty, rather than OH MY GOD ITS RAPE HELLO?) It’s just that a male actor played the female characters in a gender reversal, which is very, very interesting. I just couldn’t stomach the sexual violence. (Ahh, that didmake a difference in my reaction. I just realised.) Maybe that’s why! Because rape is so gendered — so often it is a male perpetrator and a female victim when it is portrayed or talked about, that when it is a male body that is being raped on stage, the audience don’t feel the same horrific reaction? Oh, shit. Which is very problematic, but it is a very real mindset, and I think that is a very real concern that we should be tackling – men can be, and also are, as much of a victim as women are, and their trauma should be treated with as much care, concern, and anger, the same anger that we feel for female victims.

That’s a really interesting point and choice that Teater Ekamatra made, and I feel that it made the scenes more ‘bearable’ because they weren’t done to ‘women’. The horrible videos are horrible because they just are. It’s quite universally horrifying to watch people get beheaded. But to me, watching a drunk boy kick around random people because he’s drunk isn’t as horrible as watching a woman get hit cause that’s ABUSE. I’d feel more personally involved.

The gender reversal in A Clockwork Orange made it easier for me to watch and sort of distance myself from the reality of it. Not because it’s better for males to be sodomised or raped, but it would have been too much for me to watch if it happened the other way around. Too real, perhaps. And because the line between being ‘just a performance’ and incurring serious triggering trauma in this play was already very thin, that would have just tipped me over.

Do you think they switched most of the gender roles in this play to make us think about what is okay and what isn’t? And to think out of our biases?

Perhaps! It is quite poignant that a man plays almost all the female characters. It definitely changed the way we engaged with the sexual violence on stage. I read an essay on restoration drama about the introduction of female actors on stage. It mentioned how with female actors, sexual violence on stage can now be enacted on a female body itself and not a male acting pretending to be female – the violence is now direct. This made me think: what if Al was played by a female, or if the female actors who played male characters played them as female, how will things change?

I was actually thinking a lot about the ending —because it ended on an extremely bleak note where Al goes back into his violent ways. This ending is actually the ending of the movie, which is adapted from the American version of the book where the last chapter (the twenty-first chapter) is cut. The original novel that was published in the UK and essentially everywhere else but America, has one last chapter where Al figures that the violence is really just senseless and is the prerogative of youths. From that, he changes, and finds the need, and the desire to settle down.

I’m very intrigued by the director’s (Noor Effendy Ibrahim) decision to use the American/Stanley Kubrick’s ending, rather than the ‘proper’ ending that Burgess wanted and advocated for. Burgess even said that he would “be glad to disown it for various reasons.” I wonder what the director wanted to say through this ending of A Clockwork Orange…

I didn’t know there was an original ending so I took this for what it was, but man, that would have been so much better for my emotional and mental wellbeing.

The ending broke me in so many ways. Above the violence, the horrible rape and the torture that Al went through, the ending was what really made me feel so sick, and sad, and disturbed.

When Al left prison, he went home just to get kicked out. He met his old ‘friends’ and trusted them only to feel so horrified that he jumped out of a moving car. He trusted someone again only to get betrayed when he was most vulnerable. And that after all the suffering, he went back to square one all over again. I felt so sick. It was like my body couldn’t decide whether it wanted to puke or cry. Or both.

I just couldn’t believe that had gone through all of that trauma, for it to amount to nothing.

I have a question. Did you sympathise with Al? Did you feel bad for him?

Yes, I did. I know he did such horrible things in the beginning, and I don’t know if it’s right for me to sympathise with him as much as I do, but I remember three scenes:

1. His voice breaking when he begged for the video to stop. But it just wouldn’t.

2. Coming home with his bravada after the whole trauma —and I say bravada because I don’t think people can come out of such a horrible experience being that ‘okay’— and then getting the door slammed in his face.

3. The nonchalance of the ending. He kept on saying ‘abih amacam?’ which is like ‘now what?’. But ‘abih amacam?’ is an EXTREMELY casual thing to say. It’s like, “what do you want to have for dinner?” type of chill. It’s so eerie that this line gets repeated throughout the play, unchanging, and that at the end after all his suffering and trauma, you’d expect him to feel… something, but he just goes, ‘abih amacam?’

I’m just sitting there like, HOW? THERE IS NO WAY. CAN’T HE JUST … BE SAD? WHY IS IT NOT A BIG DEAL? IT IS A BIG DEAL. THIS IS ALL A BIG DEAL AND HE IS WAY TOO ‘OKAY’. That made me so upset.

I think this is why I have so much issue with Clockwork — the film, the book, this play. Because we are led to feel for Al, which I really, really don’t want to.

I don’t want to feel for the abuser. I keep thinking about the victims, their families, especially the author. It made me think of these questions:

Is capital punishment ever justified, even with the most heinous criminals?

Al is still a child can he be thought of as that? Do we really need this eye-for-an-eye mindset?

I hated Al so much, but I feel so much for him that I actively had to remind myself of all the terrible things that he did. But even then, he shouldn’t be stripped off his humanity and his freedom. It really is a case of how a victimiser can become a victim and vice versa.

The word kemurnian was brought up multiple times in the play, untranslated. What does it mean?

How I understand it, kemurnian means to be clean, to be pure, washed out of all evil —think: a baby in white— ‘baptized’ and free of all dirt. If you’re a terrible person, and you’ve done countless evil things, the expectation of kemurnian would be cutting yourself away from your past completely, changing everything and starting fresh, asking for forgiveness from everyone, and just living the rest of your life devoted to something ‘pure’ and clean, like volunteering, or God. Does this make sense?

Yes!

When Al said that he wanted kemurnian and that he was going to receive it with the new program, I immediately assumed that it was some religious bootcamp. By the way, I’ve never read or watched A Clockwork Orange, so I had no idea. The idea of kemurnian is often related something so pure that people often associate it with religion.

It was like watching a glass shatter, because it’s such a stark difference between expectation (unbroken glass, or kemurnian) and reality (shattered, broken, unfixable and definitely not pure). Not because what he had done was okay or forgiven, but because what he received was devastating.

I don’t think you need to forgive someone to sympathise with them. The play made me think a lot about what’s good and bad, and right and wrong, and I think that it can’t be boiled down to a black or white answer. And it’s not an eye-for-an-eye thing, which is what a lot of characters did to each other. I definitely don’t forgive Al, and I don’t think he’s a good person. But I feel bad for him, and I really do sympathise.

I do get where you are coming from. However, a part of me is still so caught up in this anger that an abuser is the hero (or anti-hero). I personally find it very distressing, and I wish we didn’t have a story about the abuser from his point of view. But at the same time, I do feel the same sadness for him, especially when Al decided to jump from the window — that scene just broke me. And when he was made to lick the foot of a medical worker while being filmed by the doctor using an iPad to prove that he was cured. That really messed me up.

It really is Clockwork Orange — a man stuck in a clockwork. A man reduced to being just a machine, mechanical.

The ending was like clockwork too. Back to the beginning. The eye-for-an-eye mentality where everyone back what he gave them was clockwork too. Literally clockwork people (orang).

Everything was just so visceral. The shouts, the slaps, the hitting.

And while so much of the play was horrible to watch, a lot of it was also incredible. The acting, the production, the stage and their staging choices — the whole setup made the play incredible intimate. We were all seated so close to the stage, which was sort of the shape of a cross and we could see the audience members opposite us, around us, and sometimes I was watching them watch the show. It made the violence depicted on stage all the more horrifying.

I really like the use of plastic bags fitted with tubes — it looked like morphine drip bags. It was so haunting. Also the masks they used — the animalistic masks! The symbolism of taking off of the animal heads and making the audience question what is human and what is animal. The acting, and the production of the whole play was amazing.

Haunting is very apt. Plus the fact that everything is white, and nothing is inherently wrong. But they contradict everything that’s clean, with something extremely dirty. Al’s ‘friends’ were all decked in white, but with their skin exposed to sweat and dirt, and with the way their clothes or mostly undergarments sat on their body, it made the white look sinful. The animal masks were cut so hollow that they looked more like devils than regular animals.

Everything we think is good and clean in our lives were used hand-in-hand with something very unnerving in this play. Doctors are supposed to be good, but the doctor was terrifying and corrupt. Sweet and melodic music was always sung and played when the characters were being evil. Every time Al does something bad, he dances.

The whole thing felt like a ghost staring at you and choking you and you don’t even know it. It’s terrifying, but it’s so smart. The way the set was designed, the costumes, videos, sound, everything just came together to really create this out-of-place psychedelic —yet so damn familiar— amoral dystopian world.

Throughout the play, we are made to face physical and sexual violence and watch so many horriffic scenes get acted out and then watch more of them on a screen. We are confronted with dirt, the notion of dirtiness in every aspect of the word, and disappointment because no one gets a happy ending. We’re made to sympathise when we don’t want to, but we can’t help it.

I hated myself for feeling for him. I kept thinking what the heck? He killed, he raped, countless people have died because of him, their lives were all ruined, they all had to live with trauma because of him. Why are we made to feel for him? And it was so easy to do that, especially with this Al because Rizman Putra just really gave him this charm, this vulnerability to him. And, the production was amazing, and I am amazed by Putra. I couldn’t believe he managed to do all those jumps and falls and rolls with a leg in an aircast. That is dedication. The injury was also incorporated pretty well into the whole world. Al had a visible injury that cripples him, and he used that as an excuse, and he was also the one who inflicted pain and suffering onto others.

I am still struggling with my feelings about this production. While I liked how it was staged and adapted, I don’t think I can say that I loved the story. I am deeply conflicted about this production. While I loved the actors, the direction the play took, the whole aesthetic of it, it still is about a story I absolutely abhor.

Even with all the violence, the pain, I still could not stop watching. I was so engrossed, to the point where I was looking through the gaps between my fingers. Watching this adaptation of A Clockwork Orange was so painful, yet I absolutely could not tear my eyes away.

Y’know at the end of it, I walked out of the play and I can’t even tell you that liked it because I don’t, but I can’t tell you that I hated it because it was so good. I know how good the production of this play, and the acting was, but I’m also aware of how much of this is real — how in real life no one gets trigger warnings and or the choice to not look at something if they don’t want to. Not everyone gets an ideal turnover-a-new-leaf redemption arc. It’s dystopian, and crazy, and unrealistic, just as much as it’s real and scarily aggressive in making us see the undesirable side of reality.

The whole thing was horrifying but it was also absolutely incredible. What is that even supposed to make me feel?

You mean apart from intense cognitive dissonance?

[laughter]

Yeah, that too.