Malaysian playwright and thespian, Leow Puay Tin first fell in love with theatre, as a little girl watching traditional Chinese opera in Melaka.

In those days, you’d often find her watching the matinee shows with a bowl of ice kacang in hand. At nights, her parents would bring her to catch some of the shows.

“Whenever there were performances, I will make sure to watch.

“I loved it. I particularly enjoyed the romances where the bad guys were punished and the good guys get rewarded. The protagonist will also usually undergo immense suffering in these shows, I found it beautiful,” Puay Tin said to me over a Zoom call recently, as she recalled the initiations of her younger days, that have since shaped her life’s course.

She generously shared key lessons accumulated throughout her 40 years of experience in theatre-making on how to write better scripts.

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1. Get better at improv through repetitions.  

As she grew older, she began to appreciate the didactic qualities of the operatic performance.

What had begun as a visually and emotionally striking experience, soon turned into a study of observation; that has since helped Puay Tin further flex her role as a playwright in theatre.

Watching numerous of those traditional operas introduced her to a method that she now employs frequently: Improvisation.

Although commonly enacted through a specific set of guidelines, there is a level of flexibility that allowed opera actors to be spontaneous as they go.

“A slight movement of the sleeve could be a signal to the musician to start or stop playing a particular tune for a scene,” Puay Tin revealed.

For spectators who are unfamiliar, these physical, and at times verbal, cues could be easily missed.

“You would think of the gestures or tonal changes as just part of the show,” said Puay Tin.

The subtle cues helped opera actors to create a more robust show, as they competed for attention from audiences, who were also townspeople, amidst the hustle and bustle of busy streets.

Ironically, the key for actors to become better at improvising was simply; repetitions.

“These actors performed the dialogues so often that they became familiar with the key points of the story. This opened doors for them to improvise and adapt.”

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2. Get into the mind of the character.

Today, Puay Tin is part of the Department of Film and Performing Arts at Sunway University and is a renowned member of the local performing arts scene.

She is well regarded for writing scripts that dive deep into the minds of its characters, exploring and uncovering layers after layers of motivations that are beset with conflict.

She is also synonymous with incorporating songs and bits of text adapted from various sources, into her scripts.

Puay Tin attributes the pivotal moment in her life, in which her passion for theatre bloomed into a life’s pursuit, to the time when she was 16 and became introduced to the works of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth by her literature teacher at the time, Miss Yin Kam Yok.

“I had no concept of theatre at this point in my life. To me, it was just a show. It was only when I read Macbeth that it struck me: there’s this whole genre of writing where you can directly get into the character’s head!”

Reading the monologues of Macbeth, Puay Tin felt Shakespeare had an uncanny style that transported the reader from merely reading lines into becoming the character.

“What blew me away were the soliloquies of Macbeth. This was a character whom I could identify with as a 16-year-old child. And I understood his trauma and despair so well when speaking his lines.”

The revolutionary thought that further spurred the playwright’s creativity was the realisation that in the process of writing, one could play anyone and anything according to whim.

“I found this fascinating!”

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3. Identify a central idea or conflict.

If Chinese street operas were the calling cards that introduced theatre to Puay Tin, Macbeth became the reason for her to venture into theatre-making.

Following her graduation from university, Puay Tin began collaborating with Malaysian theatre directors such as Chin San Sooi and Krishen Jit who were keen on producing original plays and developing characters based on Malaysian life.

Her meeting with these two heavyweights not only led Puay Tin to be more involved in theatre-making but also assisted in making her a better playwright, particularly when it comes to improvisation.

She learned that she prefers characterisation over plotting because the latter, she feels, can be a distraction.

“For me, it’s about the moment of conflict and thinking — that is very important in any story.”

Plotting often requires a number of careful planning but despite the randomness of characterisation, there is an inherent structure (or ‘spine’) to it, Puay Tin said.

Dialogue usually forms on their own based on the motivations and conflict of the characters. Through careful improvisations and adjustments, the script begins to have strength and stability.

“I can’t start writing until I know that something is wrong,” Puay Tin said,  adding that figuring out an intrinsic problem for the characters to progress her story is an absolute must.

She encourages budding writers to avoid writing until they have clearly identified the dilemma of a character and the nature of the suffering they will endure. To illustrate this point, Puay Tin provided an example in her play, The Carer’s Monologue & Chorus.

“Initially I began with the old woman as the protagonist who is well prepared with her eventual death. She has no problem with it. But she doesn’t know what’s to happen to her funeral. Do her daughters and sons know what to do? So this whole play was a dilemma of this capable matriarch who struggles with this conflict. In her last dying moments, she has to make sure that her children know what to do with her body so that her family follows customs and traditions,” she explained.

Ultimately, the play no longer is about an aging woman, rather about the aftermath of her death.

Puay Tin often starts off by reflecting on a strong idea for the story before zoning into the motivations of her characters.

“We often think that the character is very important but actually it’s the idea,” she said, adding that the character serves as a conduit to deliver that idea. It can even be tough separating the two because they’re interlinked.

“But in terms of chronology, the idea has to come first because it’ll guide you in looking for the protagonist,” she explained, adding that idea can also mean conflict in this context.

Puay Tin believes that sometimes with a strong idea, a character and even a narrator are no longer necessary.

“In fact, a story without an idea is empty. So even if you’ve got an interesting or humorous character but the idea is not there, the story can fall flat.”

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4. Write the script through speech.

After watching Puay Tin’s work, Not Forgotten The Dumb, Krishen Jit began collaborating with Puay Tin on other projects sometime in the 80s.

Both of them began developing scripts through speech until it solidified. This requires an immense amount of collaboration between the actors and the theatre director. The script is first formulated through speech, then written down, spoken again, improvised, and re-read again.

The objective of this method is to find the “voice”.

“It makes a world of difference. When I read out something that is written, it usually sounds right because it’s intellectual but it doesn’t sound like a spoken speech at all. Spoken speech has its own rhythm which can’t be found through just writing alone.”

Puay Tin believes that this method is not only the easiest but the best when it comes to playwriting.

Today, she no longer enjoys the luxury of having a theatre director sit next to her to brainstorm and experiment.

“I perform the characters as I write. It’s essentially a solo improvisation session.”

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5. Know when to use dialogues and monologues. 

It took Puay Tin close to eight years to finish writing Oppy & Professor Communitas. She began working on the script following a chance meeting with Prof Mohd Anis Md Nor sometime in 2010. The professor had a unique way of teaching by telling stories and this inspired her greatly.

The initial draft of the script was performed as a monologue to a tiny group of audience in 2014 and it was eventually strengthened based on feedback and numerous rounds of solo improvisations.

The play, set in a weekend acting workshop for arts practitioners, saw Puay Tin introducing an additional character; Oppy, a happy-go-lucky young man, who’s feeling stuck as a freelance actor.

“I had to introduce Oppy to tease the professor out of his monologue,” Puay Tin said.

The initial script draft had focused solely on Professor Communitas and later modified to allow more room for some of the difficult texts to come through.

Puay Tin expressed that while monological dialogues allow more liberty with time and space, the entire experience also becomes psychological. Dialogues, on the other hand, are often between two or more people and sociological, in nature, locked in by social realities.

“There are certain rules, that when broken, the play becomes outrageous and absurd. The context of the points made and debated is also a shared social reality not just between the characters but with the audience as well,” she explained, adding that both forms have their advantages and limitations.

On average, Puay Tin’s works have gone through 10 years of multiple performances. Her advice to budding playwrights is to forget about success and be prepared to rewrite furiously for a long time.

“If your intention is to produce something that becomes successful, then that becomes your objective. It’s no longer about the story.”

Success, she said, often serves as a distraction.

Years of working on Oppy & Professor Communitas will now see the play come to life online under the direction of Fasyali Fadzly. Through the multimedia wizardry of Syamsul Azhar, the play which stars Faiq Syazwan Kuhiri and Iefiz Alaudin, might chart a path for the Malaysian performing arts to explore yet another dimension of virtual reality.

Oppy & Professor Communitas is set to be performed live virtually on CloudTheatre from April 2 to April 3, 2021. Tickets are available here.

All images in this feature were supplied by Five Arts Centre.