I watched RiBut on 28 June 2025 at Panggung Eksperimen, ASWARA. I attended the 3PM show, which was performed by Group 1 of the Diploma in Theatre students as their PeTA final year show. The play is based on Cao Yu’s Lei Yu《雷雨》, directed by Aish Mirza and Gloria Mujan. I went in expecting a typical family drama, but what I didn’t expect was how quietly powerful the performance would be. Everything felt controlled, but heavy. It's like something constantly building under the surface.
Fanyi’s performance caught me from the start. She didn’t need to raise her voice to cry or scream because her face and body already said everything. I could feel her frustration and sadness even in her stillness. She still had feelings for Zhou Ping, but she knew she meant nothing to him anymore. What made it worse was seeing her own son, Zhou Chong, falling for the same girl. It was like she had no place left in her own home, not as a wife, not even as a mother. I still remember clearly that when she said she wasn’t sick, but her husband, Zhou Puyuan kept forcing her to take bitter medicine. That line really hit me. It wasn’t just about health, but it showed how little say she had in her own life. Her breakdown at the end didn’t come out of nowhere. It came from years of being pushed aside.
Zhou Ping’s acting was quiet but heavy. He wasn’t loud but I could feel that he was carrying guilt in his silence. Even when he didn’t speak, I could feel that he was breaking inside. His scenes with Sifeng weren’t romantic to me, they felt desperate. It felt like he just wanted to bring his lover to escape everything. When he picked up the gun at the end, I wasn’t shocked. It wasn’t loud or dramatic, it's just quiet and somehow that made it more painful.
Sifeng was the soft centre of the whole show. A maid, Zhou Chong’s crush, Zhou Ping’s lover, Lu Ma’s daughter. She was surrounded by everyone’s emotions, but never really had a say of her own. She didn’t have a strong presence like Fanyi, her presence always felt gentle and fragile. When she broke down, it wasn’t sudden or loud, she just gave up slowly. And that made it even sadder. That felt more real to me than if she had shouted or cried.
Zhou Chong was played with such innocence. His dream of helping Sifeng study showed how little he understood the bigger picture. He thought love was simple. After being scolded by his parents and losing Sifeng, he gave up. His decision to follow her into the river didn’t feel brave but it felt lost. His world was too small and when Sifeng left it, he didn’t know how to live anymore. I felt more sadness than shock.
One of the strongest performances came from Lu Ma. Her scene with the photo album was heartbreaking. Her hands shook, her voice softened and the blue lighting made everything feel still and cold. She didn’t even need to speak because the way she froze said everything. In that moment, I could feel her memories flooding back. She had finally reached a point where silence couldn’t hold it anymore.
I also thought Pu Yuan’s performance was solid. His reaction to the deaths in the second half, shouting to the sky and asking if God was punishing him could have been ridiculous, but the actor made it feel desperate and not fake. It was big but believable.
The directing played a huge role in all this. The two-sided stage created a sense of distance and sometimes even disconnection. In conflict scenes, the blocking placed characters far apart, making their emotional gaps feel more real. Some blocking choices also helped show power imbalance, like when characters stood far apart or stayed seated during tense conversations. The pacing was slow at first, which gave space for emotions to grow, then everything started happening quickly.
There were small things that distracted me too. For example, Zhou Chong carried a modern Vans bag, which didn’t fit the 19th century setting. It pulled me out of the scene a little. Sometimes, the lines felt a bit too translated. For example, the language didn’t match how people really talk. Maybe that’s because the script tried to stay loyal to the original play but it did feel stiff in places.
But still, the show gave me a lot to feel. When it ended with “Yue Liang Dai Biao Wo De Xin 月亮代表我的心” playing in the dark, I didn’t feel peace. I felt like something unfinished was floating in the air. The song didn’t sound sweet anymore. It sounded like something broken that couldn’t be fixed.
The show ran under two hours. For only RM10, it gave more than I expected. Of course, there were some messy parts, a few ushers weren’t sure where to seat people and when two scenes overlapped, it got a little hard to follow. Lu Ma’s voice was also a bit soft from the back, maybe because of how the character was meant to be. But honestly, none of that really mattered to me.
RiBut was a heavy experience, not because it tried to be dramatic, but because it didn’t. It let emotion grow slowly. It gave space for silence. And that silence made everything feel real. I left the theatre with a full heart and a quiet mind. It wasn’t loud, but it stayed with me.
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