The play that I watched is “Nyala Pijar Hiroshima", written and directed by Roydy Rokidy, who is well known for his best tragedy plays and performance on his own stage in Malaysia. I watched this play with my friend on 12th July 2026 at Auditorium Majlis Perbandaran Ampang Jaya (MPAJ). This performance took place from 12th July until 14th July, and it was performed and managed by Born 2 Bee Studios. As a theatre student, I had my expectations and a different point of view of watching this play, “Nyala Pijar Hiroshima", and it turned out to be a whole new experience of watching a tragedy play in my entire life.
As for the synopsis of “Nyala Pijar Hiroshima", the play is a fictional work inspired by the tragedy of the firecracker factory explosion in Malaysia in 1991. The story follows the experiences of three factory workers, Hilal, Robin, and Malik, who face a dark moment when the negligence of a chemist from Hong Kong, Mr Shi, triggers a devastating explosion that claims many lives. Through these characters, the work reveals the suffering of the victims and the impact of the tragedy on the workers and the surrounding community. As the writer, Roydy Rokidy wrote this real tragedy story that happened in Malaysia; the way he directs and interprets and brings the stories into a three-monologue drama of different people's perspectives was a totally challenging task to him. But he successfully dodged the problem and presented the whole performance with his own concept by combining the artistic vision to show the liveness to the audience.
To me, overall the performers' acting and the message that the director was trying to convey were understandable to me. Meanwhile, what makes me feel less inspired was the aesthetic of the performance of the play. It is because, when I am talking about the aesthetics of the play, as an audience, we have many thoughts and expectations for watching the performance. So, I feel less satisfied with the background of the performance even though it is a tragedy play. I thought that, when it comes to a tragedy play, apart from acting, the aesthetic works should gain audience impressions and their attention towards the performance by bringing liveliness into audience emotions. The storyline and plot were good, and it follows the plot structure, but as for the scenography part, this is kind of not giving me the good impression, even though the set and props are very minimalist, which follows the settings of the play. This is where I would say a lack of aesthetic vision lies, which I would like to relate to a theory called “Semiotic Theory” by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. He mentioned that, in a performance, it should be created and communicated through signs and symbols. The symbol represents the lighting, background music, costume, set and props, which play an important role in enhancing the performance. Therefore, in this play “Nyala Pijar Hiroshima", I would agree that some of the artistic vision was given some bigger expectations, and it became a plot twist of the story, such as trying to gain audience attention.
I love the way the director portrays some scenes by giving visual and sound effects according to the settings and to show the liveliness to the audience to feel the emotions throughout the whole performance. Since this is a tragedy play, the audience totally did not expect to have a bomb and explosion effect, which is totally a disturbance to some audiences, which makes the younger audiences. The audience were from different age groups, and some of them are really sensitive to this kind of background music, which leads to emotional disturbance. I am mentioning this because, in the context of semiotic noise, it can interrupt audience engagement and decoding of the plot.
Moreover, in terms of set and props, as theatre students, it is important that we should follow the proper guidelines of rules and regulations of the stage. The rules are made to ensure the avoidance of any fire or explosion in the theatre. On the other hand, the play was conducted in an auditorium, and the stage was so small that it could fit some sets and props only. Despite having a small stage, I felt that they were lacking proper guidelines. Where there was one scene, one of the actors was doing his performance while playing the pop-up firecrackers, which did not harm; however, it must be prohibited to use that due to indoor smoke chemical residue and uncontrollable popping fallout. In the context of semiotics, we call it a failure of the theatrical frame, and the director and the production must be aware of this guideline.
In the same way, the production also featured a three-person monologue. Instead of using a good blocking technique and composition to navigate the stories, I feel that the director relied heavily on fading the lights out on one actor to transition to the next. In Aristotle's theory, the concept of opsis (spectacles) should work with the mythos (plot). It means the director is trying to explain that “the scene is over” and jumps to different scenes by showing different lighting effects. By blacking out an actor, the director completely destroyed the spatial syntax of the trio. It isolated them into voids rather than showing how their stories connected. Instead of playing with the lighting effect, the director can try the frozen blocking, where it helps let the actor freeze like a statue, turning their body into a visual sign that haunts the next speaker’s monologue.
Overall, apart from having lack of aesthetic of the performance in “Nyala Pijar Hiroshima”, I appreciated the director tried to recreate the tragedy stories which gave immense emotional pain and brought the important message to the cost of carelessness, which brought a huge impact to our Malaysian society by losing innocent lives. Apart from the message, I was totally awestruck by the actors' performances. I understood the stories and felt the pain by watching their performances. Thank you, Born 2 Bee Studios, for giving wonderful tragedy stories.
#aestheticandperformance #Born 2 Bee #tragedymalaysia
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