The play features the stellar cast of (from left) Sofia Jane, Nabila Huda and Nadia Aqilah (Photo: JitFest 2025)
She could disfigure herself and devote her life to working with the blind. Should I lie down? I think I will lie down.”
In a previous incarnation, the setting was a mental ward. But with the coming of our age of social niceties and mobility, of word “sensitivities” and the “trauma” that just about everything brings, the “institution” metamorphoses into a mental “wellness” facility.
Three women converge and they remain nameless: Woman (Nabila Huda), Sister-in-Law (Nadia Aqilah) and Nurse (Sofia Jane). In the course of the dialogue, masks are torn, brittle identities surface, the confessional — often caustic, odd, beneath the surface — unfurls.
“Visits’ dynamics exist on so many levels,” says director Ida Nerina. “That is what we try to reach for in this staging, to get to the heart of the play’s many layers.”
Puckish was the common adjective often attributed to the playwright and actor Jit Murad. While the “Midsummer” imp was an accurate if somewhat predictable allusion, other, more local, allusions went unnoticed but by a few.
“Jit Murad is our contemporary penglipur lara,” theatre critic Krishen Jit said. “The teller of tales about our social and personal manners here and now, and the soother of our neuroses.” The reference to the traditional oral storyteller of healing in Malay society was judicious praise from a critic who once deemed Jit Murad and the “new generation” in theatre in the 1980s and 1990s as a “self-absorbed generation”, more “cool than committed”.
Within the landscape of the Shadow Play, Jit might well have taken on the role of one or another of the provocateur comics, Samad or Said. Possessing little of the distance and wisdom of the senior comic figure, Pak Dogol, these were sly and seductive characters, their nakal (naughtiness) so central to the unravelling of story and character, rooted in their facility with the poetic and the provocative.
Visits remains one of Jit’s most intense, unconventional and dark plays. Never fully veering towards the bleak, it is poised on the existential, reaching into more allusive reaches of character and relationships when compared to his other, perhaps better known, plays Gold Rain and Hailstones and Spilt Gravy on Rice, the latter of which was made into a feature film.
Visits first took shape as three short monologues and featured Ida, Liza Othman and Sukania Venugopal in 1994. A further developed workshop production of a proper “play” was staged in 2001, starring Liza, Sofia Jane and Melissa Saila, directed by Ida.
Ida’s third effort with Visits — “It’s mine,” she claims brazenly — only heightens her pull with the play. “It’s a lot about the fact that Jit wrote such strong characters for women,” she explains.
In her director’s notes for the production by DramaLab, Ida elaborates quite flawlessly, “I learnt relatively early in my own acting career that a good character causes you to dig deep and find layers and layers, much like an onion. For me, Jit’s women are always so interesting, to say the least. I believe he bases them on his own beloved — his mother, aunts, sisters and friends — as they are all so perfectly imperfect.”
In conversation on the directorial approach, the alluring and intriguing nature of the play is ubiquitous: the “secrets”, the dynamics of “backgrounds”, “the backstory of themselves” are frequent themes to fall back on, as if the draw of the play has mystical and elusive aspects innately within it.
“The piece is still very monologue driven, but I felt this is what we do to others in our lives. We are almost always self-absorbed. We drone on and on about memories, our own projected issues, even nonsensical drivel sometimes, as we grapple with our own discomfort. And Jit artfully does this with the women in his pieces, deftly, swiftly. Sometimes almost purposefully disjointed, because who speaks smoothly in real life anyways, right?” says Ida.
For all the interaction of characters and incidents, the play — first formed as a monologue, after all — thrives mostly on the language: word tricks, common vernacular, the oddities of class speech forge the warp and weft of how the characters come undone. “Come undone” is perhaps the most proper encapsulation of the clever confluence that lies beneath the surface of the “madness of it all”, such as when, in a rare moment of contrition, Sister-in-Law says to Woman, the patient, “You have to value yourself. I’m sorry if I’ve waved my superiority in your face, if I’ve made you feel unworthy.”
What is eventually forged in the play through the sheer act of “shedding” is also evident in the process. “As a director, it makes one’s work that much more interesting and enriching when the actors first muddle through, they reluctantly reach towards their own imperfections and finally home in on their characters,” Ida writes candidly in her director’s notes.
“The best part for me is the journey towards this: the rehearsal period of discoveries and bonding. Someone asked if it was hard to direct an all-women, star-studded cast. But it was so joyful for me to see the sisterhood of strong, fast friendships grow and solidify, and last till now.”
To never underestimate the diverse variety of experiences — this seems to have been Jit’s curtain call. And descriptions of “storyteller”, even “medicine man of healing”, have followed his legacy.
Putting JitFest together was “emotional”, Ida admits. “When we were collating everything, it could get quite overwhelming. But then, we just had to get over ourselves and move on.”
In Visits — as in almost all of Jit’s plays — for all their intensity and literary tropes, there remains always a lightness after emerging from one of his plays. The kind described by Aldous Huxley, “Lightly child, lightly … Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”
Yes, with Jit, “lightly” into quicksand.
Visits by Jit Murad is on until June 29 at Nero, pjpac, 1 Utama. Tickets start from RM108. See here for more information.
This article first appeared on June 23 , 2025 in The Edge Malaysia.
