As I had mentioned in the other post, Joe and Faridah were generous enough to give tickets to the entire cast of Ismail, to watch the show Good People on it’s opening night, which was Wednesday 14th May. Which also happened to be my sisters birthday. 
Produced by the The Necessary Stage , written by Haresh Sharma and directed by Alvin Tan.
Good People is a moving stage piece on the life of a has been singer named Rada ( Sukania Venugopal) who is in the last stages of cancer. She sent to a hospice, meant for patients to live out their last days in the comfort of a medical institution that will provide her with medication to ease her pain. There she meats Miguel (Rody Vera), an arrogant man who holds strong to business principals over human ones, and a very funny nurse , Yati (Siti Khalijah) who aspires to be a singer, but because she can’t make a living out of it, she does nursing.
The problem with the medication is that it doesn’t seem to ease her pain. The only thing that eases her is marijuana. Rada is a drug addict and she manages to sneak in some of stuff into the building but is caught by Yati and Miguel. Yati doesn’t tell on her and Miguel is assumed to be the one who told the police. The penalty for bringing in drug trafficking is death, but the law considers her untimely ‘dying’ situation and decides to give her chance, by asking who provided her the drugs. She refuses to comply.
It’s a beautiful piece on the end days of a woman who feels that her life has been nothing shot of a waste. She’s trapped in a body that rejects her and she wants to die. For she feels that she has lost her purpose in life. To the point she is willing to risk getting even the death penalty, for she is so much pain and craves cannabis that will ease her pain.
She is a ‘good’ person, they all are, but then how do you measure good. Good here, according to the law, is when you abide by it and don’t take drugs. On the other hand, Rada thinks she’s a good person because she wishes not to burden anyone else with her pain. Yati feels she is a good person because she takes care of her patients, she works hard and because it’s her belief as a Muslim to pray every day, she does. Miguel also believes he is good because he brought up the hospice when it was down in the dumps and he wants the patients there to be happy in their last day. So they are all good people…and yet what they do with their life felt empty.
The set of ‘Good People’. Picture courtesy of Min Li.
It left me with tragic feeling in my stomach. For the time on earth is so short, is there enough time to do what we are meant to do here and at the same time we as humans who want to achieve so much in our lives. In the end is it all rewarding? In the end is it enough for our God up above to actually say ‘Well done’?
All in all, it was a thought provoking performance. The settings of the stage was truely remarkable and very well done. It was a bit slow at the beginning and I might even go as far to say that I was too busy looking at their acting at first. But soon i immersed myself with the story and no longer looked at it as a performance by people. And i managed to see the story unfold.
Recommend people. Very recommended. Good People is good!
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