THE legacy of late drama doyen Kuo Pao Kun looms large in Q: Protagonists At The Edge. The new play by Intercultural Theatre Institute (ITI), a theatre school founded in 2000 by Kuo and T Sasitharan, begins with three actors standing around in a rehearsal space, waiting for their director to arrive.

In true Godot style, the director - whom they allude to as Kuo - never appears. So the three actors (Chang Ting Wei, Al-Matin Yatim and Yazid Jalil), all graduates of ITI, spend their time rehearsing and recreating scenes from three important plays - Kuo's own The Silly Little Girl And The Funny Old Tree and The Eagle And The Cat, and Lim Jen Erh's Three which was originally a Hokkien opera.

The actors begin with lines from the plays, only to divert from them and invent their own lines. They perform scenes in various languages and employ a range of theatre styles and literary devices, including Chinese opera and Malay pantun (rhyming verse). The three actors, all exposed in their ITI training to traditional Asian theatre practices and contemporary forms, get to show off their wealth of skills.