Hope is painful, but powerful

EVER met a woman called Hope who couldn't stop talking about her worries? That's how one feels sitting through the ironically-titled Harap (or Hope, in English) by Teater Ekamatra, a Malay adaptation of a Haresh Sharma play so suffused with suffering and misery, you wonder if there's any light at the end of the tunnel. Yet, at the same time, you're can't help but be gripped by its industrial-strength dose of hard, painful truths, certain that for some real-life individuals, the events in the play are simply mirror reflections of their lives.

The play has two narrative strands. The first story centers on a pair of friends who survived a car crash: One of them, Hadi (Hirzi Zulkiflie), escaped unscathed; the other, Azman (Fir Rahman), is comatose. The second story follows a compulsive gambler Hairul (Sani Hussin) whose debts to a loan shark lead to tragic consequences for him, his wife Izzati (Siti Hajar Abdul Gani) and their young daughter (Nur Zakiah Mohd Fared).

These two stories converge when the vegetative Azman rises from his coma in a surreal dream to converse with Izzati about hope and hopelessness, while Hadi and Hairul meet in real life and become drinking buddies. Unfolding against these narratives is a breaking news report of several unidentified bodies found floating in the Singapore River, the possible result of a mass suicide.