Previously, I have never heard of neither Anike nor Wong Phui Nam. Who wants to bother about Malaysian play or Malaysian playwright anyway? People are more concerned about the latest hand phones on sale or the hottest hits song on the radio than any good play. Well, thanks to my drama class for giving me new insights and perspectives about our own Malaysian play written by our own local playwright. We should be proud because we actually have many talented playwrights here. Just because they are not as famous as Siti Nurhaliza or Mawi, it doesn’t mean that they are not talented and great individual. It is surprising that Anike was actually the Malaysian version of Sophocles’s Antigone. I was impressed by the way Wong Phui Nam used his creativity and turned the imaginative ideas into a startling reality. After reading the play Anike, I realized that the story was basically quite the same with Antigone. There are quite similar characters and issues dealt in both plays. However, what made it a unique masterpiece of its own right was actually the setting that was so close to our own world and culture. It is not another isolated setting for us to be in. In fact, we can also identified Malay words such as taugeh, dusun, verandah, tosai and belukar used by him to maintain the originality and local identities. Apart from that, I also found that Anike was full of gory and horror-filled scenes than Antigone. The choices of word used in Anike to describe certain things were so vivid and clear. This can be seen in the extract “Wira was to have our brother carved, stripped bare and hung from a tree by the city gate, then left there to mature into a sack of waste for worms...”(page 3). This is one of the example and I'm sure you can identify a lot more. In conclusion, Anike is certainly a great local play I ever read with my heart and soul. It is a truly great work by a truly great playwright.
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