Plenty of frights onboard 'The Ghost Train'

By Mehru Jaffer

JAKARTA (JP): Oei Eng Goan may have ended up being a journalist, but he is unable to divorce himself from theater, perhaps his first love.

After almost five years he is back on stage with the classic thriller The Ghost Train, an Arnold Ridley play in three acts. The former teacher of drama at the National University (UNAS) has already directed 11 plays, nine of which were performed in English. The last play he staged was Agatha Christie's evergreen Mousetrap.

"I like plays that entertain audiences as well as leaving them with some food for thought," he says.

However, as the sponsors explained, one purpose of producing plays in English is to entertain audiences so that, for a moment, they can forget Jakarta's everyday problems and stresses.

Is it not best to have societal ills kept alive creatively on stage so that audiences remain connected with them in the hope that eventually people themselves will find a solution to their own problems, wonders this writer?

Ideally, Oei says he would like to perform at least two plays a year but in recent times that has not been possible, for many reasons. The turmoil that affected the lives of most Indonesians at the end of 1998 forced Oei to take a break from theater. Not for long though. Soon he had roped in about a dozen of his former students to perform The Ghost Train, a play that he first directed in 1970.

Penned by Ridley, the British TV actor from the comedy series Dad's Army, nearly half a century ago, only three copies of The Ghost Train remain, one of which is priced at US$120 at Barnes and Noble, the largest bookstore in New York.

After the dress rehearsal, Oei told The Jakarta Post that it was different and much more fun to direct the cloak-and-dagger story today as he had more high-tech equipment at his disposal.

Indeed, the imaginative use of sound and light by Andreas Laratsemi sometimes seem to play a more important role than the characters themselves in the two-hour production. Taken together, the acting and the special effects succeed in showering the audience with a-thousand-and-one goose pimples.

The play begins with an empty space. The faint sound of a train arriving is heard, which grows louder as the headlights of the invisible engine first flash and then slowly disappear, taking their sound with them.

Passengers appear on the stage one by one and, as the story unfolds, it is revealed that all six of them are stranded in the waiting room of an abandoned railway station on a very cold and rainy night. The station master begs them not to spend the night there as the only train that has ever stopped at Fal Vale is the ghost train.

He refuses to stay on and departs for his home a few miles away. At first, the passengers laugh at the station master's warning, but they are petrified when he returns to the room after a while as a man, quite dead! The passengers are further mystified by the appearance of the stunningly beautiful Julia, who arrives from nowhere and insists she is waiting for a train to arrive.

Unable to take any more, the elderly Miss Bourne, played effectively by Devy Andrie Yheanne, gulps down an entire hip flask of brandy and decides to sleep through all the excitement that follows.

Possibly the most back-breaking part of the rehearsals must have been getting local artists to speak the queen's English with clarity. They do so successfully, with the Indonesian lilts only adding to the charm of the dialogue's delivery.

Without a doubt, the star of the show is Aries Purnama, who has a booming voice and a Peter Ustinov kind of personality. Apart from a wonderful performance, the audience will be grateful to Aries for providing much needed comic relief in an otherwise tense drama.

Along with Devy and Aries, the play is performed by 10 other actors, none of whom are able to make the theater their full-time profession. Most of them are either teachers or advertising executives who lend their time and talent to the theater out of sheer love for this very creative medium of communication, says Oei, who is already on the lookout for the cast for a future production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

Meanwhile, to find out the mystery behind The Ghost Train, all roads should lead to Erasmus Huis this evening, where the last performance begins at 7:45 pm.