Plenty of frights onboard 'The Ghost Train'

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.