After an award-winning run at last year’s Short+Sweet Theatre Malaysia, SUSAN returns as a full-length play, complete with its original director, playwright, and lead.
Playwright Ian Skatu expands on his original story, and Ranessa, who netted home Best Actress, is back in the titular role, while Tharwa Wajihah is once again in the director’s seat, now with Sandee Chew as dramaturg and Darien Kozar as producer.
Truth be told, this one-woman show is hard to describe. It jumps between genres and tones, creating a narrative that’s at times disturbing, hilarious, and confusing, but entertaining all throughout.
We follow (not) Susan, a harsh, irreverent woman who desperately dreams of becoming an actress, as she navigates a love life filled with murdered husbands and a slowly spiralling mental health.
Specifically, we follow her within three acts, each with separate but linked narratives that paint a portrait of the character through various lenses: in her own life, in the eyes of the law, and through society’s lens.
All these different perspectives, of effectively the same story, create a complex narrative that seeks to challenge our assumptions of the character on multiple levels.
Much like the playwrights’ previous play, POLY, SUSAN prides itself on its interesting and frankly experimental premise, one that places a lot of trust in the audience to follow along, and frankly doesn’t seem to mind if they don’t.
It takes American Psycho and Netflix’s true crime documentaries, then adds a feminist twist, driven by an engaging character who, if we’re not exactly rooting for it, is nevertheless an engaging vehicle for this story.
And it’s brilliantly sharp, in so many ways: the audience are made to cast votes on a guilty/not guilty verdict before hearing a lawyer’s arguments, Netflix executives are portrayed as less interested in a female serial killer than her male victims, and other bits of pieces of smart and pointed writing.
There’s a lot to like about the story, and Tharwa Wajihah’s direction gives each act its own distinct identity that stands very strongly on its own, whether within the domestic setting of the first act or the court drama story of the second.
However, I did feel that this was a story told too many times, literally.
There’s a repetition between the acts that wanted to be interesting, but instead just felt repetitive. Each act repeats the same lines, follows the same story beats, but lacks a strong conclusive finish or satisfying narrative threads.
It’s especially apparent when you reach the final act, which closely mirrors the original short play, and realise how it’s the tightest narrative by far. This third act didn’t feel like a culmination of the first and second acts, rather, it was the better story overall.
Still, as you’re watching the play, you don’t seem to mind it as much. This is because Ranessa gives one of the best performances of the year as Susan, the major highlight of the show.
She is electric, hilarious, and an absolute carnage on stage. I loved the way her energy slowly seeps into the crowd, to the point where it felt like we were tied to her every word.
Shifting between the different characters on stage, she displays an impressive spectrum of emotions and personality, a difficult feat for a one-woman show but one she did so gracefully through the entire 75-minute runtime.
And there’s also this Fleabag-quality about the character itself that Ranessa brings to life. We laugh at her irreverence and irritation of married life, but at the same time, pity her during some genuine moments of vulnerability, even as we realise the absurdity of her situation.
It was her performance, no doubt honed by Sandee Chew’s dramaturgy, that kept me on the edge of my seat throughout the whole thing, and it was only when I had left the theatre that I started to see the cracks in the show.
Still, SUSAN is brilliant. Although it might have been bogged down by repetitive elements that didn’t quite land the way it wanted to, it’s still a bold undertaking in Malaysian indie theatre, one that bravely experiments with story structures and metanarratives.
SUSAN was performed at Hush The Theatre from 3-13 September 2026.
Image Credit: Engku Armand (@engkuarmand)
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