Gavin Yap: Exposing the Heart
Eyelids heavily slung across glazed spheres of chestnut brown, Gavin Yap looks tired. “Just worn out,” comes the languid rectification. He need not plead his case - Gavin gives in to an irrepressible habit of keeping his schedule chock-a-block with exploits in the local entertainment scene, whether it be acting, directing or writing. As KLpac’s current Director-in-Residence, he wears the latter two hats this month to direct his own adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart.
In the classic tale of obsession and paranoia, an unnamed narrator who takes care of an old man gets abnormally troubled by the sinister appearance of one of the old man’s eyes, and he takes matters into his own hands with grisly consequences.
Gavin’s affair with Tell-Tale Heart goes a while back. “I first read the story in Form 4, and since then I had always kept in mind how cool it would be to stage it someday, especially since it was written entirely in first-person perspective,” he explains with a renewed vivacity. In fact, he has remained completely faithful to the original text, only weaving in additional dialogue to add variations in viewpoint.
The role of the central character was a difficult one to cast. Gavin held cold readings with both male and female potentials, since Poe’s short story made no mention of the narrator’s gender: “It would have been interesting to see what direction the play would have taken had it been portrayed as a young woman.” He ended up bestowing the role to U-En Ng, whose thespian presence is synonymous with Gavin’s other directorial works such as Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Clive Barker’s Frankenstein in Love (all staged in 2007). The Old Man will be played by local dance icon, Lee Swee Keong.
Tell-Tale Heart seems like a relatively light start to Gavin’s theatre agenda this year, if juxtaposed with the ambition that fueled Frankenstein in Love last October. “Frankenstein was a learning experience for everyone involved,” he admits with a hint of fragility in his voice. “I learned that you don’t have to think big and go epic with a stage as large as Pentas 1. I’ll be playing around more with the same space for Tell-Tale Heart; it’s a weird challenge I’m posing to myself.”
To reserved theatergoers, they tend to face an awkward challenge of their own, should they take on the experience of being audience putty in Mr. Yap’s crafty hands. In his realm of creativity, unsettling themes such as murder, incest and the depths of human despair have so far been the order of the day.
Does he do this… “To shock people?” He attempts to finish my question. No- well, perhaps that, or is he just naturally drawn to the darker side of human nature? “When I read a play for the first time, it must hit me on such an instinctual or primal-enough level that it would drive me to make that crazy decision of staging it,” he explains. “I’ve also grown up in an imperfect world, and that sort of world is what I feel has a stronger ring of truth to it.”
Intentional or otherwise, Gavin’s ongoing endeavor to push the envelope of Malaysian theatre has certainly paid off, particularly in the form of the National Arts Award for Young Talent that was presented to him last November. It was an accomplishment that took him by surprise, but it did far from massage his ego. “If anything, it has put more pressure on me to work harder! As they say, you’re only as good as your last show. The worst thing that could ever happen to me is if I woke up one day believing in my own hype.”
For those with an acquired taste for his work, I’m sure they’d be eager to seek permission to do that on his behalf.
Tell-Tale Heart is being staged from 28th April to 6th May at Pentas 1, KLPac.
On the differences between writing and adapting
“Writing my own original material is a little harder than adapting something for the stage. Adapting involves looking at text that has an already-existing structure, translating it into another medium and figuring out the best way to present it. When I write from scratch, I’m like a nomad! I don’t have a plan, so I only get to know about the characters and story as I go along. You’ll never know when the floor will fall out from under you, but I like the organic process of it all. It’s almost like a form of therapy.”
On an unexpected comment about his work
“A few days after my play ‘I Wish I Was There’ had finished its run, I was doing some voice-over work at a recording studio. While I was there, fellow voice-over talent approached me. He said that he had watched the play and was so touched by it that the very next day, he drove up to Ipoh to visit his father.”
On the ‘trial’ of Cougar Glass
“I kinda knew this was going to happen but at the same time hoped that it wouldn’t… For The Fastest Clock in the Universe, I had completely lost myself in my role (as Cougar Glass), both physically and psychologically. However, it was frustrating to read that the only comments in many reviews, including ones in the press, focused on my abs! They said I didn’t do much since my character barely had any lines. But it’s not that easy to sit there for so long, especially when everything that’s going on around Cougar is directly about him. I was surprised at how some people were more interested in reviewing my workout regime than my actual performance.”
On upcoming projects
“In September, I’ll be staging 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane, a piece that explores clinical depression. Very trippy! The play is just all text, with no implication of character, story, setting – nothing. In November, I’ll be directing Dreams Are Big Business, a play which I wrote back in university. It’s a morality tale that takes place in the dream world, and poses the question of how far you’d go if you were given the chance to live out your dreams in real-time.”
