Beyond Breakfast with Shazmin Shamsuddin: Lim Soon Heng of the KL Shakespeare Players

THE pandemic saw creatives stuck at home with a sense of dread about their loss of income and the bleakness of the unforeseeable future.

But local theatre company KL Shakespeare Players (KLSP) broke new technological ground – offering live, interactive, online productions when its actors assembled on a shared virtual stage – although they were each at their real homes in different parts of the Klang Valley.

On this episode of Beyond Breakfast, Shazmin Shamsuddin catches up with Lim Soon Heng, executive director of KLSP. He explains the ingenuity needed to stage such a production where stage direction initially proved to be an insurmountable problem.

KLSP closed 2020 and 2021 with more than 70 online shows, respectively.

The success of their efforts has seen them invited to Milan, Italy to stage ‘Old Lear’ – inspired by The Tragedy of King Lear – for a competition organised by Italian performing arts theatre Spazio Teatro No’hma later this month.

Lim discusses the decline of English in schools and Shakespeare appreciation among school children, the importance of storytelling, and his labour of love to demystify the works of the Bard in the form of simple story-telling and visual performance.

Old Lear will be staged at Black Box, dpac (Damansara Performing Arts Centre, Damansara Perdana) on June 11 and 12 at 8.30pm and 3pm.

Tickets are priced at RM68 (standard) and RM53 for students and senior citizens. To purchase, go to http://www.dpac.com.my/.

For more information, visit KLSP's Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/ShakespeareDemystified/. – The Vibes, June 1, 2022