The Golden Sword

Mr. & Mrs. Thomas Stamford Raffles

request the pleasure of your company at the preview of

'The Golden Sword'

A Play in Three Acts.

At The Egyptian Hall, 170/171 Piccadilly,

7pm, on July the 12th, 1817.

To be followed by the opening of an exhibition of relics, costumes, statuary and other artifacts

collected during Mister Raffles' tenure as Lieutenant Governor of Java, to celebrate the publication of his book,

A History Of Java.

From 9pm at 23 Berners Street, Soho, London.

Please R.S.V.P. no later than July 7th.

1

A QUIVERING HAND HOLDS a lit taper to the wick poking out of the top of a gas lamp. First come sputtery sparks, then whorls of black carbon curl like snakes as the wick takes and a flickering flame is born. Its light carves out the actor's face in underlit crags and creases, and shines in his eyes like a pair of bright stars.

He rotates a beaten tin reflector mounted on top of the lamp to face the screen in front of him, and the first rows of the theatre are flooded with wobbly amber light.

It is a young man's hand that rotates the reflector, free of blemishes or spots and bearing no scars or weather, but his characterisation of age is convincing nonetheless - and I so desperately wish to remain held by the illusion, but it's the fire thing that snaps me out of the moment and puts my back up. This isn't Siami, and that's a real fire. In a bloody theatre! Asking for trouble.

From the darkened wings I peer out at the audience to see if anyone else appears even remotely alarmed. Not a one. All of them under the spell of that arrhythmically pulsating womb of warm light bound by the rectangular screen, and all with their heads tilted back just a little, mouths slightly open like young creatures in a nest gazing through blurry eyes at the world's first sun. The place would likely be burning down around them before they cotton that it's not part of the show.

Actor-Siami's partner is our ward, young Adi. He lifts a grotesque bark-and-stretched-leather caricature of a half-naked boy up in front of the lamp and casts its shadow onto the material screen, while Siami raises a hollow wooden tube to his mouth and announces into its treblous reverb;

Selamat Malam! Good evening ladies and gentlemen! Please, settle. Tonight we begin the story of Badang, the hero!

It's a bit tricky from here to make out whether the shadow-show is being performed with artistry on a par with the acting. I had urged the Radin to invest as much time as he could afford into educating these cast members on the fundamentals of Wayang Kulit, but I suspect he may have had his hands full bending the ears of our small ensemble of musicians around the arrangements for the gamelan orchestra. Both are noble pursuits, though at least the shadow puppets are a medium that have a familiar parallel in the magic lantern slides currently so popular in England and Europe.

The music, though, has no easy comparison. Its dynamic structure and tones are so unlike anything from the west as to seemingly come from an altogether other realm. I suspect that even the finest gamelan players from the heart of Java itself might sound as much of a din and racket as our amateurs to these Londoner's ears, though not mine. Even rendered in this most basic form, the sounds and patterns wake a usually dormant part of my brain and send it into a state of high alert. Every time, no matter how prepared I think I might be, my flooded senses whirl me about as they try to decode this new language and find some meaningful way to respond.

All things considered, they had done a fairly decent job of the overture, but I was backstage at that point and it was hard enough peeking through a gap in the curtain and past the glaring footlights to see even the first row, let alone make out if the angular harmonics and clangorous gongs had cleared the house of audience entirely. But they stayed in their seats, and the show went on and here we are, near the end of the slightly-too-lengthy Act One.

So I move out of the wings and into a darkened corner at the edge of the theatre, near the back, to get a better look at things (I travelled unseen, using a narrow tunnel under the floorboards that runs from backstage to front of house - a secret way providing surprise access for dramatic phantoms and pantomime pirates). Dear lord, this fellow really is so close in his approximation of Siami's appearance and tone of voice that I am again nearly transported. We wrote his dialogue with our dear friend's voice alive in our memory, and even though we had left the east before a scene like this could have taken place the words are close enough to be his, and the mode of storytelling. Siami is a dalang, a master of Wayang Kulit as well as other traditional fields collectively known as Saptamuka, the seven arts of the Malays (to which I might add an eighth, the martial art of Silat), and he has a wonderful way with a tale, pared down to its barest words and spun with strength and simplicity. In the costume of Siami's voice, and with our script as a guide, the actor continues along the winding path into our play's counterpoint.

"Badang was a Malay boy from Sayong Pinang, the only son of a poor farming family. As a young man, Badang was taken away to work for a rich landowner in a place called Salung, which is in Sumatra. A slave, he was paid in rice, only a few handfuls each day. Badang relied on secretly catching fish for extra sustenance, and he diligently set his fish-traps along the stream every morning and gathered the catch that evening.

One day Badang found his traps empty. There were leftover bones and scales scattered about - someone had eaten his catch! This went on for a few days, and Badang was not getting enough to eat. Expecting this to be the doing of some wild animal, he armed himself with a parang and hid in the bushes next to the river. But he was tired from working all day on an empty stomach and soon fell asleep."

The Radin has indeed taught Adi well. He handles the puppetry with that combination of artistry and off-handedness that characterizes much of Wayang Kulit in it's place of origin, timing the introduction of new scenic elements and props in a humorous way, just before or behind the narrative, and angling the puppets askew to the screen so that they are given depth of outline, from soft to sharp, which to me always hinted at a world beyond the objects close enough to the screen to cast a shadow, some vast space where unknown characters from other stories might mingle and live their lives, back there beyond the lamp's glow.

The audience are delighted, as am I! For them it's a new pleasure, for myself a complex blend of both pride in Adi’s stage debut and a memory of another place awakened - one I had not imagined would be accompanied by such pangs, but there you have it. On the page it reads through as a clever notion, but on the stage, living, it brings another dimension entirely.

"Badang dreamed that he was strong enough to lift a boat with all its load. He dreamed that he was very rich and lived in a palace with his mother, father, and sister. He dreamed of a warrior who lifted an enormous boulder and threw it into the air. The rock traveled many miles and landed next to a golden city at the mouth of a river.

"And he dreamed that he fought a battle with an ugly beast!

Badang wakes to find that the monster from his dream is real, and has risen from the waters to attack him! He fights bravely, but the enormous creature overpowers him and swallows him whole!

The gongs well up, and there is a crescendous smashing of cymbals as the shadow of the beast looms larger and larger, seeming to lunge towards the audience! It engulfs the entire screen just as the lamp is blown out. The audience gasps... and then there is an audible sigh and a relieved flutter of laughter as the house lamps go up. The demon's face scared me!

I shake off the cold sensation, and can even admit to feeling somewhat smug as I make way backstage to Sophia. She wasn't convinced the end of Act One had enough impact, but I have always erred on the side of the unexpected impulse when it comes to beginnings and endings. Which has brought me, well, brought me here.

I pause and lean against the old planking. The tunnel is dank and close, the musty tint of long-dead timber doing little to mask the rich smell of the ancient earth of the city (I wonder how much of that earth is made of Londoners themselves?), and I can hear the footfalls of the theatre-goers as they make their way out to the lobby bar for brandy and very small sandwiches. Over the murmur of their conversation I now and then hear a higher voice through the hubbub, and I know that was once me. Always piping up. Sophia says I merely desire to demonstrate knowledge that I have acquired, or earned, over those who only have to mention lineage or school to be granted an ear, or an hour, and I pitch my voice in order to do so. Otherwise, I'd not be where I am today.

Which is in a tunnel underground, again, listening to distant voices, apart...

I shake my head. Dear lord's sake, Thomas, get a grip! I smile as I realize this is Sophia's aphorism not mine, and rouse myself enough to peel my cheek away from the mildewed planking. She'll be wondering where I am.

So, to keep me distracted from such morose indulgences while I shuffle down this tunnel through the underworld to rescue my Eurydice from the wind-blowing socialites of London, let me fill you in on some of the highlights of Act One.

After the shock of the gamelan overture, the audience as a whole wet themselves laughing when our Leyden cried his first line from the wings, opening our play aboard The Ganges - an East Indiaman bound from London for Prince of Wales Island. His shrill falsetto rang off the rafters, and several pairs of eyes started wide for a shocked moment before mirth took hold. Be sure this play is no comedy, but in life Leyden could have as profound an effect as this, and would often affect more melodrama than a situation called for to elicit just such a response. To him, every doorway was stage left or right, and in every room he was quick to find downstage centre and somehow conjure a spotlight. And to honour this we staged him street-theatre style, having him speak to the audience directly rather than addressing mine and Olivia's characters.

As not to clutter our stage or the attentions of its audience, we had relieved the small cabin set of extraneous characters - my beautiful dependent sister and her onboard suitor were never great conversation - emphasising by this omission that strangest of relationships; the platonic, romantic threesome. Our trio made up a mutual admiration society, and spent the better part of our months at sea deeply entwined in the verbose dance of the oh-so-clever colonials at sea.

Olivia, Leyden, and me. The Owl and The Pussycat, with Leyden and I taking turns as Owl while Olivia's Pussycat played muse and socialite and sipped a little too much brandy. Or sometimes I was Pussycat while Leyden owled me - and such an owling! Without this ridiculous, brilliant fellow to encourage, tease out, educate, postulate, and pontificate, I might not have become anything other than the ambitious clerk and Company man I was paid to be, sat in the my rooms reading Marsden's 'Sumatra', wandering the walls of Francis Light's fort in Georgetown wishing I hadn't missed it all. I may not have discovered or adventured, or been led so easily down a path parallel to that one the Company had prepared for me, into peril and heartbreak.

Ha! There I go! I shouldn’t dare blame Leyden's loaded falsetto for my messes, nor the Sword for that matter. Even if blames are to be shared, their price is likely increased by any attempt to wriggle out of one's rightful share.

So, back to the stage and on ahead.

I won't sample here the pantomime trio of onboard exiles and outcasts' banter, or outline their seasick drawing-room posturing. Not out of any embarrassment, but it is the least interesting aspect of Act One and I'd like to move on. Suffice to say Leyden's eccentricities were played as broad comedy for this titled and genteel crowd, while serving to illustrate the bemused patience with which he led me to Shelley, Byron and (good lord!) - Coleridge! We played down just how intently we pored over Marsden's book and sketched ways to emulate his adventures on the Company's current East India chessboard, and plotted to be the vanguard of our beloved European Romantic Enlightenment which we would transplant across the Indies. And we omitted entirely our wild schemes to liberate the Company from its cruel and outdated model and resurrect it as a newly benevolent, cooperative hand dedicated to an egalitarian future.

Why? Because we were damned idiots. Noble ideals, certainly, but faced with the hard reality of the capital-driven factories and the entrenched systems they support, obviously little more than a prop made of poorly painted plaster, hung from the flimsiest of scaffolds, likely to collapse under its own weight before it could be finished. Indeed, Leyden would be the first to fall, while I never once realised I was falling at all, like a puppet with it's strings cut.

So, rather than scandalising our audience with displays of conspirational revolutionary zeal, we show instead Leyden wooing Olivia with a sonnet as the magic lantern projects slides of the colour plates from Marsden's A History Of Sumatra on the sailcloth backdrop, followed by scenes of Prince of Wales Island's Georgetown harbour as we three disembark into immediate drama on the docks. There, my actor (taller than me, and more commanding of voice, also somewhat less given to communicate in smiles) is given immediate opportunity at once to display a condensed version of my conviction to the articles of the Act of Emancipation by loudly denying the enslaved porters the task of carrying our luggage. A riot ensues, and a noisy crowd, equal parts cheer and jeer, follows us to the offices of the East India Company.

This, of course, did not happen - but events of a similar nature indeed did occur over the next year as I became exposed to my peers' proclivities for various aspects of slavery, of which physical labour sometimes seemed the least degrading. My Sophia shaped this fabrication, this caricature of myself, convincing me of its necessity as indeed she did of the need for this production at all if we are to combat the forces rallied against us in London. Abolitionism had become currently fashionable, and would be a perfect fit for a Picadilly theatre production. And the fact that she managed to assemble such a distinguished crowd bears testimony to her sharp sight in this regard. And to think my detractors named me a political animal! With Olivia and Leyden my idealism flourished; later, with Sophia, my politics instead were fostered.

I was a better idealist.

Stage-Raffles hefts his own luggage onto the waiting cart, while a simmering crowd gathers and the slave-master glowers. But before violence can be allowed to bloom, the dashing young Captain Thomas Otho Travers arrives and stares down the rising tempers. He sends Leyden and Olivia with the cart off to our lodgings, while he escorts myself, and the crowd, to the offices of the British East India Company on the corner of Beach and Downing. Once there I knife through the dusty disorder and languid chaos like a sword (indeed), assuming the workloads of my superiors who all seem to be vacationing or convalescing abroad or at sea, and seeing the urgent need I immediately announce I will be establishing the Company's first translation department. All within an hour of crossing the threshold!

More theatrical liberties, of course. All this took at least a year and a bit. And for myself the most glaring omission from these early scenes is Siami, who watched at the dockyards and followed Travers and I to the E.I.C., who later 'couldn't help but overhearing' my conversation with Travers about the need for a Malay translation department, and who was compelled to introduce himself to us as an agent for the establishment of same. Onstage, we simply introduced him, a little later and somewhat offhandedly, as my 'translator and guide'. Not a bad mask.

We covered a scene change by having our Leyden take the stage to paint a suitably florid picture of the island's society and entertainments.

At word of a sponsored soiree of any size and its inherent promise of free dinner and brandy, the indolent young Company couples would stir into some semblance of excitement and, once arrived, happily sit anywhere they could - on a bench or even on the steps outside if not wielding an official invitation. The inner edges of the gathering, its load-bearing walls but not its centre, are where you'll find the more courtly elder statesmen with their Nonya wives and mixed-race children, emulating if not the inspired swashbuckling style of this island factory's founder Francis Light, then his family structure at least - in itself not an insignificant cross-cultural legacy. And at the heart of the affair, in the glow of candelabra and increasingly rosy cheeks, are the senior political animals of the Company and their wives, them being a strata all their own and by far the more fierce!

With a flourish, Leyden bids the curtain rise to reveal this central table. We have been careful to avoid any particular caricatures of Company personalities, as we can't be sure exactly how connected our audience might be in this regard, but we have shown little of this restraint in depicting both the location of this particular debauch - Light's original residence some miles out of town, the grand Suffolk House, or the sponsor of this night's affair - Syed Hussein. This strutting anglophile had been courting Company favours with lavish parties and other far more shameless briberies for more than a year in a bid to gain British favour and steal the Sultanate of Aceh away from his brother, the current and rightful ruler named Sultan Johor Alum. His burning desire was to place his son on the throne, and he paid only the merest lip service to his role as a devout Islamic civic leader lest its attendant moral considerations jeopardise these activities.

Leyden describes these machinations as he circles the group seated at table, hovering around Hussein's shoulder like some Shakespearian ghost. The effect is entirely macabre, but suitably so to introduce as broad a villain as this conniving aspirant to a throne - I swear we had to actually tone down his moustache-twirling from the almost pantomime qualities he exhibited in reality. The audience swallowed this whole as a typically slanderous colonial caricature of an occidental gentleman - an impossible hill to avoid and do the scoundrel justice at the same time, but there you go. I wanted the audience on my side before these early scenes were done, and what better way than an apparently shared prejudice. In fact, if we had recreated this particular Penang evening in any more than sketchy detail, neither the Company or the more colourful locals would have come out in anything like a favourable light.

Syed broached several barrels of rum (good stuff, Portuguese, most likely spirited off some unlucky trader at sea by one of his pirates), and when the after-dinner dances had the night at its highest pitch, he flung open the french doors and ushered in a band of wild 'Malay' musicians and a troupe of bare-breasted young women and loincloth-wearing men, some bearing flaming torches, who danced with such wild abandon that the assembled company lost what inhibition they had left and joined in. Most attendees had so little knowledge of Malay culture that they wouldn't have recognised the dubious content of this 'local' entertainment for the sham it was, and those who did were mostly too drunk to care. The party spilled out into the darkened gardens where couples became trios or more, and were lent a diabolic duality as the leaping torchlight stretched the shadows of their oddly angled and entwined limbs. So far from England, and so free...

Evening dress and fancy lace are left draped among barely tamed tropical flora, and the exposure of so much pale flesh usually concealed and carefully protected alerts a heavy squadron of mosquitos who bring their malarial offerings to add to the punch. Inside, the heavy drops of crystal in the ornate chandeliers reflect amber flames and silver service, blood and mercury - refracted images of a guilty saturnalia. The participants are happily oblivious to the fact they are overdrawn on as yet undue loans; to be repaid, with interest, in a currency of slow-poisoned nightmares. Little hells yet to come for most likely all of them.

Olivia, secretly mocked as terpsicore and scandalous by this castaway gentry in their daylight-mode as society's arbiters, is now embarrassed for her suddenly emboldened peers. She averts her eyes and covers her face with her fan. Leyden and I chaperone her to our carriage.

Siami, unseen, watches until we are out of view, then quietly drops down from his high branch in the dark and makes off in the opposite direction.

No indeed, London's delicate sensibilities may never be ready for the truth of an East India evening with the Company. So we kept the onstage interactions of the assembled guests strictly verbal, somewhat polite though a little barbed, but most of it of the rhubarb-rhubarb variety. We also kept the scene fairly brief, my stage-Raffles excusing himself from the table to meet Siami in a pool of downstage light, and him spiriting me away across the Straits Of Malakka to meet the Sultan of Aceh.

We leave Leyden and his rolling narrative behind, but take Travers along to bolster my confidence and provide me with a sense of security. This little group perfectly represented the colony as the younger me dreamed it might become; an honest Company man, his morally upright Aide de Camp, and a native partner and guide. The onstage version of the meeting at the Sultan's court is polite and, well, courtly - making much of my knack with language, my research into local manners and my civil servant's very best civil diplomacy, and of the Sultan's regal solemnity and gratitude for same. I sorted out an irksome issue for him (a political matter contrived by Syed Hussein and some of my shameless peers involving a boat - most tiresome) with an exchange of letters in high Malay style.

This is a craft I realised it would be entirely necessary to employ if I wished to converse politically with any clarity in this part of the world. While I understand this art's formalities, I could never hope to personally render its nuances with the brush or knife, nor its intricate deployment of Arabic. Luckily, Siami led me to munschi Abdullah, who became my teacher in such things as well as my head translator and secretary. Together we devised a style of formal presentation that avoided apeing this traditional form by incorporating enough new elements that the design itself communicated my position; 'Here is a letter, presented in a courtly form, which shows I respect and have made an attempt to understand your traditions. The details of its presentation demonstrate that I have learned just enough not to presume that I hold the authority, nor the insight, to emulate them completely.'

In gratitude, the Sultan gifts me with a formal title of office, a kind of knighthood if you will - The Order of the Golden Sword. I am presented with a chain which bears three gold medallions, a batik robe, and a ceremonial keris - the wavy-bladed dagger so intrinsically a part of a Malay's cultural life. I am duly honoured, bow politely, and reply in kind with a gift of a bejewelled French sword, then withdraw back to Georgetown where I proudly display my newly bestowed honours only to be laughed at behind my back, and to my face, for indulging in such ludicrous native mumbo-jumbo.

Which is, of course, very unlike events as they actually unfolded. Well, except for the mockery part.

I lower my eyes as The Sultan slowly drapes the chain around my neck. He intones these words as he does so.

Sri Paduka Orangkaya Berpedang Emas.

Siami, standing behind me and a little to the left, leans forward and quietly translates;

His Excellency the Nobleman with the Golden Sword.

Thank you, Siami, I got most of that.

I can't see him, but I can sense that