Tuesday August 30, 2005
A play from the heart
By ELIZABETH TAI
In her time as one of Malaysia’s prominent thespians, Sandra Sodhy has played many roles including a Datin (Datin Lim in Kopitiam), a mother (Mrs Lim in Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd) and an abbess (Mother Abbess in The Sound of Music).
However, her next “role” will be something she feels very personally about.
She hopes to write a play on Alzheimer’s disease.
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Sandra Sodhy, on Alzheimer’s disease: "It’s like you’re a peanut in a shell, and in the end the peanut is gone and you’re left with the shell." |
“It is a very debilitating and terrible disease. It robs you of your personality. The brain cells die, nobody knows why.
“It’s like you’re a peanut in a shell, and in the end the peanut is gone and you’re left with the shell,” she says.
“At first I thought I will not write a play that is so close to my heart. But then I thought it was time that the people realise what’s going on.
“A lot of people suffer in silence and many have no idea the trauma families with Alzheimer’s patients go through.”
Before she was more informed about the disease, Sodhy too suffered in silence.
“I thought they only go ‘ga-ga’ and forget. I didn’t know that they could get vitriolic and psychotic, and accuse you of things that you didn’t do.
“I was accosted in the streets by people who accused me of abandoning her,” she says.
Back then, Sodhy’s mother was living alone and had told people that when the truth was she had refused help from her daughter. Difficult as it is to care for her, Sodhy prefers her mother living with her.
“I have only one mother. We want to keep her with us as long as we can,” she explains.
Sodhy describes her mother as “very clever”, “sophisticated” and “was top girl when she was 15”.
“Now she can’t even count. So, she gets very angry and frustrated and the easiest people for her to take it out on are us and it comes out in very strange ways.”
Sodhy says that she deals with her mother’s condition “with difficulty”. Once, she was reduced to “crying under the covers” because of her mother’s behaviour.
Sodhy knows that a play on Alzheimer’s has been done before. But she hopes that the play will raise awareness and education among Malaysians about the disease.
“It’s not going to be solely about my mother, a lot of it will be drawn from my own experience because that’s where the sympathy and empathy will come from,” she says.
However, before Sodhy can start working on the project, the founding member of Instant Cafe Theatre Company will be undergoing a a writing residency at The International Writing Program at The University of Iowa in the United States.
She hopes that when she returns to Malaysia (programme ends on Nov 21), she will have written some of the play by then.
The play will focus on Alzheimer’s patients, and the caregivers or the people the patient interact with. However, because the play is still in the planning stages, she hasn’t worked out the logistics, though she is thinking of using multimedia.
“My first job is to write it. I don’t think it’ll be pretty but it will be real. If the play can raise funds, I’ll be more than happy.”
Sodhy says that her experience with her mother has been an eye-opener.
“It’s a lesson for those of us who are healthy. Life is what you make of it. And this whole experience has driven it home: be grateful for what you’ve got.”
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