Some works ask to be consumed. Others ask to be lived. Nearly two weeks after the curtain call, Under One Roof is still living inside me.
There is a famous cry of rebellion by the French writer André Gide: "Familles, je vous hais" — "Families, I hate you." It gives voice to the universal frustration at the suffocating weight families can sometimes represent: inherited expectations, prescribed roles, and loyalties that both nurture and confine. At first glance, Under One Roof seems poised to tell precisely this story.
Inspired by her own heritage and fragments of memory, Director/Playwright Fa Abdul has crafted more than a family drama. Beneath its specific cultural setting runs something universal, something that pulses beneath every relationship, every silence, every choice. That is the brilliance of her work, and the reason I keep returning to it. Her stories invite me not to simply watch and be entertained, but to have my own thoughts and complexities unravel, my biases challenged, my assumptions unsettled, and truths I have been avoiding brought to the surface.
That, to me, is what art does. While economies and technologies may advance a civilisation, it is art that keeps its humanity awake. A society can prosper without art, perhaps, but it cannot truly understand itself.
A brief note for those who did not watch the play: Under One Roof centres on Mala (Monica Mohan), a Malaysian Indian mother who leaves her husband (Nicholas Fletcher) after discovering his infidelity and raises their three children alone. Decades later, the family reunites when unresolved tensions resurface, revealing how each has carried the consequences of that decision differently. The eldest, Prabhu (Suresh Ramskay), has grown into the role of the patriarch he never had. His younger sister and brother, Priya (Tasnim Meera) and Pravin (Arunen Thiruvarul), who barely remember their father, carry the same absence in quieter but no less significant ways. Prabhu's Chinese wife, Eileen (Lauren Tan), finds herself navigating the emotional currents of a family whose history long predates her arrival. As love, duty, resentment and regret converge under one roof, the play asks not who was right or wrong, but what each person has been carrying all along.
Art recognises us before we recognise ourselves
Under One Roof was a heavy play for me to process. Not because I share its cultural background, nor because I grew up within the family dynamics it portrays, but because it reaches beyond those specifics and into something profoundly human. When the matriarch says, "There are no clean choices. Only honest ones," the line lands with stunning clarity. Everyone has, at some point, faced a choice where every available path carried some form of loss. In those moments, perhaps the only question left is whether we chose as truthfully as we knew how.
The line does not ask us to revisit the difficult decisions we have made. It asks us to remember the part of ourselves that had to make them—the person we had to be in that moment. There is something quietly liberating in that recognition. To me, that is the play's most profound triumph; a poetic tribute to being human—to the courage to choose, and the grace to live with what follows.
The lens that reveals the unseen
The most compelling character for me was Eileen. She is not simply a spouse, an outsider, or a victim. She embodies the perspective of those who exist at the margins of a family structure that privileges other voices at the centre. She enters a household whose emotional architecture was long established before her arrival, and quietly finds herself mediating histories she did not create.
Attentive to what remains unsaid, she perceives the fractures beneath the family's routines. She navigates a state of constant negotiation—between disappointed expectations and ongoing obligations, between loyalty and fairness, between belonging and the ability to see clearly. Her emotional intelligence is both her strength and her burden when she becomes the surface upon which everyone else's instability settles.
It is through this position that Eileen guides the audience's gaze. While other characters move the story forward, she quietly changes how we see it. She refracts the family's narrative, revealing the multiple truths hidden beneath the single story of blame. In doing so, she echoes Elif Shafak's invitation to pay attention to the silences, the margins, the periphery. It is often away from the centre of the conflict that the deepest truths reveal themselves.
Through Eileen, the play challenges us with perhaps a more difficult question: how do we hold multiple truths without reducing anyone into a villain?
Under the roof
Perhaps the most silent character in the play is the roof itself. A roof is meant to shelter. It gives a family a sense of belonging, a place where memories are built and identities are formed. But it also becomes the place where everything accumulates—the unspoken disappointments, suppressed desires, identities shaped by imposed roles, and responsibilities carried without question.
The roof can become both a shelter and a container for a family system where love and pain, protection and confinement, exist in paradox with one another.
Every family, every community, every society has its own roof—built from traditions, assumptions, and stories passed down before we were old enough to choose them. These are the structures that shape us, sometimes protect us, and sometimes limit us.
The question then becomes whether we can recognise what the roofs we inherited have asked us to carry—and, with that awareness, decide what deserves to be carried forward and what we are finally ready to release.
About the writer:
Azida, a true lover of the arts, is on a self-declared break from the corporate world. Based in Penang, she spends her days hopping from one performance to another in search of stories that move and entertain. Offstage, she finds herself in unscripted adventures - collecting mangoes and coconuts or occasionally being chased by monkeys. Equal parts observer and participant, she writes with curiosity, insight, and a love for life’s unpredictability.
Seni:Kita (pentaspena.pg@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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