Mesmerising docutheatre production delves into the myth of Malayan national hero Hang Tuah while asking who gets to shape history, and why we continue to believe the stories we inherit.

Duration: 90min

Mythological figures have long served as vessels for morality, identity and national aspiration. Their stories are repeated until they begin to feel inseparable from the societies that tell them, their contradictions smoothed over and their complexities distilled into lessons about loyalty, courage or duty. Yet myths are never entirely fixed. They are retold, revised and repurposed according to the needs of each new generation, and sometimes, according to the interests of those who hold power.

Few figures embody this process as powerfully in Malaysia as Hang Tuah, the purported 15th-century warrior whose name has become synonymous with loyalty to ruler and state. But what happens when a legend becomes so deeply embedded in a nation’s cultural imagination that the distinction between history and storytelling begins to collapse? What happens when fragments of evidence are assembled into certainty, or when a myth is repeatedly invoked until its authority seems beyond question?

These are the questions asked in Fragments of Tuah, a remarkable work of documentary theatre conceived and directed by Mark Teh and created with Malaysia’s Five Arts Centre. Drawing on three years of research, the production traces the many faces, incarnations and appropriations of Hang Tuah. But their goal is not to reconstruct a definitive portrait of the warrior, but to expose the gaps, contradictions and competing narratives that surround him.

This results in an extraordinary piece of theatre: intellectually rigorous without ever becoming inaccessible, formally inventive without losing its emotional core, and deeply entertaining even as it asks unsettling questions about history, authorship and power. Across its runtime, Fragments of Tuah transforms an extensive body of research into a richly layered theatrical experience, one that moves fluidly between folklore, personal testimony, archival investigation, popular culture, music and contemporary digital media.

The title is crucial in recognising how the myth of Hang Tuah has essentially become fragmented over the years, with no one cohesive, singular truth. Instead, they remain deliberately partial, sometimes connected, sometimes contradictory, sometimes only tangentially related. The production lays them before us and invites us to consider the spaces between them, leading into a rigorously investigated meta-documentary about the ways stories are made, circulated and granted authority.

Playing at the Esplanade Theatre Studio, the production immediately establishes a world built from the material traces of storytelling. Piles of books are arranged across the stage like small monuments, repositories of knowledge that also resemble shrines, or perhaps graves, dedicated to a figure who has been studied, celebrated and reimagined for centuries. Behind them stand three large paper screens, themselves constructed from the language and physical matter of research. Books, pages and projected images become both evidence and artefact: objects that preserve stories while also reminding us that no text is neutral, and no record entirely free from interpretation.

Production designer Wong Tay Sy gives these materials an extraordinary tactile presence. Paper is fragile, but when layered and bound together, it acquires weight. It can become a wall, a landscape, a screen or a burial shroud. Under the lighting and multimedia design of Syamsul Azhar, with multimedia contributions from Bryan Chang, the stage shifts between archive, museum, digital interface and mythological landscape. The production’s visual language is dense but never overwhelming. Images accumulate rather than compete, creating the sense that Hang Tuah exists everywhere at once: in books, monuments, films, state narratives, online videos and the cultural imagination.

At the centre of this landscape is performer Faiq Syazwan Kuhiri, whose charisma and versatility carry the production through its many transformations. Accompanied by musicians OJ Law and Shariman Shuhaime, Faiq becomes our guide through the labyrinth of Hang Tuah. He is storyteller, researcher, musician, content creator and, at moments, a contemporary reflection of the legendary figure himself.

His introduction is immediately disarming, coming onstage singing an original song. When he eventually dons a paper samping and tanjak and wields a paper keris, Faiq embodies a version of Hang Tuah assembled from texts and cultural memory. He recounts the warrior’s exploits with warmth and intimacy, drawing the audience into the familiar rhythms of oral storytelling. There is a comforting quality to the way these myths are presented, as though we are being welcomed into a story we have known all our lives, even if, for many in the audience, the details are unfamiliar.

Faiq’s original music deepens that sense of connection. His songs illustrate the narrative while turning the Theatre Studio into an emotional space, offering alternative ways of thinking about masculinity, belonging, vulnerability and agency. The legendary warrior is often reduced to a singular image of unquestioning loyalty, but Faiq’s presence complicates that image. As a young Malay man, he brings both the privilege and the burden of that identity into dialogue with a figure who has come to represent Malayness on a national scale.

The production’s most effective strategy is to place this monumental “big history” beside Faiq’s own personal history. The story makes a sudden shift away from Hang Tuah’s exploits, we learn about Faiq’s early years as a content creator, his experiences making online parodies and social commentary, and his eventual disillusionment with the demands and volatility of digital visibility. We see his earlier videos projected across the screens, encountering a younger, more animated version of the performer who now stands before us, his professionalism and experience illustrated through his confidence with which he speaks into a live camera feed projected onto the screens.

The connection initially feels unexpected, but it gradually becomes one of the production’s most revealing ideas. Both Hang Tuah and Faiq exist through stories told about them. Both can be interpreted, celebrated, criticised or repurposed by audiences beyond their control. Faiq’s account of his punk band Terrer receiving hostile reactions after criticising Malaysian politics brings the instability of public image into the present. In the age of social media, narratives can be amplified, distorted and turned against their creators with astonishing speed.

Here, Fragments of Tuah begins to reveal itself as a work that goes beyond historicity and myth-making, and delves into ideas of authorship itself. Once a story enters the public imagination, who owns it? Can its creator control how it is understood? What happens when an individual becomes an image, a symbol or an avatar onto which others project their own beliefs?

The production then descends into its most uncanny and unsettling investigation. At some point, Hang Tuah began appearing with renewed frequency across social media, where content creators shared supposed discoveries relating to his life, birthplace and burial sites. These online claims intersect with the rise in popularity of Hang Tuah: Catatan Okinawa, a 2015 publication that argues for the warrior’s historical existence through a network of artefacts and connections extending across Okinawa and beyond.

What follows is a fascinating journey through the mechanics of belief. The research leads to a keris scabbard reportedly discovered in Okinawa, and to claims that objects associated with Hang Tuah have survived across different parts of the world. Yet the evidence repeatedly appears uncertain, incomplete or disconnected from the conclusions drawn from it. The production examines how these claims move from books and online videos into institutional spaces, eventually taking on the appearance of historical authority.

One particularly disquieting thread concerns an exhibition where an object presented in relation to Hang Tuah appears to have an uncertain provenance. The logic supporting the claims often seems fragile, but the confidence with which they are repeated gives them increasing legitimacy. The effect is not to mock those who believe in Hang Tuah’s historical existence, nor to offer a triumphant revelation that settles the debate. Instead, the production asks us to observe how narratives gather power.

In an era shaped by misinformation, algorithmic amplification, fabricated evidence and increasingly fragmented realities, the question of whether a story is true can sometimes seem inseparable from the question of who has the authority to declare it true. Fragments of Tuah understands that myths stay on not out of historical accuracy, but because they remain useful, emotionally resonant and repeatedly reinforced.

The production never treats its subject with detached cynicism. There is humour throughout, particularly when it tracing the many contemporary appropriations of Hang Tuah’s name. From public landmarks to restaurants and commercial spaces, the warrior’s identity has become a recognisable cultural signifier, sometimes retaining little connection to the complexity of the stories from which it emerged. The cumulative effect is amusing, but also strangely melancholy. What remains of a myth when its meaning is reduced to a name? How does a hero continue to live after the stories that made him significant have been forgotten?

The production eventually returns to the Hikayat Hang Tuah, and it is here that the work becomes most emotionally resonant. The final chapters of the Hikayat, which are rarely foregrounded in popular retellings, offer a more mysterious and vulnerable version of the warrior. As the world around him changes, Hang Tuah becomes a figure searching for meaning, moving through dreams, parables and uncertainty. The legend begins to loosen from the rigid expectations placed upon it.

In one of the production’s most striking sequences, the paper screens are physically removed and laid over the book structures, transforming the stage into something resembling a burial ground. The shift is both literal and symbolic, reflecting the story being told, and how these screens through which we have encountered so much information are taken away, leaving the audience to confront the material remains of the stories themselves. As Faiq recounts the later parables of Hang Tuah, the stage takes on an almost sacred quality. A golden light emerges behind him, and the production seems to arrive at a different understanding of truth, not as a fixed conclusion waiting to be uncovered, but as something shaped through interpretation, memory and the act of storytelling itself.

The closing image is quiet compared to all that came before it, and emotionally resonant. As Faiq sings once more, the theatre darkens and gentle light moves across the floor like waves. The sound of the sea returns, and the story of Hang Tuah seems to dissolve into the landscape from which it emerged, neither definitively ending nor entirely disappearing. It is a haunting conclusion to a work that understands stories as both enduring and precarious. A myth may survive for centuries, but its meaning can change in an instant. A national hero may appear immovable, yet the narratives surrounding him remain vulnerable to distortion, political appropriation and collective forgetting.

As the opening production of Esplanade’s The Studios 2026: Precarious Bodies, Fragments of Tuah establishes the season’s central concerns with remarkable clarity. It reveals how power operates not only through institutions and physical control, but through the stories societies choose to preserve, repeat and believe. The production does not tell us what to think about Hang Tuah. Instead, it invites us to examine the narratives we inherit and ask who shaped them, whose interests they serve, and what might be hidden in the gaps.

Under Mark Teh’s direction, research becomes music, paper becomes landscape, archives become performance, and uncertainty becomes a space for imagination. Anchored by Faiq Syazwan Kuhiri’s magnetic performance, Fragments of Tuah is a richly layered, visually striking and deeply moving work that transforms the act of questioning history into theatre of extraordinary power. Hang Tuah may endure in the collective imagination as an invulnerable warrior and symbol of unwavering loyalty, but this production reveals his own precariousness: a figure continually reshaped, appropriated and made to bear the weight of changing political ideals. In doing so, Fragments of Tuah reminds us that the stories we inherit are never fixed, and that the figures we elevate can become vessels for the values, anxieties and agendas of those who choose to invoke them.

Photo Credit: Pam Lim

Fragments of Tuah played from 24th to 26th July 2026 at the Esplanade Theatre Studio. More information available here

The Studios 2026 – Precarious Bodies runs from July to September 2026 at the Esplanade. Full programme and tickets available here

Production Credits

Performers/Musicians Faiq Syazwan Kuhiri, OJ Law, Shariman Shuhaime Director Mark Teh Production Designer Wong Tay Sy Lighting Designer Syamsul Azhar Multimedia Designers Syamsul Azhar, Bryan Chang Stage Manager Armanzaki Amirolzakri Producer June Tan Assistant Producer/Production Manager Hoe Hui Ting Executive Producer Five Arts Centre