There are some family stories that sit in plain sight. Others are deliberately put away. For Ling Tang, it was a drawer she was told never to open. For Lim Tiong Wooi, it was a box of almost 60 documents tracing her father’s years of detention, rejection and separation. And for Jo Kukathas, it was a box of her own father’s belongings sitting in her study.

These objects became entry points into The Secret Drawer, a new documentary theatre production by Instant Café Theatre Company that brings together two deeply personal family histories with a much larger, and often uncomfortable, chapter of Malaysian history.

The production centres on two women: artists and performers Ling Tang and Lim Tiong Wooi, as they investigate the lives of their fathers and the political world that shaped them. Their stories reach back into the theatre, activism and political upheavals of 1950s and 1960s Malaysia, including the experiences of people on the Left, political detention, student activism and the consequences of being branded an enemy of the state.

But The Secret Drawer is not just a history lesson. It is an investigation into what happens when political history enters a family, and what happens when the children of that generation finally begin asking questions. As the production’s premise suggests: “When history happens, no-one is spared.”

For director Kukathas, the project began with another production altogether. Last year, she developed What the Elders Left Us, a research festival examining the Malaysian performing arts scene from the pre-independence period through post-independence and up to 1969, the year of the May 13 riots.

“I was looking at the performing arts scene in Malaysia, pre and post-independence until 1969, when we had our May 13th riots,” she says. “And I felt that the arts in Malaysia needed to change, and then the national culture of Malaysia needed to change again.”

Her own father was part of the post-independence Malay theatre scene, and she had inherited a box of his belongings. “I had a box of his things in my house,” she says. “But that was what inspired me to start this festival about opening boxes.”

The idea of opening boxes became more than a metaphor. While researching Chinese theatre for the festival, Kukathas approached Ling to help with material she could not read herself. Ling then mentioned that the father of her friend Lim Tiong Wooi had also been involved in theatre, and had been arrested for his activism. “I felt that,” Kukathas says. “And I thought it would make a really interesting story.”

Ling also told her about a drawer in her family home that she had always been forbidden from opening. “So I guess that the serendipity of opening boxes, opening doors, wasn’t a good excuse to pass up,” Kukathas says.

What followed was a process of excavation. Tiong Wooi was initially reluctant because the story was deeply personal. But she began researching with Ling, and her father eventually shared a box of files she had never seen before. The material was compelling enough that what had begun as a one-day research presentation became something more substantial.

Last year’s version was, in Kukathas’ words, a way of presenting research theatrically, using family archives. But Ling had not yet had the opportunity to tell her own stories. “When I asked them, I felt we should stage it in full,” Kukathas says.

As she came on board as director and dramaturg, the process became one of asking questions, sending the performers away to research, and waiting to see what they would bring back. Ling’s material began to widen beyond her father and mother to her great-grandparents and the political and social circumstances surrounding them. Kukathas encouraged her to investigate the artists of the 1950s and 1960s, eventually uncovering another story she felt belonged in the production.

She began to see the two narratives as complementary. “I thought Tiong Wooi’s would be the personal family and nation narrative. And Ling’s would be the national narrative. And it’s a big geopolitical narrative,” she says. But the deeper they went, the harder it became to separate those categories.

Ling’s parents had also been Leftists. They were not imprisoned and were not politically active for very long, but their choices raised another question for Kukathas: why did they become involved in the first place? For Tiong Wooi, meanwhile, the history became unexpectedly centred on her mother. “I always knew she moved to Malaysia for love, for marrying my father,” she says. “So I thought maybe that’s not too difficult. But as I understand more of it, it’s more than that.”

Leaving one’s homeland, family and social network, then raising three daughters in Malaysia, was itself a profound act of sacrifice. “It’s not easy to leave your own homeland, your family, with no relatives and friends around while at the same time, raising three daughters and having a family,” she says.

The archive therefore does something unexpected, not only revealing the hidden political life of a father, but also changing a daughter’s understanding of the people around him. Ling experienced something similar. “My father always talked about it, ever so lightly,” she says. But when she began asking more questions, particularly about the period when he submitted his name to a petition concerning expelled students, she began to perceive the emotional cost beneath his casual recollections. “I can feel his pain more,” she says.

That movement between the public and private is central to The Secret Drawer. For Kukathas, political detention is not only about the person who disappears into prison. It is also about the family members left behind. “He went to jail for five years,” she says. “But what we also see is that it seems so easy for a government to put somebody in jail. But it has an effect on children. It has an effect on families.”

The political story, in other words, is a family story. A generation can be detained, silenced or written out of a national narrative, but the consequences do not disappear when the prison sentence ends. They travel through families, such as through what parents choose to tell their children, what they leave unsaid, and what their children only understand decades later. “A lot of the play is about bloodlines,” Kukathas says.

She is also interested in the delayed nature of understanding one’s parents. “When we’re young, we ignore our parents and we judge them,” she says. “When we even get older, we think, gee, who were they? And our story is worth listening to.”

For Tiong Wooi, that process of looking backwards has also meant confronting a painful contradiction. Her father was unable to continue pursuing his socialist ideology, likely in part because of his responsibilities as a father. “Children like us somehow know this,” she says. “But then knowing this and telling the story as a performance is different, and difficult emotionally.”

That distinction between knowing something privately and putting it on a stage is where the documentary-theatre form becomes particularly important. The Secret Drawer uses letters, official documents, archival material, memories, objects, music, sound and re-enactments. But Kukathas says the process forced her to question the category of “documentary theatre” itself. “I wanted to stay true to the idea of documentary theatre, but then I also began to question what is documentary theatre,” she says.

The material is both public and private. Historical and intimate. The performers speak directly to the audience, but there are also scenes in which they appear to be engaged in the process of discovering their own histories. Some of that material came from an unexpected source: the WhatsApp messages Ling and Tiong Wooi had exchanged during their research.

“They were incredible messages,” Kukathas says. “They were asking each other really profound questions and answering in a really profound way, asking about the meaning of art, asking about the meaning of home.”

She began calling these sections “Late Night Conversations”. At first she considered presenting the WhatsApp messages as text on stage, but decided against a straightforward digital representation. Instead, they became part of a wider theatrical language involving audio, objects and visual material.

The definition of “archive” also expanded. Sometimes the performers would tell her a story and then dismiss it as unimportant. Kukathas began asking what else might count as an artefact. “What other objects are important?” she recalls asking. The answer became three-dimensional: objects, sound, music, text and paper.

One particularly small object became significant. Ling had told Kukathas about a secret drawer and said she needed a cassette tape and other material. The tape itself was too old to play, but Ling managed to find the cover identifying the music.

“What’s in the cassette tape?” became another question. The answer was not necessarily the sound itself, but the trace left behind by it. By extension, music also became part of the archive. Kukathas, who had wanted more songs in the production after last year’s work, began looking at songs as historical documents. This resulted in a piece that asks what happens when an archive is made theatrical.

Tiong Wooi describes the official documents as particularly powerful because of their very lack of drama. “The dates, the cold and factual language, the words written at a particular moment in time, all of these things have lived through the years and have now become history,” she says. “When we allow these documents to speak for themselves, we don’t have to explain everything. Sometimes, just placing a letter, a date, or an official record on stage is enough.”

That approach also leaves room for uncertainty. “We are not trying to tell the audience exactly what happened or who was right and who was wrong,” Tiong Wooi says. “We are trying to create enough space for different versions of the truth to exist at the same time.”

That is easier said than done when the material belongs to living families. Tiong Wooi says that when she first began writing down her memories, she was terrified that she might hurt the people she loved. The collaborative process became crucial. “I don’t think I could have done it without my director and my collaborator,” she says.

Kukathas, in turn, describes a process built on trust. She would ask the performers to write about something, sometimes without knowing what would emerge. “Because when you’re writing your own personal experiences, you’re digesting in a way things,” she says. “And then when I would ask her questions about it, then [it would] trigger a memory.”

Some of those memories had been buried. “There were certain points, moments where I said, is that too difficult to talk about?” Kukathas says. The performers retained the final authority over their own experiences. Kukathas describes reconstructing sections of their stories and having the performers stop her: that wasn’t how they felt; that wasn’t how it happened. “So it’s their story,” she says. “They tell me it’s wrong. I’m going to change it because it’s wrong.”

For Tiong Wooi, this process also revealed the complexity of the people she was writing about. “The same person can hold completely opposite qualities at the same time,” she says. “Someone can be loving and hurtful, generous and selfish, strong and vulnerable. These things can all exist in the same person.”

She describes the process as being like discovering the part of an iceberg that had been hidden beneath the water. That may also explain why the production is not simply a solemn exercise in political remembrance. Kukathas says she is particularly interested in Ling’s humour. “She’s very funny,” she says. “And when you said earlier, how do you create this? I feel like their characters, the two actors have their own character.”

Rather than flattening the performers into vessels for historical information, Kukathas wants to preserve their distinct personalities. “I want to keep the integrity of the two characters, the two spirits,” she says. The humour, in that context, can become another way of approaching pain. “You mask our pain with being funny,” Kukathas says.

It is impossible to discuss The Secret Drawer without confronting the political sensitivity of its subject matter. The production deals openly with the Malaysian Left, political detention, activism and the generation that came of age before and around 1969.

Kukathas does not describe making the work as an act of bravery. In fact, she resists that framing. She points to her father’s own theatre work. The first play he wrote for his post-independence theatre group was about a communist who has been imprisoned and later seeks out the man responsible for his imprisonment, eventually encountering his wife. What interested Kukathas was that the communist character was treated sympathetically. His point of view was allowed to exist. “And yet, after this, every time you put any communist character in any play, they ban it,” she says.

Her response is characteristically direct. “I never think, ‘Oh, it’s brave to do it.’ I think you just do it.”

She has long argued that Malaysian artists should not assume they are being watched or policed at every moment. “There’s far less policing than we think,” she says. “And I always think we should just do it, and if somebody objects to it, then we have a dialogue, or we have a shutdown.”

But she acknowledges that the political environment has shifted in ways that have made the question of censorship harder to ignore. “If you’d asked me that a year ago, I would have said, yes, it’s fine now,” she says. Then, she points out, books about the lives of Malaysian Leftists in the 1960s and 1970s were banned. “And I’m like, okay, it’s still something that those in authority think that we should not be looking at.”

That history of suppression has also informed Instant Café Theatre’s own practice. Kukathas recalls the company’s documentary work about its political satire, You Can’t Say That, whose title came from a sketch about the Internal Security Act. The joke was simple: contestants would correctly answer questions about politically sensitive subjects, only to be told, “You can’t say that.”

Kukathas sees The Secret Drawer as continuing that instinct. “We always like to do things where people say you can’t say that, then it’s up to us to say it.”

For Tiong Wooi, the practical concern was whether using her father’s archival documents could create legal problems. Her father asked the same question, but his concern was for the production rather than himself. The distinction is telling. These are people whose political experiences happened decades ago, but the consequences of making their stories public are still being considered in the present.

Kukathas has a phrase for the kind of history she wants to recover: “subaltern histories”. The term points towards people whose experiences sit outside dominant historical narratives, people whose lives may be treated as peripheral even though they reveal something fundamental about the society around them.

In the case of political detention, she is interested in the apparent insignificance of one person within a vast bureaucracy. “In the greater bureaucracy of imprisoning people, he’s a blip on the radar,” she says.

But to a family, he is anything but a blip. This is why she rejects the idea that the production is trying to replace one official national narrative with another. “The real ones are the lives of ordinary people, sometimes in very extraordinary circumstances, sometimes just very ordinary circumstances.”

One of the production’s scenes brings this approach into particularly sharp focus. At a protest, one performer plays a protester and draws on the declaration issued by students at the time. But within that historical recreation, she tells her mother’s story.

The political document and the family memory exist together. And the effect is not to make history smaller, but to make it human. Perhaps this is where the production speaks most directly to younger Malaysians. Tiong Wooi says she does not particularly like telling audiences what they should take away from a performance. She believes that if a story is told earnestly and sincerely, people will find their own connections.

But she does see a generational connection. Young people today may experience their own political and social difficulties without necessarily seeing themselves as part of a longer history of Malaysian idealism and resistance.

Kukathas similarly sees Ling and Tiong Wooi as a bridge between generations. Their parents were idealists of the 1960s. Their own generation inherited the consequences of those choices. And today’s young Malaysians are confronting their own versions of political and social uncertainty. “They’re young people now who are also idealistic, but who think they’re alone,” Kukathas says. “They don’t see it as part of a continuum.”

Theatre cannot, she admits, solve authoritarianism. “No piece of theatre is going to change that.” But something special happens when people gather in a room and collectively acknowledge what happened. “Not pretending it didn’t happen, that is very important,” she says.

For Instant Café Theatre, which has spent decades using satire and performance to interrogate Malaysian politics and society, that collective act is part of the point. The theatre does not have to provide a verdict. It can create the conditions for people to listen, remember, question and perhaps recognise something of themselves in a history they thought belonged to someone else.

The most moving part of The Secret Drawer may ultimately have little to do with ideology. It is about what remains of people after they are gone. Kukathas recalls recently attending an exhibition of letters with one of the performers. Among the letters displayed were those belonging to her father. Kukathas had brought along a letter from her stepmother concerning her father’s death.

She was asked to read it aloud. “I started to cry,” she says. “And I just was so shocked.”

The letter, she realised, had become something more than a document. “Just reading the letter is a memento of a love.”

That observation provides the emotional key to the production. The documents in The Secret Drawer are evidence of political history, but they are also traces of relationships. The drawer contains more than secrets. The archive contains more than facts. There are parents who made difficult choices, children who grew up in the shadows of those choices, mothers whose sacrifices were less visible than their husbands’ political lives, and artists trying decades later to understand what their families were part of.

For Ling, the exploration ultimately expands beyond the individual fathers. “Through our own history [we] explore the meaning of this history, not only themselves but that era, that space, that region, people of that era,” she says.

These family histories, she adds, are part of a “bigger tapestry”. For her, that connects directly to questions that have always mattered to artists: identity and belonging. And perhaps that is why the image of the drawer is so apt. Malaysia’s history is not necessarily hidden because there is nothing there. Sometimes it is hidden because nobody has opened the drawer.

The Secret Drawer asks what happens when someone finally does, and discovers not only the political history inside, but the people. A father, mother, daughter. A prison, a play staged behind bars, a petition. A letter, a cassette tape, a box of documents. Small things, perhaps, against the machinery of history.

But as Kukathas puts it, the supposedly small stories may be the big story after all.

The Secret Drawer plays from 2nd to 6th September 2026 at The Studio@JCPAC (Jeffrey Cheah Performing Arts Centre), Sunway Square, Kuala Lumpur. Tickets available here