When Jeffrey Cheah Performing Arts Centre (JCPAC) approached Ghafir Akbar about presenting a production, he already knew which play he wanted to pull from the back of his mind: Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, “I love Greek plays and I love this play,” he says. “But one of my concerns was also that sometimes when you think about classic plays, the language can be quite demanding, and the scale can be quite demanding. Sometimes they can feel inaccessible.”

He had first read Ruhl’s play many years ago and, rather than immediately pursuing it, decided to keep it in reserve. “When I read it, I thought, ‘This is a good one. I’ll keep it in my back pocket.’ So when JCPAC approached me to present a work, I thought it was a good one to pull out.”

What appealed to him was the way Ruhl manages to make an ancient story feel surprisingly immediate. Eurydice, which premiered in 2003, takes the familiar myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and shifts the centre of gravity away from the musician descending into the Underworld for his wife. Instead, the story is told through Eurydice’s eyes: she dies young on her wedding day, enters the Underworld, reunites with her father and struggles to remember the life and love she has left behind. Ruhl herself has described the play as one of her most personal works, written in response to the death of her own father.

For Ghafir, that combination of an old story and contemporary sensibility was exactly the point. “It is a classic that feels contemporary. It deals with timeless things, but Ruhl’s adaptation is fun, it’s light, it’s relatable. And it is theatrically rich enough to make something that feels old feel new and fresh.”

That theatricality is particularly important to Ghafir because Eurydice does not behave like a conventional classical tragedy. Ruhl’s script is full of strange, playful images: an Underworld populated by Stones, a River of Forgetfulness, a raining elevator and a world that she specifically asks directors not to treat too traditionally. Her own notes describe the Underworld as something closer to Alice in Wonderland than Hades, while Eurydice and Orpheus are to be played as young people who are “a little too young and a little too in love.”

Ghafir is interested in precisely that tension between accessibility and theatrical invention. The production runs for only 90 minutes without an interval, but he does not think contemporary audiences necessarily have a problem with duration. The bigger question, he says, is attention. “People can sit through a three-hour film like The Odyssey,” he says. “So I think it’s not really about duration. It’s about attention.”

Ruhl’s play helps by constantly changing shape. “This Eurydice is visually rich. The scenes are short and fast. The language is poetic, but it’s contemporary. It’s almost like music. There’s rhythm, there’s rhyme, and it shifts between verse and prose. It’s continually challenging the audience and surprising them,” he says.

For Ghafir, that makes the work less about asking an audience to endure a difficult classical text and more about inviting them into a world that keeps moving. That world has also changed for him since he first encountered the play. Ghafir trained primarily as an actor rather than a director, and much of his directing education has come through watching and working with other directors. “I learned on the job,” he says. “I’ve worked with different directors and seen different methods of how they get performances out of actors. I’m still learning. I’m still pivoting and shifting.”

His experience as a performer has become part of his directing vocabulary. He has worked across Shakespeare, movement-based theatre and realism, and says that understanding different performance modes has helped him recognise what a particular production needs rather than imposing one method on everything. “I think being an actor has helped me because I understand different modes of performance. I understand Shakespeare, I understand movement, I understand realism. So I can shift between those things,” he says.

Travel and exposure to other theatre has also changed his tastes. “You see work elsewhere, you travel, you see different things, and it changes what you like.”

And then there is life itself. In the past two years. “I think this play feels very different to me now than it did five years ago,” he says. “I’ve lost several friends in the last two years. As recently as two months ago, I lost someone. So you start to think about these things differently.”

The themes of death, family and memory therefore arrive in the rehearsal room with a weight that may not have been there when he first put the play aside. “All the themes are now much more pronounced.”

That may also explain why the central question of Eurydice has become so important to him: not simply what happens after death, but what happens to the memory of a person after they are gone. “How do we remember dead people?” he asks. “What do we forget? How do we choose to remember? That’s the crux.”

Playwright Ruhl’s own relationship with those questions was deeply personal. She has said that she wrote Eurydice for her father, who died of cancer when she was young, and that in writing the play she was, in many ways, trying to have more conversations with him. She has also spoken about how the play became a way of taking fragments of her own life and pushing them through a much larger myth.

Ghafir approaches that emotional terrain through a world that is deliberately less gloomy than audiences might expect from a story set in the Underworld. “The Underworld is post-life, so it can seem very heavy and musty,” he says. “But Ruhl’s Underworld is fantastical. It’s whimsical.” His production takes that whimsical quality somewhere quite specific: a public swimming pool. “There’s something about a swimming pool that reminds me of childhood memory, but there’s also some imminent danger.”

The difference between a swimming pool full of people and one that has been emptied is particularly evocative for him. “I actually love water and love swimming. But think about how a public pool during the school holidays has a very different quality from an empty pool. An abandoned pool can feel quite ominous. Think about how when you go into old homes, you see old swimming pools, and it triggers memories of climbing, falling, almost drowning.”

The production will not literally build a swimming pool inside JCPAC’s Studio. The black-box space demands something more suggestive, with the designers using lighting, texture and colour to create the impression of water rather than constructing a literal pool. “It’s more of a wall with water,” Ghafir says.

Even when the water is gone, however, the space retains its history. “Even if you drain it, the containment is still there. The memory still inhabits the space.” That idea extends beyond the set. “Water has always been there, and it leaves a mark after the person dies,” he says. “It stains you.”

The metaphor feels especially apt for a play in which memory is constantly being washed away and reconstructed. Ruhl’s Underworld is governed by forgetting, and Eurydice’s reunion with her father becomes a process of rediscovering language, identity and shared history. Ruhl has described the play as being concerned with the relationship between language, memory and the bonds between people.

Ghafir’s own understanding of grief is similarly rooted in love. “Grief exists because of love,” he says. “You don’t grieve someone you didn’t love. The greater the love, the harder the grief.”

Importantly, he is not approaching the swimming pool from a place of fear or mistrust. The pool is instead a container for memory: something familiar, playful and potentially dangerous, capable of holding traces of childhood long after the people who inhabited those memories have disappeared. That same tension between the ordinary and the extraordinary informs the performance style.

Ghafir sees the production as having two distinct realms. The Underworld will be heightened, fantastical and larger-than-life, while the relationships between Eurydice and her father and Eurydice and Orpheus will remain much closer to realism. “The relationships live almost in realism,” he says. “There are quiet, tender moments, but they become bittersweet because the larger circumstances are pulling them apart.”

That, to him, is one of the defining qualities of Greek drama, resulting in a production in which the emotional stakes remain recognisable even as the theatrical world becomes increasingly strange. “You have these relationships that are real, but the circumstances are beyond their control; gods, the Underworld, the River Styx, Hades. Audiences can and should expect real relationships being tested by extraordinary circumstances.”

The same philosophy informed his casting. The role of Eurydice will be played by Vinna Law, returning to the Malaysian stage from London, with Tinesh Janaki Raman as Orpheus, Terence Swampillai as Father and Gavin Yap as the Lord of the Underworld / Man. Jo Kukathas, Anne James and Sukania Venugopal take on the roles of the Stones.

For Ghafir, the Stones and other ensemble roles offered an opportunity to bring together performers with different levels of experience. “The play is quite open in its casting, especially with the three ensemble roles,” he says. “I wanted experienced actors and new actors. I wanted a representation of what Malaysia sees.”

Physicality, age, gender and chemistry were also important, but the ability to inhabit Ruhl’s language was non-negotiable. “One of the key things is that they have to be able to grasp the poetry, the rhythm, the language.”

He had not previously worked with Vinna Law and had not seen much of her work, but her audition immediately caught his attention. “I knew of her, but I’d never worked with her. Her submission struck me because there was a purity to it.”

The casting process eventually drew a wide pool of applicants, including many young actors, but Ghafir deliberately wanted a mixture of generations and experience. That decision created some of the scheduling difficulties that are familiar to anyone working professionally in Malaysian theatre.

Most actors, he notes, are full-time theatre-makers in the sense that theatre is their primary profession, but that does not necessarily mean they can simply commit to one production whenever a director asks. “They need to do other work. They need to do other shows to sustain their lives.”

As such, Malaysian theatre, he says, has a habit of happening in bursts. “Shows often come together last minute, in bursts. So scheduling becomes difficult. Sometimes six shows at once, then it becomes quiet.”

He describes the current activity around JCPAC in similar terms. More productions are happening, which is encouraging, but a sudden concentration of shows can also mean that audiences are divided between them. “There are many shows happening now, and that can spread the audiences,” he says. “But it also shows that there’s an injection of funding and an ability to produce.”

For Ghafir, that can create a misleading picture of the health of the industry. “The bursts can create a false impression of what Malaysian theatre looks like, and for me, it’s a matter of planning. If we know we can do shows for the next year, then we can plan properly.”

He wonders whether the sector needs some form of central body or network that can help companies and artists coordinate rather than operating entirely independently. “I wish there were some kind of union or central body,” he says, pointing towards the possibility of a structure that could function somewhat like the National Arts Council or a network between theatre companies. “Otherwise, we’re just growing sideways.”

The issue is not simply funding or venues. It is also the relationship between audiences, and thinking of how despite there being more spaces, more trainees and more people entering the industry, but that does not necessarily mean the industry is growing in a way that compounds over time. Audiences, meanwhile, remain concentrated in pockets.

Platforms such as CloudJoi could potentially become part of that solution, not merely as ticketing services but as bridges between companies, artists and audiences, perhaps eventually moving towards co-programming or even co-production. But once again, planning is the obstacle. “Getting everyone onboard is hard because shows happen last minute, and CloudJoi needs months of preparation.”

It is a recurring problem: the industry wants to build a larger ecosystem, but many of its individual productions are still operating on short timelines. Yet Ghafir is clear that there are significant strengths in the Malaysian theatre community, particularly in the resourcefulness of its artists. “Artists here are really good at making work on shoestring budgets without the work suffering,” he says, where he considers how a lack of money can sometimes force a more focused kind of theatre. “We don’t need spectacle, it forces us to look at detail, nuance and focus on our Malaysian theatrical language.”

But that strength can also become a limitation when artists do not have enough opportunities to see or work alongside people beyond their immediate circles. “We don’t see enough of how other people work,” he says. “We don’t see enough contemporary work.”

There is, however, a strong culture of writing original material. “We have strong writers,” he says. “Because of the lack of rights funding, people write original work. That cultivates writers and directors.”

He sees diversity and the willingness to revisit stories from different perspectives as another strength of the local scene. Artists are willing to take the same basic story and ask how else it might be told, which in turn encourages experimentation in form and theatrical language. “The biggest issue then is longevity and sustainability,” he says. “Funding lasts two or three years and then disappears. Government money appears and disappears. It’s hard to build momentum.”

This is part of why he sees the development of JCPAC within the wider Sunway ecosystem as potentially significant. “Sunway is building a system,” he says, pointing to the relationship between its universities, malls, residences and now the performing arts centre. The arts, he believes, were a missing component in that ecosystem. “They recognised that the arts were missing from that ecosystem.”

JCPAC’s programming across theatre, dance, stand-up comedy and film suggests an attempt to build something broader than a venue devoted to one particular form. “Even residents who don’t think they need the arts may discover it because it’s in their neighbourhood.”

There is also the potential for the nearby university and its arts training programmes to feed emerging performers into the venue, creating an ecosystem in which students can move from training to professional work without having to leave the environment entirely. But Ghafir stresses that this kind of infrastructure cannot be judged solely through conventional short-term returns. “You can’t expect a return on investment in two years,” he says. “Arts investment works differently, and isn’t necessarily a business where it comes back in monetary form. The ‘profit’ is people coming into the coffee shop, building audiences, building awareness and a relationship with the arts over time.”

It may seem small when measured against the national picture, but he believes the ecosystem can become meaningful from within. And if Eurydice is ultimately a play about what happens when people disappear, it is also a play about what remains. That question has become increasingly personal for Ghafir. For him, the play is “about remembering and memory, language intertwined with death and losing someone you love.” He hopes audiences will leave with something deceptively simple: the desire to remember. “I want people to leave with a desire to remember people who are no longer with us, and to actively remember them.”

Loss, he says, changes the way we understand the moments we had with people. “When you lose someone, you realise you want to remember them. You start thinking about all the moments you had.” The play repeatedly returns to the devastating possibility of forgetting, to the desire to say, in effect, if only I could remember. “If we make it count now, there’s less regret later. Yes, it’s a cliché, but that doesn’t make it any less true.”

That desire to make people remember is also connected to what he hopes the production can do for the Malaysian theatre community itself. He wants the actors to be seen at their best, not simply by audiences but by other directors, writers and theatre-makers who may encounter the production and recognise the talent available to them. “I want to present these actors at their best, so other theatre-makers, directors and writers can see what talent is available and be inspired to use them, to create work for them.”

And he hopes the production will encourage artists and audiences to think differently about mythology itself. “You can tell Greek stories differently,” he says. “There are different ways of telling our stories. There’s no need for it to be dry or for us to be wearing togas.”

Perhaps that is also why he is not particularly worried about whether audiences arrive knowing the original myth. Many people may know the broad outline of Orpheus and Eurydice, while others may encounter it for the first time. Either way, the emotional architecture is accessible. “It’s about young people in love,” he says. “It’s about love and loss. That’s universal. You don’t have to dumb it down for the audience.”

Balancing it all between language and image, realism and fantasy, ancient myth and contemporary experience is ultimately what draws Ghafir to Eurydice. Ruhl took one of the oldest stories in Western mythology and asked what might happen if the woman at its centre were finally given space to speak. In doing so, she transformed a familiar tale about Orpheus’s journey into something equally concerned with father and daughter, memory and forgetting, and the strange ways love persists after death.

Ghafir’s production takes that story into a swimming pool, into childhood memory, into the rhythms of Malaysian theatre and into the personal experience of a director who has himself become more conscious of loss. The question remains the same. “How do we remember dead people?” The answer is not to remember them, but to make the moments we have with the living count while we still can.

Eurydice plays from 18th to 27th September 2026 at The Studio@JCPAC (Jeffrey Cheah Performing Arts Centre), Sunway Square, Kuala Lumpur. Tickets available here