Kee Thuan Chye
2 events
Profession:
Actor/Actress, Director, Producer, Playwright/Scriptwriter, Voice Actor
Based Location:
Klang Valley
As a playwright, Kee Thuan Chye is best known for
• 1984 Here and Now, which is included in the international anthology Postcolonial Plays
• We Could **** You, Mr Birch, which has been a text studied in Malaysian universities since the mid-1990s
• The Big Purge, which has been translated into Greek and staged by a professional company in Athens
• Swordfish + Concubine, which has been translated into Chinese and Malay and been staged twice in Singapore and several times in Malaysia.
Kee has also written numerous radio plays many of which were broadcast on RTM in the 1970s.
He has directed about a dozen plays for the theatre, including Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, We Could **** You, Mr Birch, which was invited to the Festival of Asian Performing Arts in Singapore in 1995, and Swordfish + Concubine (2017).
His acting credits over the last 50 years have been for stage, film and TV.
He has appeared in the Hollywood films Entrapment and Anna and the King, and in Malaysian films like 1957 Hati Malaya, Sell Out! and Terbang.
On TV, he has worked in numerous series and TV-movies produced in Malaysia and Singapore, among them City of the Rich, Kopitiam, 10 (Sepuluh), Phua Chu Kang, Code of Law and Sense of Home: Kampung Kid, in which he played the lead role.
He was also in the Hallmark TV-movie Marco Polo and Secrets of the Forbidden City, made for the BBC and the History Channel.
On stage, he has acted in countless productions since 1977 but the one role he is proudest of is that of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
He is the author of several books, including No More Bullshit, Please, We’re All Malaysians, The Elections Bullshit, March 8: The Day Malaysia Woke Up, The People’s Victory and the two-volume biography of Lim Kit Siang entitled Malaysian First.
