“Origins are often unknowable. The Komedie Stamboel was often described in reviews, notices, and advertisements as a Malay version of European opera. There is no doubt that the Komedie Stamboel drew directly on the conventions of European musical theatre. The proscenium stage, wing-and drop set, focused stage lighting, emotive character-based acting, musical orchestra accompaniment, division of plays into scenes and acts, makeup and costumes, and many of the plots of plays all resembled the theatrical technology and dramaturgy of late nineteenth-century European theatre.” (Cohen 2006: 41)
“Another influence, just as formative but less visible, was the Parsi theatre. The Parsi theatre, sometimes called wayang Parsi in Indonesia and Malaysia, is seen by some as the beginning of commercial theatre in the Malay world.” (Cohen 2006: 41)
“This book suggests that komedi stambul was one of the critical conduits for establishing Malay language and associated urban culture in the consciousness of ordinary people throughout the islands of Indonesia. Knowledge of Malay was largely restricted to the spheres of officialdom, army barracks, and urban Chinese and Eurasians in Java and other Indonesian islands until the end of the nineteenth century. The popularity of stambul and related Malay-language theatres were critical factors in Malay’s move “out into the marketplace and the media,” and help to explain why Malay was so avidly “picked up by inlanders [Natives]” lacking formal education in fin de siècle Indonesia. In Mahieu’s day, Indonesian actors performed in Malay to audiences who did not speak the same dialect of Malay as they did, and they acted on-stage together with actors from all over the archipelago and as far away as Singapore and Penang. Grammarians had been struggling to define a transregional form of Malay for decades; in stambul theater a panlocal Malay became a living reality spoken aloud in theatrical dialogues before and with mass audiences.” (Cohen 2006: 341)
“The overwrought acting style so characteristic of many so-called regional theatre (teater daerah) forms, as well as Indonesian television and film, is a reflection of stambul acting. The idea is not to internalize character but to project movements to the audience. The legacy of stambul acting lives everywhere in the stagy gestures and affected intonation automatically deployed by so many Indonesians when speaking bahasa Indonesia. Although bahasa Indonesia is officially the national language of Indonesia, it remains for most Indonesians an “un-native” language. It requires a modulation of the self, and the way the self is situated in terms of others, in order to shift oneself from the habitus associated with a mother tongue and inhabit the linguistic worldview of bahasa Indonesia. It requires speakers to dissimulate, to act. Stambul and its theatrical derivatives have provided models for how to do this.” (Cohen 2006: 342)
“Ben Anderson has persuasively argued that komedi stambul exerted critical influences on twentieth-century Indonesian political culture. The theater provided a model for “elocution and gestural repertoire” for early twentieth-century politicians. ‘The borrowing seems quite natural if we reflect that it was for the first time in stambul and bangsawan that ‘natives’ stood up onstage and addressed large numbers of people they did not know with words more or less fully prepared or memorized.’” (Cohen 2006: 342)
“Komedi stambul has been portrayed as an emblematic mestizo cultural form in which differences among Chinese, Indonesian, and European were erased and social boundaries crossed. We have observed that stambul was a multivalent cultural field that actively involved participants from all of colonial Indonesia’s major ethnic groups, including Muslims, Chinese, Europeans, Eurasians, Arabs, and others. Rather than being a melting pot for ethnicity and race, however, onstage and offstage relations in the theater served to dramatize social and ethnic difference. Contrast and conflict came into the limelight in this most public of spaces.” (Cohen 2006: 344)
“Particular patterns of social relation were instituted in the theater. In particular, komedi stambul established the Eurasian appearance as the preferred object of spectatorial pleasure for Indonesian audiences of melodrama; as such, stambul has rightly been called “a precursor of the contemporary Indonesian ‘Sinetron’ or soap operas.” The pattern of Chinese “exploitation” of non-Chinese performers also largely began with stambul. Chinese bankrolling of Indonesian artists and culture workers continues to be characteristic of nearly all forms of Indonesian entertainment involving large sums of money, including the recording industry, television, and film.” (Cohen 2006: 344)
“Stambul played a decisive role in securing, organizing, and articulating a modern worldview in nineteenth-century Java and other islands of Indonesia. It marked a break with the traditional ethos and worldview most prominently displayed in wayang kulit. Java’s traditional shadow puppet theater enacts a stratified world of gods, nobles, demons, and commoners, in which characters are inherited types rather than novel creations. Performances are contingent on ritual functions and dedicated to ancestors and tutelary spirits; the puppeteer is both entertainer and ritual officiant. Stories might be new creations based on the characters and situation of oral traditions, but resolutions are fixed: there is always a return to the status quo. The Javanese language employed is often purposefully archaic and obscure, demanding linguistic expertise from both performers and audience.” (Cohen 2006: 345)
“Stambul stages a modern model for representation, both in theater and in real life. As commercial entertainment performed in readily accessible Malay language in public theatres, depicting characters mechanically reproduced or re-presented from social life, it was not contingent on expert spectators, local religious practices, or places spirits. The theater was a platform for mimesis and translation, in which “a huge variety of stories were imitated or enacted.” Plays were typically narrative transformations of literary and journalistic sources, but companies were free to take substantial liberties with dramatic sources as these were not fixed by the legacy of a performing tradition. It was, in other words, a site for play. It was a place for the exploration of possibilities, including ones overtly forbidden by the colonial regime.” (Cohen 2006: 345)
Source: Cohen, M.I. The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891-1903. Leiden: KILTV Press, 2006