The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891–1903 (review)

The Komedie Stamboel was a pioneering, traveling theatre company of the 1890s Dutch East Indies. This company, the large majority of whose players were Eurasian by birth, rose rapidly to popularity and spawned a plethora of imitators, thus greatly contributing to the growth of popular urban theatre in the Indies throughout the last decades of the colonial period. The form exercised such popular appeal that it may well have played a significant role in shaping later, better-known genres of folk theatre such as ludruk, ketoprak, and randai. Indonesian and foreign scholars have long mentioned Komedie Stamboel as a possible precursor of, or contributor to, the rise of the national art theatre in Indonesia, but little work of substance has been produced to flesh out the nature of such links. In The Komedie Stamboel, Matthew Isaac Cohen has taken the first steps toward a fuller understanding of popular theatre in the urban Indies during the first few decades of the twentieth century, and these steps have set a magisterial standard for future scholarship on the topic.

Cohen has written a powerful, impressively researched history centered on the Komedie Stamboel company and its key figures, especially the pivotal and protean actor, composer, musician, playwright, and manager, Auguste Mahieu. Cohen's account begins by describing the variety of traveling circuses, magic acts, comedy shows, and other entertainments circulating throughout the Dutch Indies in the late 1800s. He notes that it was in this cultural circuit, dominated by desires for the new, for astonishment and surprise (heran and aneh), that a musical theatre such as constructed by the Komedie Stamboel troupe first emerged and found fertile ground in which to flourish. He then paints a portrait of late 19th century Surabaya and the condition of its Eurasian population, a group living on the margins of both colonial European and native societies. Next, Cohen delineates the emergence of the Komedie Stamboel troupe in 1891, influenced both by European stage conventions and those of the Parsi Theatre, itself a kind of hybrid theatre drawing many of its stage conventions from European theatre, but much of its story ma te rial, languages, and tone from local South Asian sources. The actual birth of the Komedie Stamboel theatre in the eastern Javanese port city of Surabaya in 1891, brought about through a fortuitous though rocky partnership between Chinese entrepreneurs and unemployed Eurasians with a flair for acting and singing, is a fascinating story all by itself. The book follows the rise and fall of the original Stamboel group, the fortunes of several of its successors (under the leadership of Mahieu or others) and competitors, and pays particular attention to Mahieu's career, shifting from popular entertainer to a cultural figure who embraced the cause of Eurasian nationalism at the turn of the century, before slipping from the limelight in his last years as the genre's reputation grew tarnished, and as his later troupes proved unable to compete with other entertainments for public adulation.

With this book Cohen has pieced together an authoritative narrative of the rise of a theatrical genre that exercised tremendous influence, not only on the popular stage of the Indies, but on the popular music of the time as well. He meticulously documents the kinds of string ensembles, which were first engaged to accompany Stamboel's performances, and devotes attention to the ways in which Stamboel songs became omnipresent in the cities and towns where the company performed, taking on a life of their own as a popular and widely reproduced music that helped shape the urban culture of the late colonial period. The author seems to have combed both Dutch and Malay language periodicals deeply and exhaustively with a sensitive eye to all manner of information about Stamboel, Mahieu, and other major figures who helped shape the genre, as well as the general popular cultural atmosphere of the time, to piece together...