Masakini Theatre

Masakini Theatre Company is a Malaysian performing arts company based at 8A Tepian Tunku, Bukit Tunku, Kuala Lumpur. It was set up in 2003 by Sabera Shaik, its founder and artistic director, who holds a Masters degree in Theatre Arts and had accumulated decades of theatre experience with companies in Kuala Lumpur beforehand. The company describes itself as a group of artists that stages its own works as well as those of other performing artists, and it also videos and archives works by those artists.

Activities span directing and producing theatre productions, staging variety and corporate shows for company annual and award dinners, and training actors through workshops. Programmes include ACT ONE, an acting workshop for beginners aged 12-45, and "Acting for the Young At Heart" for participants over 50, in which they write and perform their own stories. The company positions itself as the first and only theatre company in Malaysia to produce shadow theatre works for adults, with titles including WAYANG (2010), WAYANG - The Story of Kuala Lumpur, WAYANG - Malaysian Stories and WAYANG - Malaysia Kita, alongside children's shadow theatre such as The Ugly Duckling, Sang Kancil stories and a "why we celebrate" series covering Chinese New Year, Christmas, Easter and Ramadhan. Other listed projects include TINGKAP, MARI MENDENGAR, Canadian Rajah (from the Canadian Rajah Collective, on the story of Esca Brooke-Daykin, son of the white Rajah of Sarawak) and Mok Su, written by Datuk Ramli Ibrahim about Mak Yong prima donna Mariam Titisan Air Mata.

The company operates its own venue, Studio Ramli Hassan, in Bukit Tunku, described as surrounded by greenery and equipped with a sprung floor, large mirrors, a 6.5-metre-high ceiling, a music system and basic lighting. The studio hosts workshops, actor training and experimentation by young artists, and is offered to outside parties for collaboration and space usage.

Founding story

Sabera Shaik established the company in 2003, after roughly 35 years of theatre work in various capacities with theatre companies in Kuala Lumpur and having completed a Masters degree in Theatre Arts. She has described a wish to see more localised content, taking material from the West and placing it in a local context, as the driving idea behind her work.

Business model

The company generates activity through ticketed theatre productions at its own studio and at external venues such as Damansara Performing Arts Centre, paid workshops and actor training, corporate show commissions, and rental of or collaboration in its Studio Ramli Hassan space. Donations are also solicited: the A Stage for Students initiative asks sponsors to fund student tickets, and after-dinner performances have been used as fundraising for touring.

Sources of income indicated include ticket sales (for example RM300 per person for the January 2019 after-dinner show plus performance), workshop and training fees, corporate show production, studio collaboration, and donation-based sponsorship of student tickets.

Traction

Lady Swettenham has been performed internationally since its 2009 Danish premiere, including seven shows in New Delhi and at the NCPA Theatre Festival in Mumbai in November 2011, plus dates in the UK, Malaysia, South Africa and Brazil; Puteri Saadong was performed in Jaipur, India, and at Odin Teatret's 2019 Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium festival. The 2019 production Wayang: Mak Yong Stories is described as a sellout. For the 2026 production Lady M the company set a target of RM12,540 to sponsor 200 student tickets across four performance days.

Latest developments

In April 2026 the company staged Lady M at Damansara Performing Arts Centre from 23 to 26 April, a solo reimagining of Macbeth performed by Sabera Shaik and directed by Tage Larsen of Odin Teatret, presented without a set and using lighting design, minimal props and no music. Alongside it the company ran A Stage for Students, a donation-based initiative that began as a collaboration with Universiti Malaya and has since opened to other educational institutions, subsidising student attendance at professional theatre.