A Reflection on Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet AFCM 2025

At a morning concert during the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, The Death of Juliet – Prokofiev’s final scene from Romeo and Juliet, arranged for viola and piano by Vadim Borisovsky – was performed with great poise by Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt and Joseph Havlat. The piano gave the piece its pulse, steady and restrained, while the viola hovered above it, expressive and sombre. And though it didn’t quite carry the emotional edge a violin might bring to that final arc of sorrow, the music did what it so often does: it opened the door to memory.

In 2001, I was leading a team responsible for the development of the Belanak gas field in Indonesia’s West Natuna Sea – a subsea project exporting natural gas into Malaysia via the Duyong platform off Terengganu. It was the first cross-border subsea gas pipeline in Southeast Asia, and it required close and frequent coordination with Malaysian partners. That meant regular trips to Kuala Lumpur.

But the city at that time was unsettled. Demonstrations were erupting in support of Anwar Ibrahim, the former Deputy Prime Minister who had been imprisoned on charges widely seen as politically motivated. These weren’t token protests – they were large, charged, and sometimes unpredictable. On more than one occasion, meetings were postponed or disrupted. And there were times I wasn’t certain I’d get to the airport, or back from it, without incident. The political instability didn’t just hang in the air – it occasionally threatened to interfere with the work itself.

But alls well that ends well. The project was successfully completed and in 2004 Anwar’s conviction was overturned and he took up teaching posts at Georgetown University and St Anthony’s College Oxford.

Two years later an article in the Courier Mail caught my eye. Queensland University was about to host the Eighth World Shakespeare Congress in Brisbane. I called the university and was advised the event was open to everybody.

Much to my surprise, the keynote speaker on the second day was Anwar Ibrahim. He spoke dispassionately about his years in solitary confinement. How, after many weeks, he was finally given a copy of the Qur’an. And then, some weeks later, a second book: the complete works of Shakespeare. It changed his life. He recounted how he read the plays again and again. Not for entertainment, but as an act of reflection. Shakespeare, he said, was not bound by time or tradition – his characters struggled with the same questions that lived at the heart of scripture: justice and tyranny, loyalty and betrayal, power and its misuse. He spoke of the Qur’an and Shakespeare not in contrast, but in conversation – as if both, in different tongues, had helped him make sense of what had happened and how he must go on.

Later that week, at a Bell Shakespeare performance of Romeo and Juliet, I found myself seated next to Anwar and his wife, Dr Wan Azizah. We spoke for some time before the performance opened. He already knew of the Belanak project, and was genuinely interested in hearing about my work in KL during those turbulent years. He was warm, curious, and generous in conversation.