TALES OF LAND AND SEA
Contemporary theatre evokes the politics of the past
Bangkok Post Outlook
December 12, 2008
by Amita Amranand
As expected, there was a fragrance of the past in creations by theatre companies B-Floor Theatre and Crescent Moon Theatre
. And when familiar yet unfinished chapters of history recorded in fictional or poetic forms are plucked from their pages to continue their threads in the stories of today, nostalgia and relevance can tread on a thin line.
Crescent Moon's Yod Namtha Nai Talay (Sea Beside) translates Waree Wayu's poems on the lives of those residing by the sea into a series of small scenes that marry spoken words with moving image and bodies.
Written in the aftermath of October 6, 1976 by one of the founding
members of Crescent Moon, Talay Roomron (Brewing Sea) brims with the sense of both youthful idealism and dashed dreams. Director Sineenadh Keitprapai reflected verses of pain with the uncomfortable contortion of bodies. She portrayed the wails in the poems with eerie images of rapacious ghosts and evoked crumbled hope with graceful melancholy. There was also a dash of romance in the piece with the beautiful projection of live sand drawing.
It's not surprising that Sineenadh would pick literature by a writer of that specific generation whose political, social and artistic idealism helped shape the direction of her theatre work. She was able to extract both the beauty and the sense of loss of the time. Yod Namtha felt like an homage to something long lost in the past. The only problem with the tribute is that it hardly scratches the present.
In B-Floor's Phaen Din Uen (The Other Land), the odour of the past lingers on in the present and ferments until the future becomes fearsomely fetid. Inspired by the 1996 SEA Write award-winning collection of short stories of the same name by the late Kanokphong Songsomphan, director Teerawat Mulvilai's latest effort is the most overtly political theatre creation in recent memory.
Teerawat states in his director's note, "I can never talk about the political situation any more because we all have our own 'democracy'." And as a result of that frustration, he has created a physical theatre piece that is thoughtful, affecting and uncompromising.
Through political artefacts, from the stories of Kanokphong set in the South of Thailand during the political witch hunts of the '70s and '80s to the 1977 anti-communist military propaganda film, Nak Phaen Din (The Land's Burden), Teerawat subtly injected into them the psyche and mentality of the nation today and the words we like to bandy about when we speak of politics and the current unrest while he steered clear of the hackneyed suggestion that history repeats itself.
One of the most marked characteristics of Teerawat as a performer and director is his oddball humour. And his statements are most forceful when he gives his quirkiness an edge. The death of an inn
ocent man is quickly transformed, by the soldiers, into a comedy routine and a spectacle similar to the noisy Thai temple fairs. Before we know it, the victim is crowned a national hero. The propaganda film, with only its sounds preserved, becomes a comedy with an absurdly maudlin re-enactment. The utter seriousness of an officer as he tells the communist and the village scout to reconcile and love one another is all at once laughable, hilarious and jolting.
Teerawat drapes his entire one hour-plus production with unsettling sounds. Phaen Din Uen begins with a dead body sprawled on a bed of tyres and the voice of a Southern man: "Silence is the sound of this land." It moves into a future a la Sir Thomas More's Utopia that is choked with the mad buzzing and screeching of the citizens. It ends with today's most influential institutions taking hostage of the future generation, giving them guns to point at one another in fear. The final scene, accompanied by a chilling soundtrack and muffled sobs, made me wonder what would happen if Teerawat toyed less with sounds and more with silence.
