The 13th edition of the Bangkok Theatre Festival (BTF) has come and gone. This year, the theatre scene seems to have churned out a record-breaking number of productions and festivals. And somehow the small, yet growing community still manages to organise this annual theatre event and fill up most of the small venues around Bangkok.
Iceberg.
Democrazy Theatre Studio and Noncitizen took charge of the festival this year, bringing with them a more organised ticketing system and a younger, urban image to the festival.
The Bangkok Art and Culture Centre has become the main venue for the festival. But the BTF hasn't abandoned its first home at Santi Chaiprakarn Park in Bang Lamphu community, where small performances and excerpts of bigger productions were staged during the first weekend of the festival.
Here are some exciting developments and trends at this year's BTF.
Breaking Conventions
Devised theatre seems to be term du jour for young theatre artists. Splashing Theatre, and Kawin Pichitkul and Chanida Punyaneramitdee who collaborated on another devised theatre project Covertal, for Take Off Festival earlier this year, billed their festival entries as devised theatre.
Kawin and Chanida's creation, Ting, about two friends who leave their brainwashed town in search of a free-thinking place to live, didn't end up breaking any theatre convention in its final product. However, Chanida proved to be a witty writer and the cast of four actors, including Kawin, were hilarious and charming. Experiment was not confined to the new blood's territory. The more experienced artists broke a few rules of their own.
Silpathorn artist Nikorn Sae Tang of 8 x 8 Theatre Group did what he does best — depicting simple, intimate moments between ordinary people. In Goodbye, My Love, he also explored the concept of intimacy in digital communication by having audience members read a break-up scene from two digital devices. We then saw the same scene played out by two actors onstage, except this time, the characters were breaking up with each other in person.
One of the funniest and most charismatic stage performers Wannasak Sirilar returned after a few years of absence with a bold ensemble creation, Mamia Sukkasem (The Lover). Inspired by a true story of a forbidden love between a Lanna prince and a Burmese woman, Mamia, the piece frankly discusses sex, sexual identities and social taboos through monologue, singing, live music and interaction with the audience.
Wannasak and Lanna music artists/dancers Mae Champa and Krit Chaisinboon formed a formidable ensemble, but as the director, Wannasak also let each performer bring their individual expertise to the table. His monologue about rhinoceros (the Thai word for the animal, rad, also means slut) was at once hilarious and empowering. Wannasak is back and in top form.
Parnrut Kritchanchai of New Theatre Society may have stuck with comedy and adaptation, but she made an interesting proposal with her boisterous Sao Kruerfah In Search Of An Author. The writer-director combined the play Sao Kruerfah, the Thai version of Puccini's Madame Butterfly, with Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters In Search Of An Author to tell the story of Kruerfah and her son, who are searching for a playwright to rewrite the ending to their story.
As usual, Parnrut and her cast delivered a hysterical show. As a director, she is more in control of her craft while never abandoning the spontaneity necessary for comedy. Her adaptation is a clever one. It could have been a feminist one, too, if she hadn't been so faithful to the endings of the source materials.
Go Inter
Theatre companies from abroad have been performing at the BTF for at least five years, but they have mostly been short performances. This year, venues such as Sodsai Pantoomkomol Centre for Dramatic Arts and Creative Industries hosted some excellent foreign productions.
Sodsai Pantoomkomol Centre for Dramatic Arts presented Girl X by Japanese troupe Hanchu-Yuei and The Curious Lives Of Shakespeare And Cervantes by Singaporean company Generasia Limited. New performance venue Creative Industries, located in the same building as M Theatre, presented Smell: The Blind And The Dog by Inzou Theatre Company from Japan.
Smell tells the story of a Thai actress living in Japan, who is hired by a wealthy woman to act as the dog of her blind daughter. The real dog was killed while the mother was taking him out for a walk. Written and directed by Atsuto Suzuki, this play about deception and friendship is as cruel as it is touching for it still finds room for genuine and optimistic humour. Marino Yamamura played the blind Ayaka with heartbreaking delicacy and fieriness.
Another heartbreaking work from Japan, Girl X, dubbed "a 2.5-dimensional play", pushes the storytelling envelope with representations of characters, emotions and spaces through colours, words and images projected onto a screen. The two live actors Kazuki Ohashi and Sachiro Nomoto interact with these images and texts while performing their monologues. Although our eyes had to pull some acrobatic stunts, darting from the stage to the main screen to the subtitles, the actors' intensity was nevertheless compelling.
Girl X's writer and director Suguru Yamamoto, inspired by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, portrays the repressive atmosphere of the natural disaster's aftermath through a story that shuttles between dream and reality and characters with twisted inner lives that eventually unleash, destroying themselves and those around them — a challenging and unsettling piece of theatre.
The Dropouts
Like the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the BTF's programme has always been flooded with works by university students. Some are student-teacher collaborations, while others are entirely student-created. Most of them are either forgettable or in a very early stage of development. A major shift took place last year when students and professors at Mahidol University's College of Music were invited to present their works alongside professionals in a performing space reserved for shows handpicked by the organisers. Although they were professor-directed shows, the students' talent, energy and performance skills exhilarated and impressed.
It was undeniable that they were products of superior theatre training that Thailand has only begun to witness. Mahidol University's investment in their music programme is paying off handsomely. It is of course premature to expect a new standard of theatre in Thailand from watching these students' performances.
After all, how many of these well-trained and gifted youngsters will choose theatre as a career once the university's financial support is no longer available to them?
The interesting university-related development at the festival this year is the new theatre companies founded by university students and professors who declare independence from their educational institutions.
Splashing Theatre Company, comprising students from Thammasat University's drama club, debuted with Zone. The eerie play about two male strangers who develop a master-slave friendship intrigued me with its political undertone and spare language and art direction.
Another is 206 Performing Troupe. The company's name comes from Room 206 at Burapha University's Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, a black box space that led to the creation of the Faculty's music and performing arts programme. The company comprises Burapha's professors and alumni who want to build a professional theatre scene in the seaside town of Bang Saen in Chon Buri province.
The company debuted with M>A=D, a comedy that centres around four gay men in their 40s: A politician who's been outed by his political opponent, a high schoolteacher who's having an affair with his student, a singer who can't get a respectable gig, and a fashion designer who's embroiled in a lawsuit that could ruin his business.
They meet in a place that defies the logic of time and space, where they are forced to face their true selves and the reality of their situations. Written and directed by Apirak Chaipanha, the play, though still a work-in-progress, was funny, poignant and heartwarming.
Every year, names of new theatre companies pop up on the programme. Some return, endure, and grow, while others are never seen again. I can only hope that Splashing Theatre and 206 Performing Troupe will find the off-campus freedom to be sweet enough to stay a long while.
Goodbye, My Love.
Girl X.
