By Alanna Maclean
Never underestimate the vitality of Shakespeare. Bell
Shakespeare has just been in town with a Macbeth with a very spare and
contemporary approach.
Meanwhile a film based on Macbeth called Shakespeare Must
Die has just been banned in Thailand.
Updates are nothing new for the look of a Shakespeare of
course but what happens when his plays are being viewed by those for whom
English is not the first language? (I don’t include the moanings of decades of
English speaking students who have generally gone from Shakespeare illiterate
to Shakespeare literate once they got themselves on stage doing it.)
Late in 2011 I was doing a workshop about Shakespeare in
Thailand at Makhampom Theatre’s Chiang Dao centre. We’d called it Shakespeare
in the Rice Fields but it really didn’t end up being about that in more than a
metaphysical way. We were in the main theatre space there, which is like a
long, two-storied version of the New Globe in London surrounded by water and
sitting in the middle of the rice fields. Because the sides are open in the
daytime the rice fields become a background. You are never, in that place,
unaware of agriculture. (Or architecture)
Makhampom’s Richard Barbour was a bit nervous about language
since it looked like the group were going to be all Thai (The non-Thais had not
come to Thailand for the big Makhampom Theatre Reunion Forum fortnight to find
out about Shakespeare). So was I but only because my Thai is still only enough
to navigate a market, a restaurant or a taxi ride. I’m a long way from following
the snappy dialogue of a satirical likhe play with any kind of comprehension.
However, I’d just spent two weeks teaching drama to Akha students in Chiang Rai
and had confidence as always in the Thai translator, what mutual English and
Thai we might all muster and the goodwill that always accompanies
Makhampom.
As for Shakespeare’s language, we weren’t going to be
tackling that except for the occasional short key quotation. If I’d chosen
Hamlet the key one might have been ‘To be or not to be’. Or the Ghost’s ‘Remember me…’. The
intent was to work on the two turning points in The Winter’s Tale, ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’ (the only
stage direction in Shakespeare that I am inclined to trust) and the scene where
Hermione’s statue comes to life at the end and Leontes says ‘O she’s warm’.
The group were frank about what they saw as their lack of
knowledge. ‘We know Baz Luhrman’s Romeo+Juliet’ they said but actually there’s
much more Shakespeare in Thailand than that and they showed that they knew
about Hamlet and Macbeth at least by name. And one of the Thai kings, Oxford
educated King Rama VI, translated three of his plays (The Merchant of
Venice, As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet) into Thai. I even once glimpsed
the casket scene from The Merchant of Venice being done by a school group in a
Bangkok mall.
What they came up with in a two hour session (that
extended into a longer discussion) were a couple of moving and accurate
responses to the two scenes, underpinned by lifetimes of training in Thai
movement and performance styles. As for the language, it became Thai for the
purposes of the afternoon and much could be said about the way clowns seem to
be universal. This group rightly brought the man eating bear and the clown
seeing it all and the people drowning on the ship sinking at sea all on stage.
We don’t know what Shakespeare’s theatre did with ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’,
but the group bought right into the theatricality of the scene. The sound of
the drums scraping across the concrete floor, accidentally discovered and
incorporated, was a nerve-racking addition to the bear’s slow motion meal.
I admit to having to hold back any interference when
the group put a very 1960s bucket hat on the head of Hermione for the statue
scene but when it ran in performance she echoed the 1960s Queen Sirikit who
came with the king to Australia and dazzled my generation with her glamour.
Again, the emotion of the moment was there. And for an hour after we were
supposed to finish we were all still there, talking about what the session had
uncovered about ways to work on a daunting text by targeting the key moments.
If you want some idea of the epic stories that drive
Thai performance then they can be found among Makhampom’s contemporary
performances. Elements of the Thai Ramayana (the Ramakien) surfaced during the many Thai performances at
the Forum as did Buddhist and folk tales.
These can also be seen in a variety of much more
commercial theatre pieces in Bangkok. Shows like the royal sponsored Sala
Chalermkhrung and the huge Siam Niramit are a good introduction to the Thai
sense of the epic as is the Phuket Fantasea, complete with acrobats over the
audience’s heads, a procession of elephants and a bevy of live chickens. The
Joe Louis Puppets may have to be hunted out from wherever they are now based,
having lost their old Bangkok theatre, but I’m sure I spotted some of their
half life size puppets each with two to three operators at the Thai Festival in
Sydney a few weeks ago.
There’s also a contemporary ‘black box theatre’ scene
that is well worth searching for. Patravadi Theatre over the river in Thonburi
stages some good examples of this but there’s also lovely socially acute work
done by Makhampom in their tiny converted beauty parlour in Saphan Kwai
(‘behind the police post where the bomb went off ‘) and by powerful groups like
the Butoh based B-Flor. You won’t find most of this in Lonely Planet but a
search of the internet and an eye on the newspaper arts pages might just send
you down a dark alley to see Thailand’s theatre of the now.
Shakespeare might not always feature (I did once see a
Thai version of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther at the Crescent Moon theatre
in the Pridi Banomyong Institute) but if he does, rest assured he will be bent
to Thai needs and views.
