Versatile and controversial, Somtow Sucharitkul receives an Honorary Silpathorn Award

STORY BY AMITHA AMRANAND, PHOTO BY YINGYONG UN-ANONGRAK

Ordinary, he is not. Eccentric, definitely. Check out his blog and you'll find this 56-year-old still gets a kick out of posing in front of a camera to create trippy and humourously unflattering images of himself. He also seems to enjoy recounting his epic dreams and interpreting them quite a great deal. He has a Hi5 account, too, by the way.

Somtow is indeed a protean artist. His volumes of English-language vampire novels, especially Vampire Junction, have gained a cult following in the US. He staged the entire Ramayana epic in his opera Ayodhya. He reinterpreted Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream into a punk movie.

His operatic version of the most famous Thai ghost story, Mae Naak, is splashed with the aesthetic of the film How the Grinch Stole Christmas. He plans to have the entire Wagner's Ring Cycle performed in one seating once he finishes staging all of them individually. (He's already completed two of the operas.)

This doesn't look like a resume of a National Artist. And a lot of people, Somtow included, would agree he is likely never to become one. This year, however, the roly-poly artist will be crowned as Honorary Silpathorn artist, the newly established branch of the five-year-old Silpathorn Awards.

"[Architect] Sumet Chumsai pointed out that there are artists who are no longer eligible for the Silpathorn Awards because their age has already exceeded the criteria of 30 to 50. And they are too controversial to receive the National Artist award. So we created this new award for this purpose," said Apinand Poshyananda, director of the Office of Contemporary Arts and Culture (OCAC) at the Ministry of Culture.

"Of course I'm very flattered. They called me and said, 'The committee voted six to one to give you this award. And that one vote said you were too old.' So after this they had a huge meeting and said they've actually created a new award and they've awarded it to three people. I read it in the paper, the whole purpose of this award is to give it to the people who are too controversial to become National Artists. Maybe that's sort of a sarcastic way of looking at it, but there's perhaps an element of truth to it. It never occurred to me that I would be that controversial," said Somtow.

Somtow has his fans and people who find his artistic achievement respectable.

"On one level, you have to respect his ambition. And his compositions are of good quality. He knows how to compose beautiful melodies.

Although his recent works are not the most novel of music, they can communicate with the audience better and his music has won a considerable amount of listeners," said music critic Sadabpin Ratanaruang.

Bob Halliday, music and food critic, long-time friend and "big fan" of Somtow, speaks affectionately of the artist's sense of humour.

"He's extremely funny ... when he speaks Thai, everything he says is very funny. His mother is the one who translates his books into Thai. And I wish he would translate them as well."

He praises Somtow for his artistic versatility and his ability to "develop each one in such a personal way". Halliday describes Somtow as "intelligent and talented" and an "effective organiser". He also recognises his friend as a teacher who helped "coax the talent" and "open avenues" to his prote'ge' and gifted young musician, Trisdee na Patalung.

Somtow has also created enough enemies to keep people who don't know him well enough at a careful distance.

There are incidents of his crew quitting mid-production. Rumours abound of corruption inside the artist's seven-year-old opera company, Bangkok Opera. Two years ago, after Ayodhya finished its run, an anonymous hate email was circulating around the culture circle. The email exposed Bangkok Opera's dirty laundry, from the money that goes into Somtow's pocket to the one that didn't make it into his employees'.

"The most interesting thing about this spam [mail] was it contained many things that were half-true, which made it so dangerous and was obviously written by a person who'd been deeply involved with us. Let me give you some examples: The spam stated that I was drawing a huge salary of 100,000 baht. Now the standard salary of an opera company director is about 2 million (1.7 billion baht) a year. So anybody who knew anything about opera would just laugh if they saw that figure. That's the first thing. The second thing is in our budget a salary of 100,000 baht is for me, but I don't get it because I usually give almost all of it back to the company. It's just there on paper I should receive a fair compensation for what I'm doing ... there were many things that were just amazingly outrageous lies," Somtow said.

For Somtow, the email turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

"When that spam came out, I gave a long speech at the Siam Society about [it] and as a result, I got many more supporters, in fact, I have to say the spam was very helpful to my career. Because it showed me who our friends really were and those who supported us rushed to our side and were really great about it ... after the spam came out, we had our most successful year."

The writer-cum-conductor-cum-composer is no stranger to hatred. In 1978, the twenty-something UK-educated Somtow returned to Thailand with a desire to stage an artistic revolution. He, along with music men like Danu Huntrakul, Boonyong Kiatkong and Bruce Gaston, held a concert featuring their own experimental compositions, which attempted to shatter the barriers between the music of the East and the West. Traditional Thai instrumentalists refused to perform because the music broke the established rules, and were replaced by Western-trained percussionists. The piano disappeared a few hours before the concert, courtesy of the Fine Arts Department who, according to Somtow, claimed modern music would damage the instrument.

"Bruce Gaston, Danu and I were doing all these things which was altering the way traditional Thai music is perceived and making it interact with Western music in new ways. And of course this whole clashing culture is in a way how culture is created. The Kingdom of Siam has always been at the focal point of many clashing cultures and many things that are unique about our culture come from the way these cultures collided, often vehemently, in the past. Almost everything we see around us ... from the skyline of the city even to the ordinary things."

Somtow reflected upon this artistic period in his 2006 speech, Who Am I? A Short Course in Reinventing Oneself, at the SEA Write award ceremony.

"Everybody hated us. In retrospect, it was pretty thrilling. I recalled stories of Stravinsky having to flee out of the bathroom window after the premiere of The Rite of Spring, and I tried to tell myself to calm down ...

"The concert got rave reviews in the international press. But the hall was virtually empty. My cultural revolution was a flop."

After the failed coup d'art, the heartbroken Somtow fled to the US, where he led a rich artistic life in both the literary and musical arenas, composing symphonies and film scores, penning horror and science fiction novels and short stories, children's books and a few episodes of cartoons as well as TV series.

"I think some people would say my reaction to the way it was received by the public was a young person's reaction. Had I been a little older, I would have stayed on and watched this actually work itself out, but I didn't and that was a very cowardly thing to do in many ways ... and we all sold out in some way or another. In some ways, we betrayed the ideal by going into commercial music or in my case, leaving music altogether for a while."

Somtow continues to raise several eyebrows in Thailand since his return in 2001. His operas and its aesthetics possess incongruent and quirky personalities, which both attract and repel audiences. Does he still find it a thrill in being hated the way he believed he was hated in the '70s?

"Everybody still hates me," he joked. "No, it's not that thrilling. It's something I can live with. Before I was really hurt when somebody hated me, but now I realise, in a way, it's not even that personal. In a way, their agenda doesn't exactly align itself with what I'm doing and therefore they think that somehow I'm evilly trying to destroy them, but I'm not. I've found that most of the people who have attacked me the most in Thailand in the last few years are the people who owe their career to me and who wouldn't have gotten a start without me. So in a way, it's a form of compliment. And you know, when you have children, you get used to the idea that at some stage, they will defy you and tell you you're the most evil person in the world, and storm off in a rage. I think that's actually part of life."

Despite their shabby production qualities due to low budgets, Somtow's operas have always attracted the attention of international press, partly perhaps of their exotic qualities. His Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold) saw the characters glittered in Thai-inspired costumes. The opera was set in what Somtow called a "cartoon-like Thai wonderland". He set his Die Walkure (The Valkyrie) in the period of the Japanese occupation of Siam. His Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute) was a circus of Thailand's favourite gaudy colours. The stage was littered with Thai everyday trinkets.

All his life, Somtow has struggled with his cultural identity as an artist: feeling he could not be both an artist and Southeast Asian in his younger years, or fearing he was going to be branded an ethnic writer in the West. Today he feels comfortable exploiting the exotic card in his creations, "a very important card to play," he said. Doing operas in Thailand, he believes, is having two exotic cards to play: Opera is exotic to the Thais while the Thai interpretations, stories and aesthetics are exotic to the Western audiences.

"I've wrestled with it for a very long time. It has to do with whether we are going to identify ourselves as a post-colonial clone of past Western cultures. Can we attract the people without the exotic card? If we had an unlimited supply of cash ... yes. But we have the exotic card, not the cash."

When Somtow returned to Thailand after his 30-year absence, he thought he would come back to finish what he and his fellow composers began 30 years earlier. He realised it was continued by others: "It generates itself. It doesn't have to be pushed. It's something that would have happened anyway."

Currently, he's penning a fantasy trilogy and composing a requiem for HRH the late Princess Galyani Vadhana. Somtow will hand the baton over to Trisdee to conduct the revival of Mae Naak next year and will take a less active role in the productions of Bangkok Opera.

Last time he lasted 18 months in Thailand as an artist. This time, it's been seven years. He trusts that now there are more audiences for his kind of work. The musical territory has expanded, for him and for others.

"I think something that has to change in this country is the idea that the pie is limited and that the slices get smaller with more people. I feel the biggest contribution I make to the arts here has not been to take away everybody else's piece of the pie but to make the pie bigger. And I wish other people would realise ... there's so much more territory than before. And if there is any legacy I've given, it's the fact that I have shown people how much more territory there is."