Mind of a madwoman

Review

It takes place in the cellar a day after the murder of her estranged brother and the subsequent suicide of her mother. We are taken into the dreams of a remorseless murderer. Her face hidden beneath her hair, her clothes wildly tattered, Martha sits alone until we hear the sound of a heartbeat. She comes to life, and we witness her anguish and demons.

Inspired by Albert Camus's Le Malentendu (The Misunderstanding), Silent Scream: Journey into the Dream of a Murderer imagines the dreamscape that depicts the inner turmoil of Martha. In Camus's play, Martha and her mother runs an inn, which they turn into a sort of slaughter house, murdering their well-to-do guests and steal their money in order to save up for Martha's dream of living by the seaside in Africa. One day, Jan, Martha's brother who ran away many years ago and now lives happily with his wife in the continent of Martha's dream, returns to the inn to reunite with his family. He keeps his real name a secret from his mother and sister, and eventually meets the same fate as other guests at the inn. Jan's true identity is revealed only after his sleeping body is thrown into the icy river to drown. The exhausted mother decides to join her son at the bottom of the water, an act Martha deems as an abandonment and a betrayal.

Silent Scream is a mostly wordless solo performance. The only time Martha speaks is to the quivering matches that she light and let extinguished like her murder victims. (The snippets of lines are taken directly from The Misunderstanding.) Directed by Wasuratchata Unaprom, Silent Scream succeeds only as far as being so pretty to watch. Martha is a madwoman - a beautiful madwoman. The video projection with its black and white images paints the world of Martha as melancholy rather than twisted and worn. The face of her sad mother, the shadow of the jail cell that's supposed to represent Martha's state of mind, the sea that she longs for - all of these are predictably beautiful and sterile. Millie Young's video work is like a shadow play - suggestive and soft in comparison to the cruel reality in Camus's play.

For a show that relies mostly on its visuals to communicate the complexity of Martha's mind, Silent Scream is composed of mostly images that are either simplistic or so random that the only way to understand them is to journey into the dream of the director. It only states the obvious: Martha's mind is a labyrinth. Martha's choreographed anguish and her intermittent convulsion, coupled with her wild hair and torn clothes, are all too typical a picture of a madwoman. It doesn't help that she suddenly starts giddily playing with a mannequin, pulls an apple from within it, takes a bite, then has a seizure. For most of the show, Martha is more of a representation of emotions rather than a human being.

Martha, performed by Pattarasuda Anuman Rajadhon, becomes a person when her relationship with her mother begins to be underlined. Her resentment toward her brother for leaving, for achieving the life that she has always wanted, and for taking away her only companion and partner in crime, surfaces only in the last few minutes of the show. When the face of Martha's mother becomes almost indistinguishable from that of Martha's, the video image swells to take up the space of the wall. Martha stands before it with a resoluteness of a lonely woman and rips apart the picture of her mother. Those few minutes turns Martha into a much more interesting woman than her series of thrashing and yanking.

Although one of the most promising actresses and directors on the local scene, Pattarasuda, who also helped develop the show, plays to the stereotypical image of a crazy woman. The character's emotional intensity seems to be thrown mostly into her body. Sometimes, we can hardly see her face. We don't get the Martha who is numbed to murder, the Martha who desperately wants to leave Europe for a land by the sea, the Martha who thinks that a murder is a kinder treatment of another human being than life, the Martha who asks her mother whether she's beautiful after having just committed a crime.

To get into the mind of this character, I think we would have gained more insight if they had staged Camus's play. How careful Martha is in choosing her words and controlling the language of others to dehumanise them and facilitate her crime. Her dream is as violent as her reality: She longs for Africa, the place where the sun burns through one's soul, the place where there are no questions. Her brother's true identity would have done nothing to save him because it is his words that seal his fate. Camus wrote this play during the Nazi-occupied Europe. Martha is a person that belongs nowhere and to no one, only to one of the cruelest times in modern history. Spare us the poetry of a silenced scream, give us the words of this woman. That's where her cries are anyway.

'Silent Scream: Journey into the Mind of a Murderer' is playing at Democrazy Theatre Studio at 7:30pm until November 30. Tickets are 200 baht. Call 08-0783-2727.

Relate Search: Albert Camus's Le Malentendu, Silent Scream, Pattarasuda Anuman Rajadhon