Comments to be taken on board

Comments to be taken on board

New Jaturachai play invites audience members to critique and kill cast and crew

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Comments to be taken on board

When I first learned about the premise of The Comments: Kam Kid Hen, the latest play directed by Jaturachai Srichanwanpen, I was both intrigued and sceptical. Intrigued because the audience was promised that their opinions would guide certain parts of the play and sceptical because the play’s seeming aversion to a culture in which everyone is a critic felt strange in a time when people are incarcerated for their thoughts and sometimes tried in military courts.

The Comments: Kam Kid Hen.

Before entering the Democrazy Theatre Studio, audience members are each given a piece of paper to comment on the play that they are yet to see. These sheets are collected as they pile into the theatre. Once inside, they catch the final few minutes of a play that has seemingly just ended, but the cast and crew remain inside the theatre, waiting for the director’s and audience’s feedback. Not long after hearing outsiders’ comments on their performance, they begin to turn against each other.

As their evening, and the play, progresses, their criticism on eachother’s work grows increasingly insulting and hurtful. The play’s tone, too, becomes more and more absurd and surreal. In one moment, two performers walk in with a wheel with photos of the actors and crew members’ faces on it. A volunteer from the audience is then invited to throw a ball at the wheel, picking the “victim” of the evening. Someone onstage will then suddenly die and the rest of the cast and crew investigate the death, pick out suspects among them, put on a trial to find the perpetrator, execute him and then throw a party. Their lives then proceed as normal.

Although the audience members’ comments were requested and used, they had very little to do with the show. The cast and crew merely read them out and make a few jokes about them. The only time it really felt that audience participation influenced the direction of the show in any way was when a volunteer from the audience threw the ball that determined the fate of one of the performers. This felt so forced, however, that it came off as a lazy attempt by the director to make the audience feel part of the show.

The Comments does have some wonderful qualities though. Jaturachai and his cast — a mix of veterans and newcomers — have created a coterie of colourful characters: a vain, passionate and condescending costume designer; an actress who likes to pretend she’s in a musical; a grown man who thinks he’s convincing as a young girl; a messy sound designer who loves to eat; an earnest foreign actor whose Thai nobody fully understands, to name just a few. Their stage chemistry and ease with one another truly lifts the play and go some way to making The Comments a-laugh-a-minute production.

Yet as funny as the play is, it makes a tired and insipid point: words can hurt, even kill. The play shows that the indirect and often anonymous nature of online platforms and social media can embolden people to speak their mind without considering the consequences of their words and actions. It is not, however, the seemingly unlimited freedom to criticise that is the culprit, as the play seems to suggest, but rather the lack of a culture of criticism within our society.

It is not the words that kill an actor every evening of the performance, but rather the lack of critical-thinking skills and, consequently, empathy that lead this group of people to hurt and kill each other. They don’t know how to make polite and constructive comments to their colleagues, nor distinguish between productive words and petty insults or deal with criticism in a mature way.


‘The Comments: Kam Kid Hen’ begins at 8pm and shows until Monday, Aug 4 at Democrazy Theatre Studio, Soi Saphan Khu. Tickets are 550 baht for walk-ins and B500 for advanced paid reservation. Call 081-116-0066.

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