Democrazy is a new-ish theatre, down a dark alleyway. You walk down the street in the rain (it is the rainy season in Thailand), wondering why there aren’t any streetlights, and then you see the place, in a shop, only what would normally be the shopfloor has been turned into a foyer, and the theatre space is in what must once have been the store room. There is a large dog sleeping in the middle of the floor, which is normal, and about twenty people sitting around on benches chatting.
The box office staff are rather sweetly concerned about me. ‘You don’t speak Thai? Any Thai?’ they keep asking. And I try to explain that I knew the play well enough, I’ll be fine, but don’t know if this gets through. They sell me a ticket, but look at me anxiously from time to time. It gets to eight o’clock, the advertised starting time, and nothing happens. Some teenage girls decide to pass the time taking pictures of themselves with the dog.
Eventually they let us in, about ten minutes late. The set is all white – walls made of white sliding panels, white tables and chairs. A giant red chaise longue. And all the props are bright red, a concept they take to dotty lengths – all anyone ever drinks is rosé wine, and at one point Emma serves up a salad made entirely of rose petals.
Only not Emma, because they’ve changed the names to Thai – she’s Jiramol, played by Pavinee Samakrabutr, beautiful in a diminuitive Eva Longoria kind of way. And I suspect they spent a large part of the budget on her frocks, which are uniformly stunning. She looks, in almost every scene, like she’s on her way to the Golden Globes. Her men friends are compelling too, tall and good-looking in a warrior-poet kind of way.
The translation seems reasonably faithful, as far as I can tell, although as previously established I know precisely enough Thai to order in restaurants and no more. I think they felt sorry for the guy playing the waiter only having one scene, and have put him into a couple of others (the actor is also credited as part of the ‘set up team’). And the ending is a bit different – her husband actually catches Jiramol and his best man canoodling in the marital bedroom, which makes the whole rest of the play rather more perverse than usual.
It’s a good production, on the whole, even if the walls are thin and you can hear the dog howling out in the lobby. The actors are charismatic and not afraid to hold a pause, which is always good in Pinter. The set design achieves a lot with a clearly limited budget, and the music is so lushly scored I suspect they nicked it off a film soundtrack. There isn’t a great deal of Thai theatre around, so I was encouraged by the youth and enthusiasm of the audience (where youth= anyone younger than me) and hope this is a sign of great things to come. Democrazy seems to be one to watch.
A long succession of thin evenings 