Dragon's Heart returns

Dragon’s Heart. Photo courtesy of Anatta Theatre Troupe

Musicals about the lives of Thai defenders of democracy and human rights have come to define director and playwright Pradit Prasartthong’s body of work since he founded the Anatta Theatre Troupe in 2012. He’s imagined the intimate and personal moments of the late writer Sriburapa, first lady Poonsuk Banomyong and former rector of Thammasat University and Free Thai Movement member Puey Ungphakorn.

These musicals are the more obvious statements by the artist about his country. Pradit is much more subtle and artful in his treatments of Thai folk tales and classic literature. But even though he always paints these men and women as unequivocally good and heroic, Pradit’s intention is to humanise and entertain rather than provoke.

In its third incarnation, Mangkorn Slad Gled (Dragon’s Heart) returns this year to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Puey Ungphakorn’s birth and the 40th anniversary of the Oct 6, 1976, massacre at Thammasat University. The play premiered at the Bangkok Theatre Festival in 2013. It was comedic in tone and dealt more with Puey’s identity as a young Thai born into a family of Chinese immigrants. The second production, which I didn’t see, boasted a large and star-studded cast and had a three-hour run time. The latest version is a much more modest one, with 14 cast members, four musicians and the first act about Puey’s childhood chopped off.

This is the most complex work of Pradit I’ve seen. But Dragon’s Heart is not a complex portrait of Puey; it’s an admiring and affectionate one. The man is faultless in Pradit’s eye. But through Puey’s life, work and values, Pradit has found a more complex way than we’re used to to portray Thailand’s political culture and upheavals.

The musical begins with Puey’s time as a prisoner of war due to his involvement with the Free Thai Movement during World War II. It then takes us through his period as the governor of the Bank of Thailand and subsequent relationship with Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat’s government. The play culminates in the Thammasat University massacre of 1976, which led to his exile to England, where he died less than a year later.

While Puey’s public record is stainless and the message of his moral courage and integrity is an important one, the play, or at least this version of it, doesn’t investigate how he became this wise and virtuous man. Puey’s portrayal in the first half of the play felt flat, as if it was made for school touring.

To be fair, Puey does struggle in the play, just never between right and wrong. If anything, he is always so morally assured, which is both his biggest strength and weakness. Rather, he struggles to choose between his ideals and the reality, his country and his beloved Margaret, his country and the ordinary people.

These struggles show little emotional depth in the character, even though there is a lot of room for that in a man like Puey. To Pradit, Puey’s incorruptibility casts him as an outsider throughout his career, but the play only reveals glimpses of what that might have felt like for Puey.

In that sense, the composite character, Raphi (played by Pradit), is more realistic and interesting than Puey. Raphi and Puey become friends when they are both prisoners of war. While Puey refuses to get into politics after the war, Raphi gives in to Thailand’s corrupt political culture. But they remain friends over the years even as their values and political beliefs diverge. Raphi later becomes somewhat of a tragic figure as a father of a young hotheaded man with extreme political views.

The second half of the play is much stronger — at times thrilling, angry and passionate, at times tender and moving. Pradit depicts the student movement at the time as fervent and well-intentioned, but also marred by the recklessness and bullheadedness of youth.

Puey becomes more interesting as a character, too, when he has to deal with the generation gap at his job at Thammasat University and at home with his son Giles, who has inherited his father’s humanitarian streak but not his equanimity.

The exchanges between Puey and the student protesters and his son reveal a side of the October generation we rarely see in the theatre. These scenes also reveal how intolerant a political movement can be even when it believes its cause to be democracy.

And even though Pradit writes in his director’s note that all the characters and events in the musical are fictional and “do not exist in history”, the student massacre scene involving the right-wing groups and the police, as imagined by the artist, felt real and true, especially for an event that no governments since have considered worthy of an official death toll.

Pradit, also the lyricist for the play, teamed up with Gandhi Wasuvitchayagit and delivered gorgeous music based on the melodies passed on from the late National Artist Sudjit Duriyapraneet. The music in the play is in the style of lakorn rong, a Thai musical theatre performance adapted from bangsawan, a type of Malay opera, and European operas. Gandhi conducts a four-person orchestra who together play Western and Thai percussive, string and wind instruments and produce lush, beautiful sounds.

Not all the actors can meet the demand of the music or even sing on a professional level — a common problem in Thai musical productions. But in the role of Puey, the young actor Pasakorn Rungrueangdechaphat, with his warm, smooth singing voice, carries the show with aplomb, playing the revered figure from his 20s to his 70s with subtlety and grace.

This source first appeared on Bangkok Post Lifestyle.