Likay is Thailand’s comic opera
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Likay is Thailand’s comic opera for the masses. Faust is Germany’s great epic play about the scholar who sold his soul to the devil. What do they have in common? Krishna Veni discovers the Buddhist elements inherent in Faust and the depth behind the comedy.
It is a village fair. As evening approached, the intrepid traders packed up their wares – colorful sarongs, beautiful straw baskets, metal and earthen utensils – and the fine dust raised by animals and people settled down. The throngs of people settled down on straw mats in extended family groups as if at a picnic. Food vendors went around with the food in two baskets balanced from a bamboo stick across the shoulders. Somehow, everyone had congregated around a little bamboo stage covered with cloth. Huge lamps of burning oil lit the stage. As the sun set, the curtain rose and a solitary singer came onstage singing the story of a pair of star crossed lovers, or of the play of gods or missing princes or sometimes, even the slightly risqué couple next door. After a few minutes, another man in an even brighter shirt entered and conversed with the singer. And the show was underway! Punctuated by laughter and loud music, it went on all night and was interrupted by the audience’s shouts, appreciative clapping, and even offers of cash garlands to the actors.
Music, dance, drama, comedy, action… Likay has it all, tightly cemented together by the actors’ improvisations and the fast-paced action. Drama of the people, for the people and by the people – that is how one wag describes Likay, the dance-drama from most popular with Thailand’s rural people. Now, director Janaprakal Chandruang and his troupe Moradokmai plan bring this burlesque opera form of the masses onto the hallowed stage of Bangkok’s Thailand Cultural Centre. What’s more, he has chosen Likay as the vehicle for introducing Goethe’s Faust to Thai audiences. Given that Faust is to Germany, as Hamlet is to England or the Ramakein to Thailand, this is an ambitious undertaking indeed! However, he has chosen a most adaptable form to did him in this Herculean task.
With the coming of the travelling cinema, of the many predicted the end of Likay. The same happened with the coming of television and yet, Likay has survived – as vibrant and strong as ever. It is time then, to take this icon of Thai rural culture to the urban centre of the nation – Bangkok. Scorned by the czars of culture for pandering to the baser instincts of the hoi-polloi, Likay has proved that it can take on serious topics and deliver serious messages to the audience. Using its trademark puns, slapstick humor and double entendres, Likay has tackled topics as complex as democracy and politics over the past few years and found itself remarkably adept and malleable without losing the essence of the form or the topic.
In the past, Likay stars have been as famous as the pop stars of today. Women have swooned over them, propositioned them and proposed to them. They have down huge crowds that would be the envy of any star of today. The secret of Likay’s success is not hard to understand – they spoke this language of the people; they improvised on the spot using local dialects and anecdotes that the audience could instantly relate to; every statement conveyed two or more messages, which sophisticated audience trained in Likay could grasp, appreciate and guffaw over for days afterwards. The colorful clothes, the garish makeup, the slapstick humour were the perfect façade for the soul-searching and the political and social agenda these plays often hid. In addition, not for a moment did a Likay performer forget that he was essentially that-a performance, an entertainer.
“Likay is exotic to the Thai elite,” says Khru Chang (as Janaprakal Chandruang is better known) by way of introduction. “I have a story to tell and the form and technique support me. Likay is the only form that can tell any story,” he says paying tribute to the universality of the form. There are very few props, no sceneries. Travel from one town to the next can be done in a single step or in 10.
The idea is to make things easy and funny without losing the essence, and that is what Khru Chang attemps to do with his version of Faust. This is where Likay’s comic form supports him ably. Dr Katharina von Rucketschell-Kartte, director of Goethe-Institute, who is producing the plays believes that introducing Faust to Thai audiences in their own idiom – Likay – will encourage them to read the original. For a popular introduction, there is no better vehicle. A vehicle of the masses, and a tale of everyman – for that is what Faust is at heart.
For Johann Wolfgang von Goethe himself, and for his fans, Faust: A Tragedy is a very universal theme. The fight within every human being. It is the basis of all the world’s religion. And so, the Faust written in Christian Germany has very clear resonance in Buddhist Thailand. It is a very Thai thought – this search for the ‘Truth’, for Nirvana. Faust’s search for wisdom, first through knowledge, and then through experience, are especially relevant in Thailand which values the external over the internal. This inner journey of Faust towards enlightenment is also symbolic of the strivings of humanity against the limitations and strictures of society.
“As I grow old, I study about Buddhism and it has become my foundation in life and my approach to the world Goethe’s work appeals to me as a Buddhist. Faust and Mephistopheles are both inside us,” says Khru Chang and proceeds to weave the tale where the battle, the warriors and the battlefield are all inside the human mind. “We must learn to let go of both goodness and badness. You cannot find Nirvana until you let go of your preconceived notions of God,” he adds entering the domain of spiritual teacher. As Khru Chang visualizes Faust in Buddhist idiom, he weaves in the classical Faust and a contemporary Faust into the Likay performance, thereby bringing immediacy to his concerns and to the play as well.
Like most people around the world today, Faust lives in the past and future more than he does in the present and that is the cause of this discontent. The secret of life is to live fully in the present moment, as it will never return when it is gone. If you capture the present, it is called enlightenment. In the past, Thai people did not ‘rush’ into the future, they were content to live in their present. The ever-growing Thai house was a symbol of this attribute. But with today’s
consumer culture, people are slaves to the future. The way out is not to leave it physically, but to live amidst this chaos and change inside so that peace reigns within, says Khru Chang interpreting the play's message to him.
In the play, Faust is reincarnated as a theatre group director, while Mephistopheles is an evil businessman who offers the underplayed actors big bucks to produce Faust! In the process of the production, the protagonist, played by Pichet Klunchuen, continues his search for the meaning oflife and is seduced by the pleasures of life offered by the businessman. He, in turn, seduces a young actress who is in love with him. She (Gretchen) then bears his child and drowns it. In jail, she disowns Faust after recognizing the devil with him and in him. All the evils that assault modern Thailand are faithfully represented in the play ¬the need to show your wealth, the labels, the pub culture and the liquor and drugs that flow, the material world that gives mere excitement not peace. By the end of the play, all the actors realise the futility of pursuing the material world. All the money on earth does not bring wisdom, enlightenment or peace, they discover through Faust
To some extent the play mirrors the life of the director Khru Chang himself. Having taught playwriting and acting at Chula for 17 years, he realized that the commercial world does not have answers to everything in life, nor will it sustain drama in Thailand. So he quit his job and trained his sights on making drama a sustainable enterprise in Thailand by developing an appreciative audience. He has done that since 1995 with the Moradokmai troupe for whom drama is a tool with which to mend society, drama as education. Drama for social ends is his passion.
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