A new play from the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Prasadtaek proves to be another quality rendition of contemporary urban angst and frustration that befall people nowadays, i.e. you and me and other people surrounding us. It consists of five mini-stories that are interconnected, revolving around the main protagonist whose madness slowly comes to surface.
The cast is superb and the audience is promised two hours full of fun and frolick. Of course, for those professional viewers, you might rather cry than laugh, as some of the jokes are created to parody the contemporary corruption of human intimacy. The poignant scene is the third story -- the office scene -- whereby office staff resemble automatons and their relationships are rather superficial and tend to progress into alienation and frustration. The more they talk, the more they reveal their fragility. Of course, their boss is such a tyrannical leader, but without his aid the shallow, defunct intimacy among office staff would have sufficed to turn them into psychopaths.
I think the play does great job in portraying the fragility of human emotion and relationship and everyone seems to be 'mad' in this play. But hey what is madness anyway and the play seems to suggest that it is part and parcel of our life if we choose to live in this less-than-ideal society, full of threats and insecurities. I wouldn't spoil the plot with more details as the performance I watched was the first public one. But what I want to say is this: Prasadtaek is a play well worth watching for those of you who want to look at yourselves 'honestly' from another perspective. You might not find it a straightforward mirror that reflects your appearance, but it should be compared to a magic mirror that may distort or exaggerate some parts of yours. But it's still your reflection nonetheless.
2 comments:
Thank you very much for bringing me to see PRASADTAEK (2007, Panpassa Thoobthien, A+). I also like the third story (office scene) very much, and I like the fourth story (two old women) the second. I’m not sure why, but I guess it may be because the first and second story are a little bit far from my real life. It’s like watching other people’s stories, not watching stories which may be compared to my life. The fourth story is also a little bit far from my real life, but somehow I love the old murderess. She’s a fascinating character. The moment when she and her friend were panicking is also a moment which is truly frightening for me. I mean the situation in the first story (a suspected bomb in an airport) and the situation in the second story (a woman was tied up) are something which can hardly happen in my daily life. But I can imagine that our daily life can be shockingly interrupted like the old women’s lives when we begin to fear that there might be a random killer targeting us.
The fifth story is not far from real life, but it doesn’t cause heightened emotion as the third and fourth story.
I think what you like about the murderess and how she and her friend are terrorised by a child's toy perheps tells a lot about the paranoia that we are now subject to. We are afraid of everything, even though the cause for such fear is more often than not unfounded.
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