Wilderness: A play of love and revolution [Eng Sub]

The play tells love stories amid the winds of a revolution and tries to answer the question whether the winds would support the ship or sink it.

Splashing Theatre, a Thai theater production house, produces love stories among two groups of revolutionaries, presented in two acts, divided by a 15-minute intermission and spanning a 50-year period.

The first act (1976-1981) begins with a group of students who escape to the jungle after the Thammasat massacre on October 6, 1976. Right-wing parties and the Thai police carried out the massacre of leftist protesters who had occupied the university to protest against the return from exile of former military leader and prime minister, Thanom Kittikachorn.

The dramatic events of October 6 result in deaths, arrests and escapes to the jungle. In “Wilderness”, the leftists live and work from the jungle. Driven by ideology, they manage “The Organisation”, a party set up to bring revolution to the country following Marxist and Mao beliefs while fighting with the Thai government, which at that time was totally opposed to communists.

The second act links with the first one by combining love and revolution in the heated political atmosphere of 2020-21, once again driven by youth, when pro-democracy protesters held demonstrations throughout the country against the government of former prime minister General Prayut Chan-o-cha.

Though occurring at different times in history, the play explores them as parallel events, a mirror reflection of each other. With an adequate dose of humour, the three-hour play is able to capture the audiences’ attention throughout – thanks also to the stuffed animals and playful projected scenery that help make the scenes funnier. 

As a small production house where an actor often plays more than one role in a play, this could cause confusion to those who are not familiar with the style. My suggestion, especially to non-Thais who need to pay attention to both the play and the subtitles, is to pay attention to the dialogues and costumes.

"Wilderness" is now showing at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre on the fourth-floor studio archives from September 12 to 22, with a total of nine performances. Tickets are priced at 700 baht for adults and 500 baht for students. English subtitles will be available throughout the play for non-Thai speakers. More information on Splashing Theatre social media platforms. 

The following parts reveal important segments in the play.

Love stories among the leftists in the 21st century parallel those in the wilderness of the 1970s. 

In the first act, which is interestingly depicted through polite and terse dialogues as if they are living in the military setting or a futuristic robotic world, the comrades living in the jungles find a mysterious single-page of a puzzling play written by the unknown comrade “P”.

Pages of the play keep on appearing one by one, but without any page numbers. Could this be the way out of their current situation?

While some of the characters may take their roles too seriously, love stories also happen out of the storyline. 

Interestingly, while LGBTQAI+ love stories may be more common and acceptable in the present day, the writer chooses to give them plenty of stage time even in the 1970s, through two gay couples.

Two male-born buddies find themselves drawn to each other in the poisonous wild and two females comrades not only fight for their ideology but to keep their love unfaded. 

The second act, which honestly and respectfully I found more to my liking, happens anachronistically as if the director decided to throw the script in the air and grab those papers randomly. The confusion stays throughout the second half until the puzzle is solved in the end, keeping the show captivating and the audiences engaged.

In the second half, two characters escape into a world of dream and play, by taking suspicious pills which take them into a celestial world where two goddesses – sun and moon – are fighting. People are obsessed with cheering and worshipping made up figures of the gods. Dream and play, made out of emptiness, are also what people tend to escape into. 

While the comrades are performing a play, the new generation are playing comrades. And interestingly, whenever the screen turns red (or white) with the big black cross as a symbol of death, it is always caused by either love or revolution.