THEATRE: David Le Page
REPRESENTING the agonies of a nation like Cambodia is a considerable challenge. It carries with it great responsibility, owed to the memory of the dead, but mostly to the living who must ensure that the 20th century’s dreadful pattern of mass annihilations does not continue into the next.
Regretfully, it’s not a task that Cambodia Agonistes, presented by the US-based Pan Asian Repertory Company, in Johannesburg for the Arts Alive festival, lived up to, though along the way we were exposed to some beautiful and dynamic dance and theatre. The story itself has many fascinating elements and an intriguingly counter- intuitive logic rooted in Buddhist philosophy. The music, written and played by Louis Stewart (piano) alongside a quartet of South African musicians, was evocative, lyrical and hypnotic.
The story is of The Dancer (Lydia Gaston), a refugee from the nightmare of Cambodia, working in a sewing factory, who becomes psychosomatically blind as a result of the horrors she has experienced (a genuine, documented phenomenon). Her memories take us back to Cambodia, to the horrors of the reign of Pol Pot, who led the Khmer Rouge and a campaign to exterminate professionals and intellectuals. The Dancer lost her child in Cambodia; ultimately he returns to her — as a Khmer revolutionary bent on killing her.
In its combination of music, song, dialogue and dance, Cambodia Agonistes has a Broadway feel to it at times. This is not in itself a bad thing, and throughout Act I, the idiom is largely successful. The classical Cambodian ballet, unfamiliar and unhurried, is rather beguiling. Gaston’s voice is wonderful, and the supporting cast more than competent. In Act II, however, things fall apart.
Scenes of horror are given little weight. The programme describes a scene in which soldiers play with a human eye, which is then swallowed by one of them. When the scene arrives, it is over in seconds; no time is allowed for the shock of recognition.
Later, a eugenics programme has The Dictator (Jason Ma) copulating behind a sheet with a succession of women. The women immediately give birth, a motion completed by a soldier tossing rejected infants aside. The infants are represented by dolls, inanimate objects that need more than a superficial resemblance to a child if their disposal is to evoke any horror. As it is, both scenes seem empty and trivial. In a more realistic medium like film, such triviality might carry its own horror; in the mannered realm of Cambodia Agonistes it is without
Ultimately The Dancer kills her son, mainly, according to director Tisa Chang, to stop him doing evil in this life and give him a chance to be reborn. After he is felled, the long drapes that have received light and projected images to form a backdrop to the production are pulled down (representing the transitory nature of the material world) and laid over his body to form an eight-pointed mandala, signifying the eight-fold path to enlightenment. Chang seems to see this oriental denouement as tragic, but the only way in which both mother and son may progress towards enlightenment.
This is at odds with an opinion expressed in the programme by Ernest Abuba, the playwright: “… evil can reincarnate itself just as good does”. If evil can reincarnate itself, what good does it do The Dancer’s son to be killed? If his redemption in this life is impossible, why should anything change in the next?
The production’s major problem, though, is representing evil. Instead, The Dictator brings new meaning to the expression “the banality of evil”, a phrase which may contain an interesting philosophical point, but hardly makes for convincing theatre. And the Cambodian genocide deserves nothing less.
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