That evening I decided to take in some theatre.
I was very intrigued to find out what Laos theatre was really like. The evening
before in the night market I had heard traditional music coming from a large
white building but because of all the stalls I couldn’t see where the entrance
would be. This morning on my travels I had found the source to be in the
gardens of the old Palace building that is now a museum. In the far left
section of the group of buildings was the large white house which I had seen from
the road on the other side. From this angle it looked very grand but a little
shabby. A sign outside explained that this evening there would be a performance
of Phralak Phralam or Ramayana Lao which is the 2nd Episode in an epically long
tale it seems. This section was entitles ‘Golden deer and the abduction of
SIDA’ which all seemed very exciting to me so I bought a ticket. There were 3
price ranges 200,000, 150,000 and 100,000 kip a ticket depending on where you
sat. Looking at a seat plan it seemed that the place wasn’t so big so I should
be able take in all the majesty and splendour of the performance even from the
back. Unfortunately there was not much of that to go around. As I got shown to
my seat it was very obvious that the only other people in the theatre were
Westerners. The hall was unimaginative with rows of ordinary chairs facing a
hand painted backdrop. It reminded me a little of old school plays I used to
do. But I decided not to judge the performance before it had begun. Soon
afterwards the MC came on the mic to introduce the performance beautifully in 3
languages English, Laos and French. I was very impressed. Then the band struck
up, all 10 pieces of them, playing traditional instruments – so far so good. Then
they came on stage. A big group of Laos girls who danced a traditional theme
and left the audience so underwhelmed they were almost asleep. They seemed very
young though so maybe their passion was not for dancing, especially the ones at
the back who just twirled their wrists like they were doing the washing up.
Thankfully they were not on for long and then we were onto the main event, this
turned out to be only marginally better with the lady who played SIDA being so
drab I wanted to get up and slap some life into her. The boys did pretty well
twirling their bows and mock fighting with deer and giant protective birds but
it really was awful.
The only plus side was the costumes and masks but when
they took off the masks to bow they revealed bored and tired looking faces that
would rather be anywhere than here. Then we had a show from monkeys which
didn’t mean anything to anyone and then the girls came back and washed the
dishes while vaguely doing the dance of the lotus. Then the MC came on and in a
proud speech he thanked us for coming and asked us to spread the word about the
theatre and its performances. I’m not really sure he’d want us to do that………
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