Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Live theatre is a bit hard to come by in the wicked little town that is Bangkok. There is an abundance of live music, but the ‘shows’ that people come to here are more of the sex variety. So it was with some optimistic hesitation that my boyfriend and I went to see Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the RCA Mongkol.

The night began with a rocky start. Although scheduled for 8pm, we had to wait until 8:20pm before we could even move from the un-airconditioned hall and to an even smaller, but thankfully air-conditioned waiting room inside the venue. We listened to sound checks for about 15 minutes, before being ushered into the performance space. The space was set up like a bar, so that there several rows for sitting and some tables for standing. Luckily we managed to get a seat, because it was another 20 minutes until the band appeared, and then maybe another 10 minutes until the show started.

By this time, we had grown impatient and were ready for something amazing. Hedwig entered the stage, and while her wig was drag-tastic and the music was loud, something was amiss. The sound was warbled and the Thai-accented English was inconsistently intelligible such that we were distracted by needing to read the English surtitles above the stage. This was not looking good…

There is a 15 minute window in a performance where you need to settle yourself down, forget life outside the theatre, readjust your expectations and try to enjoy a performance for what it is. If you surrender to the performance so that it can work in its own terms, it might just grab you and never let go. I quickly realised that this was not going to be a master-class, technically perfect performance, that in fact this had the potential to be an exercise of amateurism. So I adjusted, and by the time the ballad Origin of Love began, I got used to the warbled pronunciation and the average acting and just let the lyrics wash over me.

Fortunately, the songs are solid – vulgar, witty and emotional at the same time. Hedwig is the type of story where even an adequate staging can still be powerful. Witty songs layered on top of witty anecdotes tell of Hedwig’s escape from communist East Berlin and her travails with finding her soulmate in America. Origin of Love reveals Hedwig’s romantic heart, Sugar Daddy is pure raunchy fun, and The Angry Inch is an appropriately angry rock anthem for all botched gender reassignment surgeries everywhere.

Then something magical happened during Wig in a Box – Chanudom Suksatit's performance as Hedwig began to transcend any language barriers and tapped into some emotional truth, his voice aching with longing, dreaming and melancholy. Perhaps finally relieved of exposition, Suksatit, like Hedwig, was also re-constructing his identity/performance, with each new wig he could express himself better and become someone more exciting, more lively, more emotional.

The show was electric from this moment on, such that by the time he removed his  wig in The Long Grift, he  had so effectively and affectionately built up Hedwig that the audience was putty in his  hands. Not a sound was heard as Hedwig dropped her wig and, utterly defeated, staggered to the nearby staircase. The fall of Hedwig, who was so full of drive, hope and romanticism, who used to be able to ‘take the pieces off the ground and show this wicked town something beautiful and new’, left us devastated.

When she cried out during Hedwig’s Lament, there were quite a few sniffles in the audience, and when she asked us to lift up our hands in Midnight Radio, we couldn’t do anything else by lifted our damned hands. It was in these moments – the shared silence, sniffling and hand raising of the audience – that is the power of live theatre. I had been living in Bangkok for 6 months now, and in many ways I was still feeling like the expat outsider. Perhaps I will always feel this way, but slowly I was beginning to feel like a local. Meeting someone you know out of the blue at a café or on the train. Giving directions to a tourist. Or crying along with an actor and his audience. These are the shared experience that makes Bangkok feel more a little more like home.

In our post-show drinks, my boyfriend and I discussed whether in the end Hedwig still believed in the Origin of Love, or whether, as her ex-lover sang to her, ‘there's no mystical design, no cosmic lover preassigned.’ It was a surprise to me that my eternally practical and rational boyfriend also believed in soulmates - that there was a handful of people in the world that we can that we could make a go of it – that’s there’s something beautiful and magical in some form of pre-destiny. For me, there’s no such thing as destiny – a ‘soulmate’ is a combination of cultural, social and emotional compatibility traits and an active choice to be with someone. It was in this choice that was the magic and beauty. It was interesting for us to debate this, but really, it didn't matter who thought what, because in the end, and by whatever belief we had, we were where we both wanted to be: together, in whatever foreign town we decided to call home.

While I was explaining my viewpoint, I was struck by another reason why I had responded so powerfully to Hedwig. In her pursuit of love and desire, in her determination for re-construction of identity, and in her salute to all the female music stars before her (‘Patti, Tina, Yoko, Aretha, Nona, Nico, and me’), she reminded me of one of my favourite movies, All About My Mother. Was this not the same story, but differently wrapped? Was this whole performance just a longer version of Agrado’s impromptu authenticity speech? Was this also a tribute to women everywhere, to ‘Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider. To all actresses who have played actresses. To all women who act...”?

Standing in the train on my way home, I ruminated on this, and many other ideas sprouted from the show, and was grateful that I could have such cultural experiences in Bangkok. Maybe I could live in this wicked little town after all.