This Song Father Used to Sing (Three Days in May)

by Wichaya Artamat
The Esplanade: The Studios
Esplanade Theatre Studio, Singapore

There's something quietly powerful about This Song Father Used to Sing (Three Days in May), the closing production of the Esplanade's The Studios 2024 season that is interrogating the theme of land over a three-year period. The acclaimed Thai play has toured various European festivals and this marks its debut in Singapore.  

Written and directed by Thai playwright Wichaya Artamat, it revolves around a pair of unnamed Thai-Chinese siblings in Bangkok who gather once a year in the month of May to perform funerary rites for their late father. We watch as they cook rice, fold joss paper into gold ingots to be burned as offerings and banter with each other in their father's old apartment. It's obvious that the pair have drifted apart and lead largely separate lives. The brother (Jaturachai Srichanwanpen) is a postgraduate student in arts and cultural management based in Singapore while the sister (Parnrut Kritchanchai) is a yoga teacher who has dreams of opening her own food business. 

There's a familiarity to their silences, sighs and sniping, a rythmn that has been honed to perfection since the same two actors have been playing these roles since the play premiered in 2015 and co-devised the script. They appear gruff and disengaged but one senses that they cherish this fleeting moment in their childhood home, reliving memories from their youth and sharing the ritual of mourning. The songs of Leslie Cheung and Teresa Teng which their late father enjoyed punctuate the narrative and add a nostalgic cultural shimmer. 

What elevates this simple, everyday tale is the indelible political stamp it bears. While not taking place in the same year, the three specific days in May when we encounter the siblings (17 May, 19 May and 22 May) coincide with the dates of major political protests against the Thai military regime that resulted in widespread violence and death. Even as the two siblings sit by a window, wrapped up in their personal lives, it's impossible to ignore the horrors of the world outside. 

It's perhaps no coincidence that the framed portrait of the father, occupying a central position on the stage, bears a striking resemblance to the late Thai king. Furthermore, given that the king is commonly referred to as the father of the nation in local parlance, it's easy to see this familial play as an allegory of two ordinary citizens living under the rule of their monarch and the contrasting and contradictory ways in which they remember him.  

Indeed, This Song Father Used to Sing is a play of many layers. Chinese audiences would be alive to the cultural references from the funerary rituals and songs. Thai audiences would no doubt get the political context. The language of love, loss and family fault lines is of course universal. This is a nuanced and elegiac work that definitely deserves a much longer run.

The Crystalwords score: 3.5/5