Global Theme, Local Form: Testimony, Storytelling, and Thailand: What's Love Got to Do with It?

Abstract

This essay is a reflection on the play, Thailand! What’s Love Got To Do With It?, by Máirtín de Cógáin and Brian Desmond, first produced in Cork, Ireland, in 2007. Thailand is both documentary play and metaphor: documentary in that it dramatizes an analysis of perspectives expressed by Irish sex tourists, and metaphor in the way that this analysis reflects the hysterical electioneering (from both government and media) during the 2007 Irish general election which saw Fianna Fáil’s Celtic Tiger government elected for a third term. A reflection on practice, this essay uses postcolonial and narrative theory to discuss Thailand as an act of performance which deploys the latitudes of epic storytelling to interrogate Irish attitudes to citizenship, both national and global. It discusses ways in which Thailand interrogates Celtic Tiger Ireland’s expedient self-narratives, including those of wealth as moral currency, the disposable foreign “other,” and the anti-dialectical narratives of the Irish government (and its media allies). First produced in 2007, shortly before the Irish economy went into freefall, Thailand documents an affluent Ireland’s critical disengagement with the contradictions of prosperity or, after Jerome Bruner, its apparent inability to narrate “itself” as “other.” This essay considers how Thailand’s dramaturgy exposes some of these contradictions and, through epic storytelling, both performs and exposes an apparatus of global domination.