Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Fever Room

Projected consciousness: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s first stage production is showing for the first time in the German-speaking region at the steirischer herbst festival.

It’s probably fair to say that no other film-maker can build up an atmosphere of mysticism and mystery without any horror effects as skillfully as Apichatpong Weerasethakul. In unassuming fashion, the deceased ancestors and phantoms that haunt in his films, still get very much under our skin.

Weerasethakul takes a step closer to his audience with his very first piece for theatre by reversing viewing conditions from the beginning: Once the audience have taken their seats on the stage, the auditorium is transformed into an uncanny projection screen for a bewitching blurring of reality and fantasy. Jen and Itt, the protagonists from Weerasethakul’s latest film “Cemetery of Splendour”, also inhabit this “Fever Room”. They meet in a dream, their memories merging with those of the director to form a fiction. The fact that his characters take refuge in dream worlds also has a political background: Because of its military dictatorship, Thailand has been on the brink of collapse for years.

“Fever Room” documents a personal and national history as if everything were very soon to disappear. As in “Cemetery of Splendour”, the hospital is once again a locus of transition and transcendence. With the “sequel” to this much-acclaimed film in three-dimensional space, Apichatpong Weerasethakul has created his first, highly unconventional stage production.

Regie: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Produktion: Sompot Chidgasornpongse
Musik: Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr
Musik: Koichi Shimizu
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Rueangrith Suntisuk
Lichtregie: Pornpan Arayaveerasid