An Actor in Conflict

Actor Soontorn “Jim” Meesri and his lifelong struggles with anger from without and anger from within

Below is a profile of Thai actor Soontorn “Jim” Meesri, the honoree of this year’s International Association of Theatre Critics – Thailand Centre’s Kittisak Suwannabokhin Life Achievement Award (previously called Lifetime Achievement Award). Soontorn is the 12th recipient of the award, which began in 2013, but this is the first time in the award’s history that, almost as soon as the announcement was made on IATC Thailand’s Facebook page, it was met with online outrage among some in the theater scene.

First, full disclosure: I am a member of the International Association of Theatre Critics – Thailand Centre. However, because I have been much less active as a critic and have watched very few to no performances in Thailand since 2020, I have not cast my vote in the competitive categories since the start of Covid in 2020. And in the past two years, I have not been part of the selection of the recipient of IATC Thailand’s Life Achievement Award. I did, however, participate in discussions on some of the rule changes to the awards a few years ago and, most recently, in a discussion on how to make the selection procedure of the Life Achievement Award more systematic and the communication of the criteria and procedure of all the awards by the IATC Thailand clearer to the public.

I am aware of the ethical concerns here. I understand why some people may be reluctant to answer my questions or suspicious of my intentions for pursuing the story. If I had been part of the selection process, known Soontorn’s work well, and championed him for the award, I would not write a story about him for a media outlet or on my own website when there’s controversy surrounding the award.

However, prior to interviewing him for the profile, I had only met Soontorn once, when I was 16 or 17 while interning at Patravadi Theatre in Bangkok during my gap year. If I remember correctly, he was leading a class or a workshop on voice for acting. And I was one of the students in that class. After that, I never saw his work again, except for maybe an ensemble performance by Crescent Moon Theatre, of which he was a member, at Patravadi Theatre during my six-month internship there in 2000 and 2001. When the Bangkok Theatre Festival (BTF) was still on Phra Arthit Road, I remember seeing his works on the programs but never went to see his shows.

As a writer, I am intrigued, of course, by what I see as a moral outrage in reaction to his being honored, the ways accusations are made and evidence presented, or not presented. Who is this man and artist whose moral character and artistic contribution are being questioned? What are his artistic achievements? Does he deserve the award? What are his moral failings that some of his fellow artists find so unforgivable? Does he deserve the outrage?

I’m also interested in writing a more complicated and critical portrait of an artist and of a small corner of Thailand’s theater ecosystem. There are screenshots, social media posts, and a controversy that have surfaced and re-surfaced in the past couple of months. These will be addressed at length. But Soontorn is almost 70 years old. Social media is much younger than he is. There must be more to a life, a career, a person than what they do on social media. We’re talking about the theater after all.

***

When he isn’t working or auditioning, Soontorn “Jim” Meesri likes to go to the movie theater at a shopping mall in Nonthaburi near where he lives. He isn’t picky at all. He’ll watch whatever happens to be playing when he’s there, even a movie that’s getting bad reviews. If he’s at home on a day off, he likes to read articles about arts and culture online. He used to swim, but he’s taken a break from it due to health reasons.

He doesn’t have a car. He mainly gets around by bus. “I have all that I need,” he said. “I have a place to live. I don’t want a car. I don’t need it. I’ve taken the bus so much that I’ve become used to it. I don’t feel inferior taking it. I don’t think, Oh, I’m almost 70! Other people have so many things in their lives.”

The bus doesn’t seem to be just his favorite mode of transportation, it’s also a workspace of sorts for him. “One good thing about the bus is that I get to observe people. And that’s helped me work with greater ease. It’s helped me access characters and language better—how do people talk? Sometimes I take notes and write poems. I write a lot on the bus.”

Soontorn has been an actor for over 30 years, appearing in theater productions, commercials, TV series, and movies, but he can still ride public transport and be left alone. He never won the Silpathorn Award by the Ministry of Culture’s Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, which is given to mid-career artists for their body of work. He’s likely not to be on track to be named National Artist either. His performance has never once been nominated for the International Association of Theatre Critics – Thailand Centre’s Dance and Theatre Awards. The only other theater award he had ever received was Patravadi Theatre’s Theatre Artists Awards in 2001 for his work with Crescent Moon Theatre.

But at 67 going on 68, although the people of his generation would say 68 going on 69, he just received the IATC Thailand’s Kittisak Suwannabhokin Life Achievement Award, the organization’s only non-competitive award. He’s the 12th recipient. And the first to stir up controversy.

“We’re always honoring artists who are more than 60 years old and haven’t been significantly recognized by other awards,” said IATC Thailand’s president Pawit Mahasarinand. “IATC Thailand has never given our Life Achievement Award to an actor before. Of course, some of our past recipients perform occasionally, but they’re also known for other things, like directing and writing.”

IATC Thailand has given the Life Achievement Award to several multi-disciplinary artists, like Patravadi Mejudhon, Mattanee Rattanin, and Kamron Gunatilaka, as well as a playwright, a lighting designer, a set designer, a choreographer, and a dramaturg. Soontorn is the first artist to be awarded who is known for being simply a professional actor.

“You can ask any theater-goer my age [people born in the 70s] and older. One of the first names for a stage actor they think of is probably P’Jim’s¹. He has performed a wide variety of roles [...] and has worked in many different theatrical styles,” Pawit said. “He’s performed in more stage works than [other actors his age] and is still performing.”

Soontorn told me during our interview at McDonald’s in the shopping mall where he likes to go see movies that casting calls for theater productions in Thailand stop at age 55. Most actors his age and older look for work in TV and film. It’s easier on the body. You don’t rehearse for weeks or months or perform consecutively for days at a time. Soontorn said he still auditions about six times a month.

Since the beginning of the year, he’s been busy with a Thai indie film by up-and-coming female director Thapanee Loosuwan. A French film he shot last year, Fils de personne, starring Romain Duris, came out in France earlier this month.

But to some of the younger generation of theater artists who are incensed by IATC Thailand’s decision to honor Soontorn, their question is, what exactly did he contribute to the scene? Is that all you have to do? Work for long enough beyond 60 years of age?

“I don’t think I’m P’Jim’s opponent, but I don’t agree with the IATC giving him the Lifetime Achievement Award,” said Jaa Phantachat.

Jaa is the co-founder of B-Floor Theatre and a Silpathorn Awards honoree. B-Floor is among the biggest winners of the IATC Thailand Awards. This year, Jaa won in the Best Performance in a Leading Role category for her widely praised turn as Maria Callas in a Thai-language version of Terrence McNally’s Master Class, translated and directed by Tarin Prinyaknit.

In her Facebook post, whose privacy status was set to “Friends”, Jaa was curious to see what AI would say about lifetime achievement awards. She posted AI’s answers to her questions that touch on issues such as award criteria, ethical use of art by the artist, the moral consideration in this type of award, the role and value of art in society, and freedom of expression.

“I think my questions are more for the IATC. Like what I wrote in another post: if we cut out the political stuff, what has he done for the theater scene that I should feel conflicted about? I want to feel that kind of sadness you feel, like, What should I do? That artist is so talented, but he’s a terrible person. Should I still follow his work? But in this case, I don’t feel that at all,” Jaa said. “For me, the IATC’s standard is suspect.”

The question of Soontorn’s artistic merit started to come up after accusations of what his detractors consider to be unacceptable politics for artists to have. Soon after the Life Achievement Award announcement was posted on IATC Thailand’s Facebook page on May 7, screenshots of a private group chat with all the people’s names redacted began to appear on a number of Facebook posts, suggesting that Soontorn supports Article 112, Thailand’s royal defamation law, or that he is at least unsympathetic to the victims of the law. Some of these Facebook posts that share the screenshots are from artists’ personal accounts with the privacy status set to “Public” and so can be viewed by anyone. Some tagged the IATC Thailand’s Facebook page in their posts.

The only official statement objecting to IATC Thailand’s awards comes from H0M0Haus – Performing Arts Festival for Diversity. Published in both Thai and English, the statement declares that, despite the nominations of two of the productions presented during H0M0Haus festival in 2025, they would not attend the ceremony and demand more transparency from IATC Thailand in regards to the criteria for all of its awards and the rationale behind the selection of Soontorn. The statement doesn’t mention Soontorn by name, but characterizes him as “a recipient whose public positions may reasonably be questioned as supporting Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code [...]” The statement does not provide any evidence of Soontorn’s “public positions” that “may reasonably be questioned as” his endorsement of the Thai lése majesté law.

The conversation in the screenshots starts with someone sharing a link to a petition expressing disagreement with the testimony given by an adjunct theater professor at Chulalongkorn University, Tridao Apaiwong Sukhum, in a lèse majesté trial against Jatuporn “New” Saeoueng. Jatuporn had participated in a 2020 political event called the People’s Runway, which was part of a bigger event called My Tax, and was later accused of dressing up like the Thai queen and mocking her in a performance. In 2022, Jatuporn was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, reduced to two years for “providing useful testimony to the court”. In 2024, the Supreme Court granted her parole. Jatuporn has been living in exile since last year.

Tridao was an expert witness and one of the 14 witnesses on the prosecutorial side. There were two witnesses on the defendant’s side, one being Jatuporn herself and another a law professor serving as an expert witness. According to the Thai Lawyers for Human Rights website, Tridao testified that Jatuporn’s action can be interpreted as mockery of the queen, based on a 19-second video of Jatuporn at the event. Jatuporn testified that she only wanted to wear a traditional Thai dress for the occasion and had no intention to mock anyone.

The conversation from the screenshots is entirely in Thai and reads as followed:

The Theater People Group invites you to sign this petition.

Re: Disagreement with Tridao Apaiwong Sukhum’s testimony as a prosecutorial witness in the Article 112 criminal trial against Jatuporn Sae-Ung [link to the statement]

I just signed it.

You want people to sign it to go on a witch-hunt?

But the real victim here is the person on trial for 112. This is just a statement of disagreement.

Starting to get fucked-up

The ones actually being hunted are the political prisoners convicted of 112.

In the end, theater people are killing each other.

Thinking differently is killing now? The question is who killed whom first.

Just sharing it here for the people who agree with the statement. People who don’t want to express their opinions or disagree with the statement don’t need to sign it.

Who did it first?

As for whether Tridao’s testimony is a witch-hunt or not is something we can discuss.

Go ahead.

I don’t really understand the sentence, “Theater people are killing each other.” In this case, I see a theater academic using her knowledge and her monopoly of interpretation to incriminate someone else. //

I think this declaration is offering a different meaning and interpretation to defend freedom of expression and to dispute one performing arts academic’s monopoly of interpretation.

Dog’s logic, shitty philosophy

If you’re going to be rude like this, how can we have a civil conversation, P’Jim?

My language, my expression.

With respect to both of you, I’m feeling really uncomfortable. Could I ask both of you to please stop? And in the future, in this Line group, let’s have a rule: only theater stuff. Is that good?

I was giving an explanation because I thought we could talk and have an exchange, but what P’Jim typed, did you just want to disparage me? Because if that’s the case, then I can say to you, “Prick.” (I apologize to everyone for bringing into this group chat a rude word to irritate your eyes.) Since there’s no more logic or philosophy that we can think of or discuss, I’m just going to stop here. Please have a look at the petition.

Soontorn told me he had read the social media posts by theater artists criticizing IATC Thailand’s decision to honor him. Regarding the private group chat conversation, he remembered that someone had sent a “questionnaire about something political”. I told him about what was actually sent in the group chat and showed him the screenshots of the conversation with all the names redacted.

Assuming that they were his words, I asked him why he saw the petition as a witch-hunt. He told me he didn’t write that comment. “I’m not sure who wrote these first sentences,” he said. Soontorn then pointed to the sentence he said was his: “In the end, theater people are killing each other” and explained that he wrote it as a warning.

“If we’re already divided, soon we’re going to break apart. It’s going to be a mess, no brotherhood or sisterhood, if we’re going to bring in political ideologies to judge one another.

“As someone who’s experienced something like this, if we went ahead with this, everyone would be divided. The theater community would fall apart. Conflicts that stem from differences in political opinions spare no one. It’s the kind of conflict that tears people apart,” he said.

In a follow-up phone interview with him about a week later, we returned to the matter and the screenshots. He repeated that he didn’t say anything about the petition being a witch-hunt. He added with a chuckle that “dog’s logic, shitty philosophy” were his own words. It’s a phrase he had used elsewhere on his social media posts about other topics.

When asked about the accusation that he supports Article 112, he said, “I’m in the middle. And I’m not extreme about it or anything like that. I’m aware that there are people who are against it and for it.”

I reached out to one of the artists who shared the screenshots of the conversation in a public post objecting to the award. I asked the author of the post about their interpretation of the conversation: whether they interpret Soontorn’s words as an endorsement of Article 112 or, at the very least, as indifferent to the victims of the law? I also asked whether the post’s author was in the chat group, whether they witnessed the conversation first-hand, whether they saw the conversation the way I did, as screenshots with redacted names, and whether they know which sentences belong to Soontorn. I asked whether they had had other experiences with Soontorn that led them to believe that he supports the royal defamation law. I also offered the author a chance to say more on the matter if they would like to.

I later had a phone conversation with the artist to answer questions they wanted to ask about the article I was planning to write. In the end, they decided not to answer the questions I sent them and asked not to be named.

One of the subjects that Jaa brought up in her conversation with AI about the award is artists’ participation in Art Lane, a network Thai artists who held a series of fundraisers for People’s Democratic Reform Committee’s projects and mass protests that started in 2013 and eventually developed into a takeover of seven major intersections in Bangkok in 2014². The PDRC, led by former Democrat Party’s secretary general and MP Suthep Thuagsuban, played a key role in the deposing of Yingluck Shinawatra’s government by one of the most consequential military coups in Thailand’s modern history.

I had misread Jaa’s post and thought that some of the words were hers, not AI’s answers. I, therefore, thought that she was talking about Soontorn’s involvement with Art Lane. But she clarified that, instead of using as an example the conversation in the private group chat about Tridao’s testimony in the Article 112 trial against Jatuporn, because it would have been too long and complicated, she decided to use Art Lane as an example in her conversation with AI instead.

I had understood that her main issue with awarding Soontorn was due to his participation, as an artist, in a political event that is widely deemed as instrumental in paving the way to a military coup and contributing to even more restrictions on free expression in Thailand. So in my questions to her, I asked her whether she had seen videos or photos of Soontorn’s participation or whether she had seen him at Art Lane events or the PDRC protests. If so, how did he use his art? What was the content of his artwork for Art Lane? Did she know what his intentions were for participating in it?

“AI asked the same question as you: What did he do? I don’t have any evidence. And I don’t want to understand P’Jim’s intentions for hanging around there either. You have to go ask him that,” Jaa wrote in a reply. (I later asked her to confirm that she had never seen Soontorn at the PDRC protests or Art Lane events and that she was only using Art Lane as an example in her conversation with AI. She never responded.) “But I remember the political atmosphere of that time,” Jaa continued. “And I can still remember this toxic feeling I had when reading P’Jim’s posts. I ended up hiding his posts or unfriending him.”

She sent me two screenshots of Soontorn’s old Facebook posts from September 2022, around the same time that the petition against Tridao was written and began circulating. Earlier that month, Jatuporn had just been sentenced to prison. These posts are still up on Soontorn’s Facebook and can be seen by the public.

One post reads, “Inciting the people to abduct the suspect / Then killing the witness / Thai theater people are witch-hunting / #ShittyPlayButStillLaughing.”

Another one reads, “#Artists speak half-truths / Then cry about it / #TheWeakLeft can’t endure provocations / Revealing themselves.”

Like with the other artist, I also asked Jaa to say more on the matter if she would like.

Jaa wrote, “Do we have enough free speech in a country with the 112 law? Are we not supposed to express our opposition against people who use our profession to support the idea that expressing oneself in public is wrong, even though our work should have a lot of freedom? Is the freedom we have now enough?

“My personal theory is that if you feel that something is not a problem for you, that means you’re benefitting from the system or that the system is designed to benefit you. It’s a win-win for both you and the system.”

Soontorn said he never joined the PDRC’s protests or participated in Art Lane activities, but he did perform his poetry during the early days of the protests led by media mogul Sondhi Limthongkul that began in the mid-2000s during Thaksin Shinawatra’s government. The movement would later be called People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) or the Yellow Shirts. He remembers PDRC’s shutdown of Bangkok as an event that made it difficult for him to catch a bus home at night after rehearsals at Chulalongkorn University.

***

Pawit has been part of nominating and selection committees for both Silpathorn Awards and National Artist Awards for many years. When asked whether an artist’s moral character should be factored into the decision-making process of such awards, Pawit suspects the kerfuffle stemmed from political differences rather than the issue of moral standard.

“Sometimes, some of us forget that political differences are integral to all democratic societies. Then, people start digging into one’s past and start questioning,” he said.

“Of course, moral integrity is among the criteria of all awards, our Life Achievement Award included. But the definition of it varies from one jury member to another [...] At the end of the day, the jury of all awards focus more on [an artist’s] professional contribution to the arts. Again, it comes back to different political standpoints, doesn’t it? It seems like, if you share the same political standpoint, you don’t care about the moral standard. Is that the case here? Did you vote for a politician who campaigned for equal rights but was known for the opposite in his household?”

Pawit also thinks the online outrage against the award is not as big of an issue as some may seem to think. No major news websites picked up on the online backlash of the award. “After all, it’s another case of echo chamber, isn’t it?”

When Soontorn reposted the Life Achievement Award announcement on his personal Facebook account, he received over 300 likes, with over a hundred messages of congratulations in the comment section, including from prominent theater artists, like National Artist Patravadi Mejudhon (founder of Patravadi Theatre) and playwright Daraka Wongsiri, both recipients of IATC Thailand’s Life Achievement Award.

But the younger artists who have publicly objected and criticized the IATC Thailand’s Life Achievement Award are successful in their own right. Each of their posts on Soontorn may have gotten only over a hundred likes and shares or fewer, but these artists form an unofficial theater community that wields a certain amount of power within the larger Thai theater ecosystem.

Although they don’t have any economic or financial power, some of them run small performance spaces and get decent media attention for their productions and festivals. Some have gatekeeping roles as programmers, curators, or artistic directors of performing arts festivals in Thailand.

One could also argue that these younger artists have more significant footprints in the international contemporary performing arts scene than Soontorn because they’re multi-disciplinary theater-makers. And though Soontorn has worked in films and TV shows in Thailand and abroad for decades, he is not a marquee name even in his home country.

Being left-leaning political artists who are openly anti-coup, anti-military, and critical of unjust laws, like Article 112, doesn’t give artists any political power. In fact, it could be dangerous for them. However, some of these artists are also recipients of the Silpathorn Awards, which is a government honor with a one-time prize money of 100,000 baht.

The highest government honor for artists in Thailand is the National Artist, which comes with a monthly salary, healthcare coverage, and other benefits. However, in 2021, the title was stripped from writer and editor Suchart Swadsri for his public support of political and monarchic reforms. Suchart took the National Culture Commission and the Ministry of Culture to court, but the Administrative Court dismissed his case last year, four years after he filed the lawsuit. Although he received support from fellow artists at the time, no National Artists returned the title in protest. And no artists have turned down the award in subsequent years in protest of the Ministry of Culture’s treatment of Suchart.

The IATC Thailand does not give any prize money. But Thai theater artists do mention their IATC wins and call themselves award-winning artists in their bios in international contexts. It’s evident why these artists in the “theater community” feel an emotional connection and sense of ownership toward the IATC Thailand Awards. Most of these younger artists within the community are the ones getting nominated and winning the IATC Thailand Awards every year.

The IATC Thailand critics who presented the awards this year told me that the ceremony on June 9 at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC) was attended by only a dozen people. None of the artists who publicly voiced their criticism against Soontorn and IATC Thailand’s decision came to the event. Prior to the ceremony, IATC Thailand did not issue any statement to address the controversy or respond to H0M0Haus’s demands.

***

But regardless of the size of an ecosystem or community, does the situation ever feel insignificant to the person being accused of wrongdoing or to the target or the subject of an online backlash?

And when another person gets accused, charged, and or convicted of Article 112, do activists and artists who are critics of the law not feel more vulnerable each time? What is it this time? How did things get interpreted? What else can we not say or do anymore? Haven’t we already been so careful? Will we be next? How else can I protect myself, my family, and my community?

Although the stakes are not anywhere as high, artists accused or suspected of holding certain political views can become pariahs in some artistic circles. Their work, whether political or not, is automatically tainted in the process. It doesn’t result in jail time or political exile, but political opinions can and have often been used intra-communally to ostracize individuals and derail careers all over the world.

To shed some light on the issue of political labels pertaining to the arts in Thailand: Controversy erupted in the Thai visual arts scene in 2016 when a series of artwork entitled Thai Uprising, by artist Sutee Kunavichayanont, was selected for The Truth to Turn It Over, an exhibition to commemorate the 1980 Gwangju Uprising against military dictatorship at the Gwangju Museum of Art in Korea. Thai Uprising was created for Art Lane to raise money for the PDRC and was one of the four series of artwork by Sutee selected for the exhibition.

A group of arts professionals called Cultural Activists for Democracy (CAD) issued an open letter to the curator in protest of the selection of Sutee’s work. The letter was signed by over a hundred people in the arts. CAD later penned a second open letter, signed by over 200 people, asking the art museum to issue an apology in Korean, Thai, and English for the lack of understanding of the Thai political situation that led to the selection of Sutee’s work, display their open letters alongside Sutee’s artwork, and collect and publish all the correspondence between CAD, Sutee, the exhibition curator, and others for the May 18 Democratic Uprising Archives.

In a video of an hour-long press conference in response to CAD’s actions, a number of Sutee’s colleagues and friends showed up to speak on a panel in support of him. Manit Sriwanichpoom, a prominent photo artist of the Pink Man photographic series fame, called the accusation that Sutee and other artists who participated in Art Lane were anti-democratic and pro-coup a smear and CAD’s campaign an attempt at censorship and at distortion of history.

Sutee addressed the question of his political stance and explained his work that was selected for the Gwangju exhibition. He also talked about how, in the past, his art had been exhibited and even awarded by left-wing groups and institutions. He said some of the works selected could even be interpreted as anti–right wing, anti-military, anti-dictatorship, and “if people really wanted to get me in trouble, some could even accuse me of wanting to ‘overthrow the institution’”. Sutee rejected the label “PDRC artist”, saying that he didn’t take orders from the PDRC, and the accusation that he ever called for a military coup or that ever he wanted or intended to “pave the way” for the coup.

In the Thai theater scene in 2015, less than a year after the 2014 military coup, Bang-La-Merd, a critically acclaimed production by B-Floor Theatre’s Ornanong Thaisriwong, directly critiqued the royal defamation law and censorship in Thailand. The performance was recorded and watched over by military officers every night. In one scene, Ornanong challenged the audience on the idea of being labeled something toxic and punished for it. The actress went around the room randomly sticking big red dots on audience members, including the military officers. The show was originally staged in 2012, two years after the military crackdown of the red-shirt protesters. Left-leaning people were sometimes called “red shirt” or the dehumanizing “red buffalo” even when they didn’t identify with or belong to the Red Shirts movement. Among the non–red shirt left, the terms were considered a smear. Even when they were not used as insults, many take offense with the blanket assumption.

In the art world today, the fact of being from certain countries alone can make artists vulnerable to explicit or quiet boycotts. Being perceived as not having the correct stance on certain issues or not being sufficiently supportive of certain causes can expose not only individuals, but also institutions, especially those whose missions require political neutrality, to controversy.

To give one example of many: In 2024, PEN America, an organization dedicated to protecting free expression of writers, decided to cancel both its award ceremony and World Voices Festival after many award nominees and festival participants withdrew from the events over what they deemed as PEN’s insufficient support for Palestinian writers and weak stance on Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Among its numerous accusations and demands, an open letter, signed by over a thousand writers, accuses PEN of “perpetuating dangerous, fascist views and offering tacit approval for the Zionist, racist and genocidal regime” for “platform[ing]” pro-Israel, Jewish-American actress Mayim Bialik of The Big Bang Theory fame in a PEN Out Loud conversation about a new memoir by Jewish-American comedian Moshe Kasher. The conversation features Kasher and Bialik, who the letter describes as “a person committed to the racist ideology of Zionism”. Kasher’s book, Subculture Vulture: A Memoir in Six Scenes, is not about the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Six protesters from Writers Against the War in Gaza (WAWOG) disrupted the event, were asked to leave, and all but one eventually left voluntarily. American writer and translator of Egyptian and Palestinian descent Randa Jarrar was later removed from the event by security, who dragged the chair with Jarrar in it out of the room.

In its announcement of the World Voices Festival’s cancellation, PEN also expressed concerns that it had heard that dozens of writers faced online attacks and pressure to distance themselves from the organization.

***

The backlash against Soontorn doesn’t seem to be an attempt to cancel him or destroy his career. He has not lost any job opportunities. And these days, he mostly works in commercials, film, and TV. He’s part of the Thai theater ecosystem, but one could say he’s not exactly part of the so-called “theater community”.

When he was asked questions about the controversy during our first interview together, Soontorn never seemed evasive. He looked and sounded emotional, but his voice was always restrained. He returned to the subject a few more times throughout the rest of the interview, even when my questions had already moved on to something else.

Sometimes he sounded embittered. When asked about his career disappointments, he said simply, “This,” referring to the controversy. “You have to go ask yourselves why you studied theater.”

Sometimes, he tried to put things into perspective, “There’s praise, and there’s blame. There’s gain, and there’s loss,” he said, referring to the Buddhist concept of the eight worldly conditions. “Once I found out I was going to get this award, I knew something negative would follow. It’s fine. It makes you strong. As an actor, I’ve gotten everything: praise and blame…”

Sometimes he sounded generous about his detractors, seeing his younger self in them. “It’s their age, too. I’ve been there. I used to complain and make a scene.”

He also seemed to be making an effort not to be reactive. “All the people posting about me, they want me to get in the ring with them, to respond to them so that they can attack me. I’m just going to play the role of a monk. I’m going to do nothing, and things will just pass. As Marcel Marceau said, ‘Mime makes the invisible visible, and the visible invisible.’ That’s the magic of theater.”

During the follow-up phone interview a week later, I asked him whether he had anything else to say about it. He sounded calmer. He referred to the artists who have come out against him as nong (a Thai word for younger brother or sister). “Nong kor keu nong,” he said. Younger siblings are younger siblings.

Jaa wrote toward the end of her reply to my questions: “I don’t know how you’re going to quote me, but I hope you’re not going to whitewash P’Jim and portray him as a theater artist with a certain amount of capability who is being ganged up on by the other side for having different political opinions. Because that would be really ironic.”

***

In his youth, Soontorn believed so strongly that he was a painter and nothing else. For his university entrance examination, he put the Faculty of Painting, Sculpture, and Graphic Arts at Silpakorn University as his first choice, but he ended up getting into the Faculty of Education at Chulalongkorn University, his fifth and last choice. Becoming an art teacher was an option he entertained.

Soontorn was born and grew up in the southern province of Trang, outside of town and near the mountains. He was the youngest of eight—four boys and four girls. Only one of his sisters went to a private Christian school and sang in a choir. The rest of his siblings attended public school. He was the only child who studied in a temple school.

“My siblings, if they weren’t drawing, they were singing. Some of them played music in school bands. I could always hear the sounds of wind instruments at home.”

At the temple or at the market, he would watch likay ( a form of Thai folk musical theater) that had traveled from the Central region. He also liked to watch outdoor movies, where he could see the live dubbing and people fixing the film roll on-site. “When the movie was playing, and the film roll snapped, then you would see people snipping and putting bits of film together. We would pick up the fragments of film negatives after the screening and put them against the light to see the images.”

After Soontorn graduated from university, he worked odd jobs, like printing t-shirts and tutoring high school students for their entrance examination in art. At one point, he worked at the YMCA on Sathorn Road, next door to the original location of the Alliance Française. This was the time before printers, so he would make cut-outs, signs, and posters for the YMCA, all by hand.

After work, he met up with his friends at the café at Alliance Française. People would play music at their tables. And if the café set up a microphone that evening, some of them would perform.

Soontorn’s first brush with the performing arts began with this group of friends. His first stage was Sanam Luang. He and his friends would find a free spot. The musicians among them would start them off. Paitoon Laisakul (1962-2017), who would later become known and loved as Khonnakhao and for his pioneering mime work in Thailand, followed up with a mime performance. Then, Soontorn would perform his poems. Among them was also the famous cartoonist Triam Chachumporn (1952-1990), who played music with them. Once done, they gathered all their busking money together, walked over to Triam’s office at Siamrath newspaper to freshen up before grabbing a bite at the famous rice-soup spot Sky High.

Soontorn said he performed at Sanam Luang for four years. He called those years his “angry years” and described his political poems as “residue from the October 6, 1976 Thammasat University Massacre”. When the massacre took place, Soontorn was still in high school in Trang, but he remembers a classmate who joined the insurgency in the jungle. Soontorn didn’t become political during his time at university. He recalls them as his quiet years.

It was poetry that led him to theater and to find his stage voice. But he still didn’t see himself as a performer or actor. “I saw myself as a painter. I didn’t see myself as having a way out from that,” he said.

In his late 20s, he spent a summer teaching art at the Appel Farm Arts and Music Center. There, his life inched even closer to the performing arts. One morning, a teacher saw Soontorn tinkering with a broken piano, playing it like a drum. He then introduced Soontorn to the art center’s music department. Soontorn had no training in music, so they put him with a pianist, and he helped out as a page-turner.

“I got to work in the music department, the dance department, the theater department [...] running lines with the children. I was immersed in the performing arts world,” he said.

He also got to see performances that came to the art center. One weekly activity got him into the world of solo performances.

“Every Friday, every department would send people to perform a solo. I would perform simple mimes. The more I did it, the more all the systems in me adapted.”

After his stint at the Appel Farm, it would still be years yet before Soontorn got serious about becoming an actor. Paitoon, his friend from Sanam Luang days, founded his Khonnakhao troupe in 1986, and Soontorn hung around the group, sometimes performing with them, holding up signs during the performance.

When Soontorn was in his early 30s, world-renowned mime artist Marcel Marceau came to Thailand. And because of his ability to speak English, Soontorn was hired as a coordinator, taking Marceau from place to place around Bangkok for a few days. One day before a performance, while Marceau was putting on his makeup in the dressing room, Soontorn was about to leave the room to give the mime master some privacy. Soontorn remembers Marceau holding him back and telling him to stay behind to watch him get ready for a performance. The young painter felt seen in that moment, as if Marceau could sense a performer in him, even though the younger artist had yet to realize it then.

“He told me that, instead of just watching him on the stage, I should also learn this part of the life of a performer [...] In a way, he was my first theater teacher,” Soontorn said.

As a painter, Soontorn was painting large-scale abstract murals. Then, he received a commission to paint murals for a conference room at the Industrial Estate Authority of Thailand in Makkasan, and something shifted in him.

“I didn’t know why I kept walking around the whole day. I didn’t know why I couldn’t start the work. There was something inside me that was growing, but I was repressing it. It was as if I kept telling myself that I was a painter and nothing else. And something else was pushing its way up from inside of me. So I thought, maybe this is not it. So after I finished that work, I put all my painting tools away.”

Soontorn decided to pursue acting seriously and began taking acting classes with Crescent Moon Theatre. At the time, the famed company that was started by a group of literature- and theater-loving students at Thammasat University in the 70s, was still being run by one of its co-founders Kamron Gunatilaka. Soontorn arrived during the company’s “permanent theater” era (1995–1997), during which Crescent Moon had a home at Saeng Arun Art and Culture Center and paid its cast and crew a monthly salary.

Soontorn didn’t think about making a living as an actor in the beginning. “Anything that made me happy, that healed me, I did it. One good thing about theater is that it makes you live in the present,” he said.

Soontorn also described himself at that time as a sick person, physically and spiritually. A clarifying moment happened to him when he read an essay by Kamron about how theater can help its practitioners achieve balance in the body and the mind.

“The theater person inside of me was growing, but it was being repressed by the painter inside of me. They were clashing. And something exploded. I was angry. Physically, I was wondering why I got sick all the time. After reading that essay, I decided to study under him and take it more seriously,” he said.

Soontorn joined the company when he was already in his late 30s, at the same time as much younger artists than he, like actress Farida Jiraphan; Sineenadh Keitprapai, who would later head Crescent Moon Theatre and be awarded the Silpathorn; and Teerawat Mulvilai, who co-founded B-Floor Theatre and became Silpathorn Artist.

Another artist who was younger than Soontorn but who had joined the Crescent Moon even before Soontorn was Nimit Pipitkul. The Silpathorn Artist who co-founded Sema Marionnette Troupe remembers how Soontorn, despite his lack of theater training, didn’t arrive at Crescent Moon with nothing to offer.

According to Nimit, Soontorn was entrusted with Crescent Moon’s production design from his first production with the company, Gu Cheu Phaya Phann (My Name Is Phaya Phann).

“His coming into theater was not about crossing over into another art form,” Nimit said over the phone. “One thing that he came in with was the way he looked at things from the design perspective, from the visual arts perspective, and from the conceptual art perspective.”

Nimit explained that Soontorn’s visual arts background also translated into the way he performed. “When he performed, he would have a concept in mind for what he wanted to communicate or what he wanted to tell. He always wanted to communicate something meaningful. He would always look like he was thinking [Laughs.]. Everything that he did onstage, he had already chosen. He had already thought about playing and communicating in a certain way. He had already done the work of interpretation. So when we created a piece together, we would be able to go beyond our usual thought process.”

In 1997, Crescent Moon did a double-bill of solos: Taling Soong Sung Nak (High Banks, Heavy Logs), adapted from Nikom Rayawa’s SEAWrite-winning novel of the same name about a mahout and woodcarver and an elephant he loves but can never own; and Krajomfai (The Lighthouse), inspired by Ernest Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Nimit, who wrote and performed in Krajomfai, recalled that for the two productions, Soontorn designed a set that transformed scaffolding and pieces of wood into an elephant and a lighthouse.

“He was able to come up with a production design concept that was interesting and made the performers adapt themselves to the design. And that led to a kind of collaboration that prompted new ways of thinking,” Nimit said.

In 1998, one of the company’s most frequently revived plays, Keu Phu Apiwat 2475 (The Revolutionist 1932), this time directed by Nimit, toured Thailand and several cities in Europe and the US. The same year, Soontorn and other Thai actors, including those from Crescent Moon, were cast in a production of Akaoni (The Red Giant), by prominent Japanese playwright and director Hideki Noda. The versions with the Thai cast, co-directed by Noda and Nimit, performed in Bangkok and Japan in 1998 and 1999.

“It was a period of learning. It was like attending a university because we had exchanges with other countries. We had to travel. It didn’t stop at one project,” Soontorn said.

When Crescent Moon moved its home from Saeng Arun Art and Culture Center to Pridi Banomyong Institute, following the Tom Yum Kung Asian financial crisis, Soontorn continued to use his visual arts skills to help with the institute’s events the way he did at YMCA. He continued to be active with Crescent Moon. And in that new space, according to Nimit, the Crescent Moon members were even more surrounded by the socially and politically conscious October-generation performance artists.

While many of Crescent Moon’s productions were ensemble works, it was in this space that Soontorn ventured deeper into performance arts. When asked how often he created his performance art solos during his years at Pridi, Soontorn laughed and said that it was many times a month. “I ate there, and I slept there, so I played there as well. When there was an event, I could always squeeze in a performance,” he said. And when the Bangkok Theatre Festival (BTF) was still at the Santichaiprakarn Park and in venues around the Bang Lamphu neighborhood, Soontorn would also bring his experimental solos to the annual theater gathering.

Soontorn started by adapting Nimit’s Krajomfai into English and into the context of the post 9/11 world, creating an American character called John A. Lone. While Krajomfai features an old petty officer stationed at a lighthouse confessing to a corpse that has washed ashore, John A. Lone is a character inspired by the famous image of a man falling from one of the Twin Towers on 9/11. The character falls into the sea and re-emerges on an island.

The piece was originally titled Lighthouse the Opera when it premiered at the Small Hall of Thailand Culture Centre. From then on, it was called John A. Lone, a creation that Soontorn continued to adapt and perform throughout the 2000s at Pridi and the BTF.

In a short video of an outdoor performance of John A. Lone at the BTF in 2004, Soontorn, playing the title character dressed in a sailor uniform with a tan utility vest, climbs a set of stairs before asking, “Bush, Bush, have you ever been in love?” to whoops and cheers from the audience. “Oh, Blair, Blair, have you ever been in love?” to more cheers from the crowd. “Oh, Thaksin,” he said, flapping his arms and clucking like a chicken to even louder cheers and clapping. He spun around and held up his middle finger in the air. The audience responded with oh’s, whoops, and scattered applause. At the end of the video, he shouted, “Thaksin, Thaksin, how many people did you kill in four years? Thaksin, you’re a [tyrant]!”

When talking about his past works, the subject of anger often came up. With John A. Lone, too.

“Through that role, I was able to talk about international politics,” he said. “There was still anger there, always ready to explode. Maybe I detonated everything with that role, everything that was still troubling me. After finishing with that role, I felt relieved.”

Perhaps it was the nature of the character, too, that helped Soontorn deal with his rage against the state of the world. “The character and the age of the character didn’t stay or get stuck in one thing. He keeps going from one subject to another. He moves along with the time,” Soontorn said.

Soontorn no longer performs John A. Lone. Since he became more focused on his acting career, he also left the world of performance art behind. He no longer performs his poetry, either, although he continues to post his poems on Facebook. Even when he writes about theater productions he saw, he writes them in short phrases with lots of line breaks. Nowadays, Soontorn said, his poems are “softer and more still”.

During Yingluck Shinawatra’s government from 2013 to 2014, his poems expressed clear animosity toward the premier and her administration. Words like “whore”, “whorehouse”, “pimps”, “mad woman”, “sick whore” and “police state” appeared frequently in his political poems at the time. Use of sexually degrading language was not uncommon among both male and female detractors of Yingluck, Thailand’s first female prime minister. The word “salim”, a pejorative term for the conservative multi-colored shirts movement called the People for the Protection of Nation, Religion, and Monarchy, also appeared in a number of his poems at the time, and not in a positive way. The phrase “shitty play but still laughing” also appeared frequently at the end of his poems of that time—the same phrase used in some of his political poems and posts in 2022.

Soontorn said he’s never gone back to his angry period. But perhaps his poems and colorful turns of phrase he likes to reuse are not the best indicator of the level of anger within him during his “angry period”. He credits the theater with having healed him, saved him, and even civilized him. “If I hadn’t done theater, I would have ended up in jail. I was so angry. I never listened to anybody,” he said. “I came from the mud, and the roles that I’ve played, they’ve formed me into a human being.”

Apart from his time with the Crescent Moon and at Pridi among the October-generation artists, Soontorn also sought out theater education and training with other theater companies from the beginning. He has collaborated with Moradokmai, a theater company that later became Moradokmai Theatre Community and Homeschool, founded by National Artist Janaprakal “Khru Chang” Chandruang. For a year, Soontorn studied classical singing and, for a couple of decades now, has been learning from and sometimes performing in the productions of Siam Opera, founded by Silpathorn Artist Somtow Sucharitkul.

Soontorn also became a regular in university students’ plays and films. He even acted in a student film written and directed by one of the most famous actors in Thailand, Nadech Kugimiya, when the young actor was still a student at Rangsit University more than a decade ago.

“It’s like grandpa working with his grandchildren. Sometimes I move fast because of my experience, but sometimes I move slowly because of my age. Sometimes I have to learn the language of the youth so that I can understand them. Working on these projects helps repair me and fill in the things that I’m missing, like theater techniques,” he said.

During Covid, Soontorn was cast in the title role of the Thai-language version of Florian Zeller’s Le Père (The Father), directed by award-winning director Pattarasuda Anuman Rajadhon. In it, he played a man with dementia. “The role felt close to me,” he said. “The ending made me cry, exploded.”

But he also shared his struggle with its looping structure and his strange experience with his own memory. In one performance, he said he skipped an entire page of the script. The production was also working under unpredictable circumstances due to the pandemic.

“I asked [the director] why she chose me. ‘Did you ask anybody else?’ And she said she had contacted other people, but they didn’t want it,” he said. “If I had read the play first, I wouldn’t have done it. It was difficult. It was heavy. It was the kind of role that could make you or kill you.”

The role didn’t make him into a star. But Soontorn survived.

He returned to the stage last year and to the university milieu, playing a role he still speaks of with pride: a monk in Kawao Tee Bangpleng: The New Musical. The production is an adaptation of Kukrit Pramoj’s sci-fi novel, which the late writer and politician adapted from John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos. The musical, directed by Asst. Prof. Dr. Punnasak Sukkee, is a Bangkok University’s production that brought together university students and professionals like Soontorn and singer Pijika “Lookwa” Jittaputta. Despite being a university production, it was staged at the Muangthai Rachadalai Theatre, one of the biggest theaters in Thailand.

One of the prominent figures in Thailand’s musical theater is Napisi Reyes, a musical theater composer, director, and professor at the College of Music, Mahidol University. She was also one of the artists who congratulated Soontorn on Facebook. Napisi doesn’t know Soontorn well and can’t recall having worked with him. She remembers seeing him in a workshop or a production long ago and found him to be a very determined artist, despite his apparent lack of theater training. Napisi most recently saw him again in Kawao Tee Bangpleng.

“I really admired how much he had improved. His singing voice was impressive, different from what I had heard a long time ago. This tells me that he must have trained very hard. And he must have gained a lot of experience in music and musical theater. The role also really suited him,” she wrote in a message.

Nimit also thinks the role was a perfect fit for Soontorn. However, the theater artists who object to his receiving IATC Thailand’s Life Achievement Award have also been using the occasion to mock his acting online. But Nimit, who has also worked with Soontorn in films, sees Soontorn’s acting style differently.

“He still has that style. We like to call it the Kamron style. It has a Brechtian quality to it. It’s not very naturalistic acting. It’s the kind of acting that’s constantly critical. Most audiences may not be used to his style of acting or question why he performs in a certain way. But I’ve known him for a long time. I’ve seen him perform in short films. He’s always had this style. It’s ingrained in us since Crescent Moon.”

One thing that Nimit appreciates about Soontorn as an artist is his way of seeing.

“I used to talk about new performances, new styles of performance that I found interesting, and he would always say, ‘There’s nothing new. It’s all been done before, and it’s being brought back again.’ I’ve always appreciated that thought from him because sometimes I get excited about creating something that I think is new, but he’s seen a lot. And he doesn’t think it’s about being new, but about how it’s serving the time that it’s in and the people of the time.”

One of the last things Nimit said about Soontorn in our phone interview was this: “He’s been through a lot in the arts scene. But certain things that he does that people don’t understand, he’s not shocked by it. And he’s always stood by what he thinks and does.”

Soontorn has been thinking about returning to his first art form, about creating his final painting—something to keep, something to leave behind. But he doesn’t see painting the way he sees theater. For Soontorn, painting is about keeping, theater about releasing.

“This type of art not only takes up physical space, it also has a possessive side to it. When I first started doing theater, I was shocked that the set just got thrown away. ‘Why don’t you keep it and sell it?’ It just cuts something out of you,” he said. “If I start painting again, I will start thinking about profits and losses. But when I do theater, I don’t think about these things.”

With this role of a monk, the subject of anger came up again. But also, as with any story of acting, the subject of transformation.

“Acting continues to change me,” Soontorn said. “Playing the role really helped me. It completed something in me. Before this, I used to react to things immediately. I was still crazy and full of rage when I was 60. I’ve had to learn to be careful not to walk into other people’s traps. I found stillness in playing a monk: Don’t react. Everything has its time and will collapse eventually.”

1. P’ (พี่) followed by someone’s name means older brother or sister in Thai. The word is used to address someone who’s not significantly older than the speaker.

2. The description of Art Lane has been amended. It was not a single event as previously described.