The hardest hitting moment of this supposedly "searing indictment" of the Thai sex industry comes after the action itself is over.
The bald facts are presented on the overhead screen:
5.4 million tourists a year arrive for sex tours in Thailand, and one of the worst offending countries in this respect is Britain. These are undoubtedly figures about which it is worth getting worked up.
What soon becomes clear, however, is that Thai film star Asadawut Luangsuntorn, Plastic Woman's sole performer, is getting worked up in an entirely unproductive way. Dressed like an androgynous glam rocker with sparkles in his hair and big boots, he leaps, flips, slips and slides around the stage in the time-honoured fashion of a single performer with too much space to fill.
He's not helped by the decision to have him speak the text in both Thai and English, and to surtitle his words for each language. This is a distracting ploy, and sentences such as "Fumed an ascetic who have to wait his queue for several more nights" don't add much to our understanding.
The "plastic woman" of the title is, we are told countless times, "an artificial product of great beauty from the factory of a naughty scientist". She's the ultimate male (wet) dream, who gives her copious sexual services for free and makes no emotional demands. Every leading light of the overwhelmingly patriarchal society under discussion is happy to use and abuse her in private, and then to rail against her in public. Santi Chitrachinda's production cleverly presents her as a doll's head affixed to a table, which Luangsuntorn then proceeds to hump with great eagerness.
The problem with the script, adapted by Chitrachinda from Rong Wongsawan's novel, Leaving 1974, is that its disjointed, repetitive naivety leaves us with no greater understanding of the phallocentric world it portrays. And for a work supposedly against the objectification of women, why doesn't it allow Plastic Woman herself a voice?
