THE CUCKOOS ARE BACK

A British sci-fi novel has been turned into a sophisticated musical that brings Buddhist philosophy to the alien invasion genre

- S.P. SOMTOW

John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos, published in 1957, is one of the most popular science fiction novels ever written and was compulsory reading in schools when I was a child.

It spawned a host of derived works, including a classic Hollywood film and a couple of less successful ones.

More importantly for the Thai literary scene, Thailand's famed novelist M.R. Kukrit Pramoj did a very clever riff on it in 1989, keeping pretty much the whole plot, but changing the rural English setting to a Thai village he named Bangphleng. That book in turn spawned Kantana's film, the biggest Thai science fiction film of its time, and now there is a musical.

I had no idea what to expect from a musical based on a book based on another book, but to my amazement, Kawao Ti Bangphleng - The New Musical is in some ways better than all its literary and filmic antecedents. It's taken a radical and creative approach to the story elements and cooked up a wild, sometimes comedic and occasionally moving — and wholly original conceptualisation of the source material.

To understand just how amazing this achievement was, we should look at the original novels.

In the 1950s, science fiction was considered a "literature of ideas" and things like characterisation often took a distant second place to the "sense of wonder" concepts.

The Midwich Cuckoos is about all the women in a small village becoming simultaneously pregnant and giving birth to alien children with superpowers who may be planning to take over the world. The characters are largely there to present the ideas. What Kukrit adds by changing the setting to a Thai village is a layer of Buddhist philosophy and an element of compassion.