Chenda usually spends her days in her rural village collecting scrap metal and looking after her seven children. But on a recent afternoon, the 42-year-old woman wore a drawn-on moustache and checked men’s shirt as she staggered around a makeshift stage by a busy road, playing a drunk husband shouting at his wife.
“I’ve told you again and again. Don’t follow me and ask me to come back home when I’m drinking,” shouted the actor. “I will kill you.”
It was a scene that mirrored Chenda’s own experience of years of physical and emotional abuse from her husband. For the next 30 minutes, around 60 neighbours and friends sat watching under a big tent in the north-western city of Battambang, while Chenda and a small group of domestic violence survivors performed a story familiar to many in Cambodia – complete with a violent partner, gossiping neighbours and unresponsive authorities.
The show is part of a grassroots effort – led by local Khmer artists who have experienced or witnessed abuse themselves – to spark community discussions about domestic violence. Family violence remains a taboo topic, even as one in five Cambodian women report experiencing abuse from an intimate partner.
“Before, when I had violence in my family, I never revealed it,” says Chenda. “[Now] I want to reveal it and tell everyone that it’s a problem.”
Nov Sreyleap, who co-founded the non-profit Lakhon Komnit, which produced the show, says her own family’s violent history made her shut down emotionally until she grew up and started performing as an actor. She wants the women to use theatre to “think for themselves” and open up to one another. “They can see their own story and start to understand their own life more and more,” she says.
Although Chenda’s show was timed to coincide with 16 days of activism against gender-based violence, Lakhon Komnit – which translates to “thinking theatre” – works with domestic abuse victims throughout the year, plus LGBTQ+ communities and people with disabilities, recruiting people to attend workshops, take part in role play and perform their own shows.
Cambodia’s theatre scene, along with other arts, was destroyed by the Khmer Rouge genocide of the 1970s. Since then, theatre has been largely limited to traditional forms, such as shadow puppetry and apsara dancing, with theatre therapy like Lakhon Komnit’s almost unheard of throughout the country.
Trying theatre was deeply uncomfortable for Sreymean, a mother of three who works as a shop clerk. She wipes away tears as she recalls years of alcohol-fuelled abuse from her husband. At first, she didn’t like moving her body or speaking about herself, she says. Less than a year later, she has separated from her husband and felt comfortable inviting her adolescent children to the performance, even sharing the Facebook trailer with them beforehand. “They said, ‘Mum, this is you?’ And I asked, ‘Does it seem good?’ They said, ‘Yes, it’s really good’.”
“I don’t want my life to be like (it was before),” adds Sreymean. “I want my life to change.”
When the show ended, the audience applauded before the actors started the scenes again. But this time, the audience raised their hands – calling “stop, stop!” – when they wanted a character to behave differently. One by one, an elderly woman, a teenager and a police officer stood up from their plastic chairs to take the place of different actors, improvising the scenes in a new way.
The elderly woman, acting as the neighbour, turned the character from a nosy bystander into an intervening hero. The police officer, playing the abused wife, avoided a confrontation by asking a friend to call the authorities.
At one point, the facilitator asked for a show of hands: “If you were the family’s neighbour, would you be brave enough to stop the husband in the middle of an argument and call the authorities to intervene?”
Just a few people raised their hands. One of them, a 27-year-old woman who watched the show quietly from the back, explained afterwards that she has dealt with physical violence from her brother for her whole life. Watching the show and hearing people openly speak of abuse “really affects my feelings”, she says. But “the story is just acting. The important thing is the reality – can we behave as the actors are performing on stage or not?”
The performers are grappling with the same question. Chenda, who played the abusive husband, is living in a shelter while her real-life husband is in a drug detention centre. She is not sure when he will come home. Taking the lead role in the performance has made her “feel that I gained confidence [myself] – not by someone giving it to me”.
“I have enough power to open my mouth and stand up to say whatever I want and do whatever I want,” she says. “No one can stop me.”
Names have been changed
