Very special and exclusive

SOMETIME AGO, The Madras Players Theatre Club declared 2000 the year of the Chennai-based playwright. Last week, the city enjoyed its first instalment, two short plays of Jasper Utley designed and directed by Mithran Devanesan. Rani Seethai Hall, quite an unfriendly space for play productions, buzzed with enthusiasts running amuck `reserving' entire rows for friends, family and assorted relatives who were presumably fighting their way through the traffic. It felt like a family get-together on Deepavali.

This one was special, completely home made and something of an inside job. In addition, the combination was just right. The Madras Players Theatre Club productions are becoming increasingly popular and Jasper Utley, the head of the British Council Division, South India, has been around in the city for over five years now and his wife, Megan and he have been very supportive of English Theatre. Chennai saw him as one of its own and a friend. Further, audiences have enjoyed Jasper Utley's performances on stage. The fact that his plays were set in Chennai and had to do with the people he encountered here made it a very special and exclusive event. The audiences were very appreciative and very generous with their applause.

The first play, `Three Women and a Dead Man' looked at a middle class Indian household, perhaps in Chennai. The pot-bellied slob of a husband (Pushkar AKS), flopped in a chair with the newspaper covering his face, convulses and dies without a whimper. His sari-clad wife Sudha (Sriya Chari) responds to the event by seeking liberation in a salwar kameez and by relieving her dead husband of his many gold rings. Her Amma (Bhavani Nagarathnam) endorses her daughter's reaction by remembering her own wretched husband. Younger daughter Indu (Anaka Narayanan), a representative college girl, is shocked by the other women's total lack of respect for the dead man. She believes both her mother and her sister did wrong in agreeing to arranged marriages. That she herself visited hotels a few times to satisfy fat old men whenever she needed money was no big deal.

For the action Devanesan put together a very simple but attractive stage with the minimum of fuss. He turned once again to his current obsession with grids - this time with a sloping fourth edge. Three panels suggested the walls, doors, shelves, mirror, photo-less photograph of the deceased head of the family and everything else one wants to imagine in that living room. It was a perfectly balanced stage with the dead man playing a pivotal role, a most interesting installation in his vest and lungi with his arms akimbo.

The play opened to a soft slow start and never really picked up too well in spite of the convincingly energetic acting from Anaka. She was good and the young in the audience found their voice in her. However, the impact of the revelation of her selling her body to earn pocket money was completely lost because it came jumbled at the end with one actor forgetting the lines, the other two making a gallant but hopeless effort to right things and the prompter rising, literally, to the occasion. The play was disrupted into paralysis from which it never really recovered.

A question that comes up is, could Devanesan have used caricature as a mode instead of the realistic approach he adopted? Irrespective of what feelings the women had for the dead man, their reaction to death was so far fetched (in a straightforward presentation) that instead of raising questions and making the audience think it lost credibility.

Was the play speaking against the arranged marriage system? The fact that a husband treats a wife badly or doesn't treat her at all doesn't really have much to do with an arranged marriage. It has to do with a man and a woman and the particular sensibilities that they have or don't have. Are arranged marriages more predisposed to indifference than the other kind? The answers perhaps could be found in the animated middle-aged discussion from the row behind, ``Now, who do you think has been confiding in Mr. Utley?'' or ``No. No. I think he has been sourcing those letters to the editor!!''

The second play `Bum' happens in the waiting room outside hell. Frank (Nilu) and Kevin (Pushkar AKS) are surprised to wake up there, on their way to hell. They were not ready for their death. In addition, they felt they hadn't really done anything wrong and were happy. Lucy ( Leela Pal Chaudhuri) joins them with more wonderful memories of fleshy encounters, throwing Dominic (Karthik Srinivasan), assistant to the CEO of Hell into complete confusion. He was answerable to the CEO and had a target to meet, sending people off to different sections of hell. And here were a group who were arguing and negotiating and wanting things to be done differently. Dominic, finding all this a little perplexing, approaches his boss (on a cellular phone no less: number W2HL666) who in his wisdom suggests that the group be held in limbo.

Their negotiating point with Dominic was that hell was a little behind times from the reality of the world. Their definition of what constitutes sin didn't fit the book. To make things worse, and to leverage the negotiation, the trio was carrying on in a way, which made it extremely embarrassing for Dominic vis-a-vis his CEO. Then again, how was limbo any better than hell?

What saved the play were delightfully wicked sets from Devanesan and a very good performance from Karthik Srinivasan. The sets were delightful under the green lights of hell. Against a grid for the backdrop, the chairs painted like the devil's mind were endearingly wicked. The music was really nice almost making hell a really cool place. Karthik delivered to perfection the director's interpretation of Dominic as a most orthodox, caste- marked Brahmin accountant. That was a perfect caricature well studied and well delivered. Remarkably, he held his own with no support whatsoever from the rest.

ELIZABETH ROY

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