Tale with a telling effect

THE SQUARE Circle. Or perhaps, one should say `Daayraa'. A discerning audience must be more familiar with Nirmal Pandey's subtle histrionics in Daayraa, a landmark movie that explores the largely unexplored `transvestite' world.

Though Nirmal Pandey stole the show and the movie, questions did arise about the `sensitive' script-writer. How did one get an insight into `square circles'? Was the script writer who wrote about transvestites also one? Well, he was Timeri N. Murari.

`Tim' Murari, that sensitive script-writer, was in Chennai recently. In the `Year of the Chennai Playwright' it would have been criminal to let such an opportunity go past untapped, so the Madras Players and British Council drew Murari into their circle on Tuesday.

The evening began with the screening of a film on Murari's theatre production of the Square Circle in Leicester. As the videofilm of the play, performed in England by an expatriate Indian cast, got moving on- screen, the audience wondered at the strange `un-Indian' accents of the cast. A cast that was apparently Indian, but spoke like the British raised eyebrows, which was perhaps why they (the audience) kept bringing it up during the discussion, later.

Despite poor audio quality (it was shot at an actual performance) which had the audience straining its ears often, the accents ceased to jarr as the play moved on. Stylised sets, interesting background sounds and the play of lights soon drew the audience into an absorbing tale of `different' people. And as the play progressed, it moved into different layers, examining gender roles now, cross-dressing then, inter-sexuality and identities.

A transvestite leads a `proper woman' through the motions of societal conventions, merely reversing the positions, `He' plays `she' and `she' plays `he'.In the process, well-entrenched beliefs and definitions become travesties.

As the lights blinked after the `play within the play', the enactment of Surpanaka's compulsive wooing of Rama, the screen lit up again with a scene from the actual movie (which came first - the movie, not the play) - Daayraa. As Nirmal Pandey sang his dirge about life and its bonds, Sonali Kulkarni, the girl-soon to-turn-man is raped savagely by a group of bikers. A `Hardian' atmosphere hangs heavy as nature stands witness to a vicious violation.

Juxtapositioning the two, the movie and the play, discussions continued on questions of style, naturalism, realism and fantasy, on the difference between the two media and treatment of the subject.

At the end though, there were several people in the audience who left the hall determined to catch up with the rest of the movie if not the play.

Perhaps, even the play, if the Madras Players are ready to `square the circle'.

By Ramya Kannan

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